The Question of Enlightenment - Theory and Practice in Eighteenth ...

The Question of Enlightenment 12
modern understandings of political and legal arrangements (e.g., the distinction between state
and civil society) back onto earlier societies and to distance itself from the tendency among
historians of ideas of ideas of “treating ideas as constants, articulated in differing historical
figures but of themselves fundamentally unchanging.” 42 To this extent, Koselleck and his
colleagues have pursued a goal not unlike that of Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, both of
whom have argued for an approach to the history of political thought that is attentive to the
relationship of texts to particular historical and linguistic contexts in which they were created and
thus avoids the habit – rampant among some political theorists – of interpreting political texts in
the light of their “timeless elements,” “universal ideas,” or their “anticipations” of later
formulations. 43 There are, however, tensions between these two approaches and a brief
consideration of these differences may help to clarify the particular concerns of this book. 44
Some of Skinner’s more emphatic formulations seem to question the very possibility of
writing a history of concepts. On several occasions he has insisted that “there can be no histories
of concepts as such” but only “histories of their uses in argument.” 45 Yet, in recent essays he has
explained that these comments were not directed at Koselleck’s venture per se (of which he was
unaware at the time) but were instead a criticism of approaches to the history of ideas – for
example, Arthur O. Lovejoy’s notion of “unit ideas” – that attempted to trace the development of
a concept in isolation from an examination of the uses to which these concepts have been put by
different agents at different times: “There is nothing … lying beneath or behind such uses; their
history is the only history of ideas to be written.” 46 To the extent that Koselleck has stressed the
need for Begriffsgeschichte to examine the “use of specific language in specific situations, within
which concepts are developed and used by specific speakers,” his approach would seem to
satisfy Skinner’s requirement that a history of concepts must be framed as “histories of how
concepts have been put to use over time.” 47
There remains, however, a difference between the two approaches, if only in their
focus. 48
Drawing a parallel between the approaches of social history and conceptual history
Koselleck has emphasized that both disciplines “cannot manage without … individual cases, but