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

The Question of Enlightenment 45
now dropped his unequivocal opposition to the writing of histories of concepts from the revised version of “Meaning
and Understanding” (cf. “Meaning and Undesrtanding” 30-39 and Visions of Politics I:67-72).
48
For an attempt to reconcile these two approaches, see Kari Palonen, “Rhetorical and Temporal Perspectives
on Conceptual Change,” Finnish Yearbook of Political Thought 3 (1999) 41-59.
49
50
Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002) 31-32.
J. G. A. Pocock, “Concepts and Discourses: A Difference in Culture? Comment on a Paper by Melvin
Richter,” in The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts 53.
51
52
53
Skinner, Visions of History180; see also Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History31-32
Cite Stuke and other discussions, in German, of the concept
See Koselleck, “The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity,” in The Practice of Conceptual
History 154-169 and Koselleck, “’Neuzeit’: Remarks on the Semantics of the Modern Concepts of Movement,” in
Koselleck, Futures Past 238.
54
55
On this point, see Skinner, Visions of Politics, 145-57, 175-87
First published in 1891, the “E” volume was sub-edited during 1881 and 1882 by Philip Whittington Jacob,
a former alderman and mayor of Guilford, who subsequently revised the volume in 1884-85, incorporating
additional examples. The definition of enlightenment has survived, unchanged, into the on-line 3 rd edition. In 1933,
the same definition was carried over without substantial modification into the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary but
has been revised in more recent editiosn of the Shorter Oxford.
56
Peter Gay, The Party of Humanity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1959) 263. See also the
criticisms of the definition found in Karl R. Popper, “Kant’s Critique and Cosmology,” in Conjectures and
Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965) 176, John Lough,
“Reflections on Enlightenment and Lumières,” The British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 8:1 (1985): 1-2,
and Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York:
Norton, 2000) 5.