Mailing Address

Karin Tilmans I Wyger Velema,

University of Amsterdam,
Department of History,
Spuistraat 134, 1012 VB Amsterdam,
The Netherlands
e-mail : Karin.Tilmans@hum.uva.nl
http://www.hum.uvainll- huizingainieuws
Colophon
Editors:
Karin Tilmans. Wyger Velema,
Freya Sierhui s
Lay-out:
Bas Broekhuizen

HUIZINGA
INSTITUUT
Onderzoekschool
voor
Cultuurgeschiedenis

Research Institute and
Graduate School of
Cultural History

History of Concepts Newsletter
Nr 2, Summer 1999









In this Issue:
The practical use ofbegrilfsgeschichte by a
historian of European pre-modem political thought:
some problems
A culture of exchange: politics and sociabili ty in
France 1660-1680
The concepts of and "republic" in the
Netherl ands : I. 1
The practical use of
Begriffsgeschichte by an historian of
European pre-modern political
thought: some problems
Prof. Janet Coleman, Government Department,
London School of Economics and Political Science
I
have just put the fmal touches to the text of a rather
large book, in two volumes, that is the result of a very
long-term proj ect on A HistOlY of Political Thoughtfi'oln
the Ancient Greeks to the Renaissance (Blackwell ,
forthcoming) . Because courses in European and Anglo-
American universities often treat the history ofpoliticaJ
thought as a study of canonical great theorists and their
texts, I have taken into account students needs and primarily
focused on the political philosophies of Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, a selection of
medieval theorists, and I end with Machiavelli and his
contemporary civic humanists. But this is no Sophie's World
with footnotes. I have treated these thinkers political theories
or political philosophies as embedded within as much socio-
political history as I could include in order to elucidate why
the texts ask and answer certain questions (and don' t ask and
answer others) without, I hope, drowning the reader in the
minutiae of different and other times . I have taken these
individual theorists to be representatives of groups, parties,
all of them positioned in structures not of their own making.
I do not treat them simply as individual linguistic agents in
speech situations, but rather, as representatives aflocal
kinds of arguments set in contexts that were not purely
lingui stic. But these contexts ~ u r v i v e for us through texts
which re-present the non-lingui stic circumstances in which
concepts were developed and experiences had. Crucially,
these selected philosophers or theorists are not taken to be.
because they were not in their own times, representative
voices o/their times. Rather, they were judged by later
Europeans to have been exemplary of the best of the past.
Hence, they are the winners, judged or misjudged as such,
retrospectively, by later Europeans who actively
reconstructed thei r own pasts, in part by establishing a
selective canon of great and inspiring thinkers who, if
properly understood, they thought could be essentially
imitated later down the hi stori cal road. [I have dealt with
this further in J. Coleman, Alleient and Medieval Memories,
studies ill the recollstructiOIl o/the past (Cambridge, 1992)].
2
On the one hand I have looked at selected political theories
and discussed their genesis in their own socia-political
contexts, but my principle for inclusion of one as opposed to
another thinker has been founded on a retrospective
examination of which texts Europeans, in the course of their
construction of therr own identities and traditions,
themselves deemed worthy of actively adopting and
necessarily misinterpreting to serve their own present. Past
concepts for such Europeans in the pre-modem period were
not antiquarian curiosities; they judged the texts, which
expressed past concepts to be usable, or else they ignored
them and did not have them recopied for future generations.
Unlike post-19th-century historians, earlier Europeans
looked for answers to what they took to be unchanging
questions, and they thought they could engage
unproblematically in dialogues with philosophers across
time and re-use their solutions to what they took to be
eternal problems about human governance. Of course, from
our point of view, what they did was construct continuities
with their selected pasts, believing themselves to be able to
learn from and indeed, repeat the virtues of the past because
they held that the past was fiUed with men who were just
like them. In fact, they were only able to sustain this
essential continuity by completely transforming past
concepts to suit their own circumstances and experiences.
They thought they were living within a tradition but actually
were in the extended process of constructing one.
Instead of focusing on lesser contemporary texts, although I
have sometimes included them to show parallels or
differences with what came to be considered the more
famous texts, I have focused on what has become for
Europeans a canon because 1 think there actually has been
one established by Europeans, especially for the long period
from classical antiquity until the Renaissance. which is
remarkably stable and it has undoubtedly wiped out a
variety of past contemporary voices and perspectives from
our view. I think this in itself has tremendous consequences
for the success or otherwise of a synchronic mapping of key
concepts that comprised a complex past society's political
and social vocabulary. I shall say something more about this
below. The canon is a collection of evolving European
prejudices about themselves and others, and has been forged
precisely as women and minority groups have today
claimed, through a process of exclusion and selection which
bas detennined which voices from the past were, in fact,
taken seriously. I have not looked for the genesis of modem
concepts, l ~ e the state, in these earlier periods because I
think teleology' s can only be constructed retrospectively,
and in the construction they tell us perhaps more about
ourselves than about past peoples ' self- understandings. But
I have tried to identify certain conceptual configurations
through languages used at the time in order to alert readers
to, say, a notion of ius or right, whose meaning is perhaps
related to some of our uses of the notion of right but which,
when situated in another context, implies a range of other
ideas, some of which seem distinctly strange to us.
Throughqut this project I have attempted to use some of tile
methods of Reinhart Koselleck's Begriffsgeschichte. As a
classicist and medievalist, and not simply as a historian of
classical and medieval political theory, my training ensured
that I was much influenced by Otto Brunner's work, without
however, coming to similar conclusions about the benefits
of national socialism! But I admit to having found it often
much easier to sustain the theoretical discussion especially
of Brunner's heirs and successors, including what I take to
be the Heideggerian and Gadamerian influences on
Koselleck's own work, than to engage the theory in practice
as I've moved from the ancient Greek world through that of
the Romans, early Christians, medievals- early and later, and
that of the renaissance theorists.
First of all, there is, of course, a huge problem of just which
we can call a political theorist in a period when there were
many literary genres which we might not recognize as
expressing political or social concepts. And there were many
men with very different professional trainings who wrote
about the social and political ordering of human life but
perhaps couched their views in biblical and theological
tenns. Is every surviving text capable of revealing social and
political concepts? In some sense the answer must be yes. Is
every author then, a political and social theorist? This is not
simply a problem for medieval so-call ed (by us) political
thought. It raises the question about the criteria we use
which enable us to privilege political and social concepts
which both GG and I wish to do, not least because this
privileging of the political as an exclusive realm of (usually
male) public val ues is a notable European practice. I take
there to be something of an unacknowledged problem
concerning our capacity to recognize what distinguishes
political and social from other kinds of concepts in pre-
modern societies.
Then secondly, for my kind of book, aimed at advanced
undergraduates and postgraduates, who are interested in
coming to some understanding of coherent whole political
theories of the past, I found it insufficient to follow
Koselleck's suggested method of tracking antithetical
dualisms or Gegellbegriffe of the sort: hellenesibarbarians,
Christianlbeathen, that Koselleck selects in his "The
historical-political semantics of asymmetric
counterconcepts", Futures Past, on the semantics of
historical time, trans . K. Tribe (MIT Press, Cambridge,
Mass., 1985). Indeed, I) [ want to suggest that there is a
problem with the use of Gegenbegriffe. It seems to be rooted
in an unspoken epistemological theory of the bi-polar or the
binary mind. It is not that there is some fixed ontology of
concepts with which Koselleck and his colleagues are
working, but there does appear to be a submerged theory
about the genesis of contingent frames of meaning that is
based on presumed psychological polarities which get filled
up, as it were, by contested words which signify concepts.
Hence, diachronic transformation is, for Koselleck,
necessarily polar.
[n discussing the concept BUild, for instance, [in
"Begriflsgeschichte and Social History", Futures Past, all
the semantics of historical time, trans.K. Tribe (MIT Press,
Cambridge, Mass., 1985, pp. 73-91 , pp. 88-9] Koselleck
offers us a religious and a political sense, and while he tells
us that the religious sense was never completely abandoned,
he seems to have a notion of understanding as dependent on
binary contradictions. Koselleck has written that without the
invocation of parallel or opposed concepts, without ordering
generalized and particular concepts, and without registering
the overlapping of two expressions, it is not possible to
deduce the structural value of a word as concept either for
the social framework or for the disposition of political
fronts. ["Begriffsgeschichte and Social History", p. 87].
KoseHeck affmns that expressions are multiple but it seems
that to engage in Begriflsgeschichte we must assume that
concepts get transformed diachronicaHy only through polar
opposition. This looks to me to be a statement about how
our recognition in sources of parallel or opposed concepts
allows us to infer a practice of human understanding: that
humans only have limited perspectives on things and tbey
achieve self-definition as it emerges through distinguishing
who is in and who is out. There is not a problem of the
relation between words and things but between a limited
perspective on things always framed by the polarities of
3
eitherlor, goodlbad, hellenelbarbarian or any other selected
dualism.
Now I do not wish to deny that there is a transformation of
meaning of words and a transformation of things, but I am
unclear about what appears to be the motor of these
transformations. For Koselleck it appears to be the
presupposition that a certain kind of exegesis of sources will
reveal to us necessarily two conceptual opposites as
possibilities in human understanding. This narrows, in my
view, what Gadamer understood as the dialogic character of
interpretation, by which I presume Koselleck has been
influenced. Gadamer saw multiple and fluid prejudices, of
an interpreter and of his text, prejudices that interpenetrate
and cannOI be isolated as dualistic presuppositions, of
interpreter and the otherness of the text. To assert a dualism
of counterconcepts, even heuristically, confuses the back-
and-forth dynamic of the dialogic game with either/or. It
cages the excess of meaning to be found in texts, reducing
the event of understanding to a necessarily polar
concretization of meaning. But there are numerous and
simultaneous prejudices which afC more constitutive of our
way of being in the world than our reflective judgements,
and the multiple pre-judgements are embedded and passed
on in the languages we use. It is these mUltiple prejudices
that I take it we are engaged in uncovering when we are
involved in Begriffsgescl,ichte.
Furthermore, I think that Koselleck and his colleagues go
further than their open claim that epistemologically nothing
can occur historically that is not apprehended conceptually.
Koselleck believes that the hi story of the translation and
reception of concepts shows that concepts are more than
linguistic evidence of social continuity and change.
Concepts, by defming extra-linguistic structures, condition
political events. [R. Koselleck, "A Response" in The
Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts, new studies on
Begriffsgeschicille, eds. H. Lehmann and M. Richter
(German Hi storical Institute, Washington D.C. , Occasional
paper 15, 1996), p.67]. I happen to agree with this and I
read it as a Gadamerian insight. But I also think it implies
something that a current Anglo- American orthodoxy which
takes a view on the relation between thinking and speaking,
must reject, I presume following the later Wittgenstein: the
rejected assumption is that thought is not simply constituted
by language but in some sense thought or conceptual
understanding is the prerequisite goal, language is its means,
and any given language is itse lf only a partial reOecti on of
4
thinking or understanding. In other words, there is a way of
being in the world for humans which we may call
understanding. Understanding is an event, something other
than, but inseparably achieved by means of, linguistic
corrununication, by dialogic engagement say between a
reader and a text. We always possess our world
linguistically, or better, we are possessed by language, and
our horizons are given to us pre-reflectively by the
languages we learn in a particular language community. But
where there is no way of mediating between different
language games for Wittgenstein and some of his followers,
since norms are indigenous to specific language games and
cannot be transcended, Koselleck seems to affirm that
Begriffsgeschicille precisely shows humans integrating and
fusing language games to achieve changed concepts from
within traditions. We are always in situations where we
encounter meanings that are not immediately understandable
and therefore require interpretative effort, so that humans
are always trying to bridge a gap between their own familiar
world with its own horizons and that of strange meanings
with other horizons. There is then a reflexive dimension of
human understanding that necessarily begins in an
interpreter's immediate participation in a tradition of
understanding which is only in part revealed in a present
tradition oflanguage use. When we master a language we
are not simply mastering a tool. As Heidegger asserted,
language and understanding are inseparable structural
aspects of human "being-in-the-world" language giving us a
relation to the whole of being that we do not and cannot
consciously create or control. But in being in the world and
understanding, we do more than learn our first language: we
engage in dialogues and learn other languages, expanding
our hori zons by confronting and interpreting past texts and
other voices.
To hold this view as I think Koselleck and his colleagues do,
is to hold a view that is not widely favoured in the Anglo-
American world and it may, in part, be a reason for
Begriffsgeschichte not having been taken up widely there.
l .G.A. Pocock, for instance, believes that humans
communicate by a language system which helps them
constitute their conceptual worlds and authority-structures. I
think Pocock and indeed, Quentin Skinner go further to
assert a methodologically controlled investigati on of past
language use. For them, in somewhat differing ways, there is
a way to recover an author' s or group's intention as
hi storical agents as helthey understood him/themselves,
based 011 the view that past (and present) theori sts must and
always do tailor their projects to fit the avai lable nonnative
languages which in turn constitute their mental worlds. All
we need do is get to know the then available nonnative
languages, maximally purging our own subjectivity of all
prejudices, setting aside our own horizons constituted by OUT
own language use, and negating the temporal distance
separating us from the authors of past texts.
This is a different vision from the one Koselleck and indeed,
ancient and medieval thinkers held. This different vision
holds that historical understanding is reconstruction. It holds
that language is akin to a prison of conventionality, even
when the prison's walls are altered by different uses to
which they are put. Especially for Skinner, language is
action, it is what an author is doing when he speaks in a text,
and it is his action rather than what he meant, that Skinner
seeks to uncover. Skinner, as I understand him, focuses on a
kind of external function of words as speech acts and
methodologically pinpoints the object of his kind of
henneneutics, the object being the community of individuals
sharing a common medium of speech acts. His aim is not to
f o c u ~ o n understanding itself but on reconstructing what
speakers are intending their speech acts to do and he focuses
on an autonomous community of texts to achieve this.
Koselleck, however, along with a tradition of interpretation
found amongst the ancients and medievals, thinks of
understanding as an experience beyond a universal method,
not as reconstruction but as mediation, making intelligible,
so that neither an interpreter nor a text can be thought of as
autonomous parts. Indeed in Gadamerian tenns, what
happens in transmissions of meanings is always a fusion of
'horizons and this is a statement about the phenomenon of
understanding when humans are engaged in dialogue rather
than one about normative languages constituting a world. As
I tried to show in my discussion of various ancient and
medieval thinkers, [J. Coleman, Ancient and Medieval
Memories, studies in the recollstnlctioll of the past
(Cambridge, 1992)] pre-moderns had a theory of language
which not only is not ours, that is, the Anglo-American
version that it is the lIses a/language which constitute our
thinking, but rather, they argued that there is a universal
language of thought , a way of being in the world through
understanding, which is selectively and partially externalised
by conventionallanguages which themselves reveal shifting
conceptualisations in contingent circumstances. For them,
the world is understood, and conventional languages
inadequately and partially reveal that understanding in
speech. Therefore. the meaning of an idea is not simpl y
reducible to its referential use or an author's or group's
intention. Likewise, for Koselleck, the past has a pervasive
power in the phenomenon of understanding, so that the past
cannot simply be supplied by texts and their display of
language use as objects of interpretation. All interpreters are,
and always have been, within their own historicity so that
interpretation always has a temporal character and is
mediative rather than reconstructive.
At any rate, to tell one or more of the stories of the western
European reconstruction and mediated understandings of
earlier ethical and political theories, especially during that
PI!:.-Sattelzeit period when it was held that histmja magistra
vilae, and for my book not to become the size of the
encyclopaedic GG project, I simply could not trace the
semantic field of selected words. This was not simply a
problem of time and space however. The selection of words
also seems to harbour unspoken problems of exegesis of
texts where these tenns are used. Therefore, 2) I want to
indicate a problem in selecting words and providing a
critical exegesis: my worry is that this depends on
uncontested but highly contestable readings of the whole
theories in which such words might be found. Instead, I
have opted to look at whole theories in their own socio-
political and conceptual contexts and have tried to detennine
what they could have been taken to mean by
contemporaries, and perhaps even more importantly, what
they were taken to mean by those who reinterpreted, indeed
misinterpreted these exemplary theories of the past when
they were in socia-historical conditions, and conceptualizing
and living according to localized norms that were not similar
to the ones in which the theories were themselves first
generated.
Koselleck has, of course, very interesting things to say about
how one treats words as insufficient indicators of stable
contents and that contents themselves undergo long-tenn
change, expressible in numerous and different ways_ I too
have tried to shift between synchronic and diachronic
analysis. I have set a premium on the synchronic and largely
affinn the diachronic by including examples of say, the use
of the classical Latin concept respublica and I have charted
its changed meanings in the middle ages and the renaissance
in order to show that despite later thinkers' references to
their reviving the Roman respublica, medieval and
renaissance city-states and their theorists did something else,
indeed a range of different things.
5
I have fewer problems with changed concepts than I have
with those taken to be stable. Therefore, I am less optimistic
than Koselleck that I can disclose a persistence of past
experience -experience is precisely what does not persist
over large tracts of time even in pre-modem societies,
except in the abstract indeed, existential sense that a way of
being in the world has always been and will always be
within traditions of experience. I do, on the other hand, think
that one can come to some understanding of the possible
present viability of past theories, in the sense that
interpreters of past texts recover and make their own, Dot the
world view of a past author, but the question that a past text
seeks to answer and they then are inspired by a dialogue
with a text to question further, transfonning their own
horizons. Indeed, this is precisely what I think implicitly
motivated Romans to interpret Greeks, the medievals to
interpret the Greeks and Romans, and renaissance thinkers
to recover and make their own the earlier traditions of
ethical and political discourse they inherited. 3) But my third
problem is with Koselleck's belief that many concepts from
an earlier period continue to be applied in almost unaltered
fonns. It is not clear to me how we could ever know this.
Past traditions do, of course, persist in the present but I do
not think we could ever assert that what we take them to
mean in the present is what they meant in the past. My
reason for saying this is that as readers of past texts,
interested in the evolution of political theorizing as an
activity. philosophical questions and answers are transitory
and hi storical rather than permanent. But some questions
and answers still appear to be alive for us because they have
entered our thought in an evolved state, a reconstructed and
mediated state, having already been taken up, rethought and
reinterpreted by earlier thinkers who thought it important to
keep their interpretation of the thought of "their fathers"
alive. The old questions and answers are part of our
tradition of rethinking, of making intelligible, in different
intellectual and social contexts, these wide-ranging matters.
In this way, the past necessarily penetrates our present lives.
But concepts from the past are not universal or
transhistorical; they have a history but not on their own.
Their history is due to their having been re-thought,
reconsidered and rendered intelligible and therefore cha/lged
by historically-situated thinkers, and we are simply the latest
in the queue. It is not, therefore, clear to me how one could
confimn that past concepts continue to be applied in almost
unaltered forms today or at any other time. In other words, I
am not convinced that the religious sense of Blmd in the
19th century was the same religious sense it had during the
6
early Reformation.
Given what I take to be the above problems, my interest is to
discuss with you how one might incorporate the theoretical
principles of Begriffsgeschichte into a narrative about the
use and abuse of whole past political theories. This is an
acknowledged problem, noted by Mel Richter, about how
we characterized patterned relationships amongst concepts.
There is an unresolved problem of how to proceed from a
lexical arrangement of individual concepts in GG to the
reconstruction of integrated political and social vocabularies
at crucial points in the development of European political
and social languages.
Problems 1 and 2: Gegenbegriffeand selection
of concepts
When we provide or extract the meaning of political and
social concepts, the words designating them and the
semantic fields within which they have functioned, we set
before ourselves a range of contemporary sources. Even if
we start by extracting a concept from one type of source,
e.g. a political theory text, to understand how a concept is
used we have to understand or have an interpretation of the
whole political theory. Take the concept "obligation" in
Hobbes. For someone to try to grasp Hobbes' s meaning
requires that he already has some working interpretation of
Leviathan and we all know that the historical profession is
based on new or different interpretations of Hobbes as the
first liberal, of Hobbes as an absolutist, of Hobbes as
Protestant theorist of man's construction of the state as the
divine will. There are plausible reasons for adopting any of
these perspectives when we read Hobbes' s text and try to get
at what he means by "obligation". But which one we choose
is crucial. In studying past political thought
Begriffsgeschichte may enable students of past political
theories to avoid anachronisms in attempting to interpret
texts written at a time when the use of key temns differed
from a Uf own. But this is only to assert that we can
minimally establish what say, a 17th- century theori st could
/lot have meant. How we get closer to a 17th- century
meaning and use of words - say Hobbes on obligation,
depends on how we understand the whole text in which such
a word or its inferred concept is embedded.
Because concepts are ways of thinking or understanding we
can only infer them from language. Concepts are
ambiguous, contingent universal meanings with capaciti es
for potential experiences. But in his "The historical-political
semantics of asymmetric counterconcepts" Koselleck
actually provides us with what I take to be a very
contentious, indeed literal interpretation of Aristotle's
Politics book I in order for him to show that the Greeks
operated with the counterconcepts Hellene-barbarian. He
tells us that Aristotle designated the barbarians as natural
slaves and that he supported his view by reference to a verse
by Euripides. [p.167]. Now this is "- reading of what
Aristotle is doing in his ethics and politics. But it is a
reading of an ethical discourse as descriptive history, a
reading of an historical moment that displays a larger
principle, the function of counter concepts in concrete
manifestation. But Aristotle explicitly tells us that he starts
with how Greeks in ordinary language tend to speak of
barbarians on the one hand and natural slaves on the other,
and then goes on to preserve the truth, if t"ere is ally, in
common views. Furthermore, the distinction he makes is not
between Hellenes and barbarians so much as the more
abstract one between freemen and the unfree. Even here,
freedom is not simply defmed by its opposite but by a
variety of factors, affected by gender, age and experience,
and geographical place and can take the form in speech of
master/slave when the household is considered rather than
the political realm. Aristotle's method is to analyze,
dialectically, common speech and test it against the "facts"
of lived life in Greek poleis. There is, Aristotle tells us, a
concept of the naturally slavish but whether it actually and
legitimately can apply to any li ving or past human example
is very problematic for him and for others in his society. He
tells us that some refuse to accept slavery to be natural-
hence, for them it is an illegitimate concept, and that others
think that it is acceptable simply because it is expedient.
Aristotle does not, of course, argue that de facto slavery
does not exist in his society nor does he pretend that Greeks
have no prejudices either about barbarians or non-Greeks or
indeed, about other Greeks. But the prejudices are much
more varied than the dualism Hellene-barbarian, even than
free and unfree, and Aristotle tells us what they are. His aim
in both the N. Ethics and Politics is to test the multiple
prejudices revealed in the use of common ascriptions to see
whether they are justified or not. He is interested in
explaining where we get our definitions from and whether
we adequately apply them to the contingent situations in
which we find ourselves.
The Politics in particular is a testing of the common views
about what the good life consists in by examining what it is
said to consist in by a variety of men with a wide variety of
perspectives, against the true or at least the best defmition so
far of eudaimollia. And it is clear from his own account that
Greek ethical discourse is much messier than a presumed
structure of dual counter-concepts, because ascription is
dependent on a near-overwhelming number of
contingencies. Indeed, he makes it clear that even the
ascription of natural slavishness is contingent for ordinary
Greeks, and they never know to whom they ought to apply it
if at all, not least because it is meant to be a statement about
a certain kind of person's inner disposition, and Aristotle
afflrms that we have no direct access to any human's
intentions. We can only infer them from practices and we
can get it wrong. Hence, his observation that although one
would think that one could simply see a natural slave by his
physique and contrast it with the obvious characteristics of
the master, there is great confusion here because men who
are presumed to be masters should have bodies that are
serviceable to the life of political agency, both in war and
peace. But in jact, Aristotle tells us the very opposite often
comes about, that is, that slaves have the bodies of free men
and freemen have the right soul but not the body. [Pol. I,
1254b 33f]. If, in ordinary speech, men employ dualisms
which appear to reveal counterconcepts, Aristotle seems to
be telling us that anyone engaged in ethical discourse should
be alive to the very confusion such dualisms generate in the
practical life of communities and that they are always being
undermined by multiple prejudices and contingencies.
Without going further into the details here, one emerges
from Koselleck's reading with a concept and its
counterconcept whose meaning is dependent on what many
classicists would argue is a literal, even arbitrary, and
therefore contentious understanding of the concepts
prevalent both in Aristotle's text and more globally in
ancient Greek society. Furthermore, in tending to read
language as negotiating between concretized opposites in
order to display concepts, there appears to be no capacity to
respond to irony. My concern, therefore, is that in selecting
concepts without a prior due reflection on the whole texts in
which they are revealed, an uncontested but highly
contestable reading of the sources from which they have
been extracted can be offered us. One cannot simply select
concepts before one engages dialogically with the whole text
and its multiple prejudices within which concepts are
revealed.
Furthermore, the GG assumes it is possible to map
synchronically the key concepts that comprise a complex
7
society's political and social vocabulary especially for a
time of rapid changes in its structure. But it is not enough
for the GG to include extensive passages from texts, both
primary and secondary sources. There are periods where the
sources for past conceptual usages are not only difficult to
obtain but are either self-selecting or they survive because
they were allowed to survive by later rememberers of past
usages deemed useful to them in a later present. Indeed,
texts that survive for us say, from the 14th and 15th
centuries, have histories that do not necessarily relate to
their contemporary importance. Cultures preserve and
destroy texts so that the history of texts is a history of their
reception by later generations with other things on their
minds. Medievalists are overwhelmed by the loss of texts
that the Protestant reformation sold or burned. Hence, I find
it overly optimistic to assume that one can map
synchronically the key concepts of pre-modern political and
social vocabulary. This is because we are dependent on later
generations' decisions about what they thought important to
preserve for their own reconstructive and mediated uses.
Important and representative texts, I would even suggest for
the early-modem and modem periods, are retrospective
nominations. Subsequent orthodoxies actively kill off what
they perceive to be past heterodoxies which might not have
been heterodox in their own times.
Let me provide an example from Mel Richter's The History
of Political and Social Concepts, a critical introduction
(Oxford, 1995), pp. 48-9. In presenting the distinction
applied in the GG to the analysis of concepts between
sernasiology and onomasiology- that is, the study of all tile
meanings of a given word, term or concept, and the
linguistic study of all names or terms in a language for (he
same thing or concept, he describes the work of the
influential Jost Trier. Trier distinguished between lexical
semantics and the semantic field within which concepts
function at a given time. He looked at three concepts
designating "knowledge" that were current around the year
1200: wisheit, kunst and list and then he looked at them
around 1300. He supposedly found by 1300 the linguistic
field had been transformed especially with regard to what
wisheit meant. By 1300 it had a religious sense and was no
longer used as a simple alternative to kunst and list. Kunst
by 1300 is said to have lost its courtly and social senses and
list acquired pejorative connections with magi c and low
wisheit took on a religious sense amongst those who were
university-trained authors and we have these texts now in
abundance. It is impossible for us to tell whether the older
usages were replaced or survived. What did occur is that
later generations actively destroyed texts from the past,
which did not suit their way of reading their present. Patrick
Geary has done some extraordinary work on how modern
historians of the so-called 12th-century renaissance are
entirely at the mercy of an 11 th-century generation which
self-consciously destroyed whole libraries and engaged in
picking and choosing what they thought ought to survive
from and about their pasts. [p. Geary, Phantoms of
Remembrance. memOfY and oblivion at the end of the first
millennium (Princeton, 1994)]. [n short, Trier simply told us
about other texts rather than demonstrating a real shift in the
meaning of concepts and a transformation of the lingui stic
field. At best one can argue for a range of new voices
appearing around 1300 and unfortunately for medievalists,
they happen to have been the ones that survive for us in
dominant numbers as a consequence of much later
librarians, operating within the post-Refonnation
confessional divide, thought it important to preserve.
I have found the Begriffsgeschichte projects enormously
stimulating and useful, indeed more so than several other
methodological candidates that have been proposed, not
least amongst Anglo -American analytical political theorists
whose interest in past texts is, to my mind, alarming
unhistorical. Perhaps the chief attraction for me is that it
takes the past seriously because it takes conceptualizing
seriously. And yet it is troubling for the reasons I have
already mentioned above. Let me summarize them:
1. What criteria do we use to privilege social and political
concepts and how do we recognize such concepts,
distinguishing them from other concepts in the pre-
modern world?
2. The location of Gegellbegriffe seems to be based on a
submerged theory of understanding based on bipolarity.
1 need a more explicit demonstration that it is proper to
deduce from oppositional language a universal,
cognitive approach to human understanding.
3. The selection of words as concepts and the providing of
a critical exegesis can be based on an uncontested by
highly contestable interpretation of the whole theory
cunning. text from which the words are selected.
4. The survival of sources from any period is not
What texts did he look at and compare" Undoubtedly necessarily a reflection of their importance for the time
8
in which they were written: past texts of all sorts are
retrospective nominations by later generations of what
is allowed, even inadvertently, to survive from the past.
This presents serious problems for establishing
synchronicity of key concepts in any period.
5. The transformation of linguistic fields is harder to
determine than one might at first think from simply
examining dominant surviving sources.
6. Even if we were not troubled by what appear to me, at
. least, to be problems, how do we get from lexically
arranged concepts to the panemed relationship amongst
concepts? How do we provide a narrative which both
adequately reconstructs and provides an understanding
of an integrated political and social vocabulary for a
moment in the past development of political and social
languages? This last step, if we could achieve it, would
replace my anempts to provide a history of European
political theories.
A Culture of Exchange
Politics and Sociability in France,
1660-1680
Alwin Hietbrink, Department of History, University
of Amsterdam
I
n the last two decades scholars have become increasingly
sensitive to the multifarious ways in which politics and
sociability were related in the early modem period. From
the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, different ways of
imagining polite behaviour were invented that were
inextricably intertwined with views of the political. My
Ph.D.-research, conducted at the Huizinga Institute, the
Dutch Research Institute and Graduate School of Cultural
History. reflects this growing interest in the culture of
politeness. It is a contribution to the history of French
political culture from 1660 to 1680, the first years of Louis
XIV's personal rule, generally considered as the apogee of
absolutism. Drawing from historical sociology. conceptual
history and the history of political thought my research is
meant to provide a more richly textured account of the
different vocabularies of sociability which circulated in this
period and the way in which these were related to absolutist
political culture. Such an account I suggest may enable us to
rethink the intellectual lineage of the Enlightenment.
The interpretation of manners in French classical culture has
been shaped to a considerable degree by the work of the
Gennan sociologist Norbert Elias. His two major publications.
The Civilizing Process and The COllrt Society, both pointed to
the court as the major model of refmed behaviour. As a result,
the importance of divergent forms of sociability has been
frequently underestimated. Only recently, the American
intellectual historian Daniel Gordon has advanced an
interpretation of French sociability in which courtly sociability
is contrasted with a more egalitarian conception of civility'.
Similarly, Robert Muchembled, although heavily indebted to
the writings of Elias, has argued that seventeenth-century
French politesse was developed in an urban sening before
being adapted at the court of Louis XIV'. These and other
studies have significantly altered our understanding of politics
and sociability in early modem France by suggesting that
courtly manners had to compete with other. sometimes
conflicting, forms of sociability.
My pH-research takes as its point of departure the importance
of patronage and faction in early modem politics. Although
some historians remain wedded to a Marxist perspective. the
focus of historical inquiry has decisively shifted from a study
of class antagonism to that of patronage. Unfortunately, the
cultural meanings attached to patronage have received less
anention. An inquiry into the language of patronage provides
an interesting perspective from which to approach the
transformation of the languages of sociability in the
seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries. Classical authors (most
notably Seneca, undoubtedly the most important author on
what Montaigne called ' the science of benefaction and
gratitude') provided an elaborate philosophical rationale for
the interdependent relations which governed early modem
culture. Their views, embraced by religious orthodoxy, were
integrated in the vocabularies of sociability which were
developed in the course of this period.
An introduction on historiographical and theoretical issues and
a general account of the language of patronage in early
modem France provide the background for a discussion of
political, cultural, and religious sociability in the period 1660-
1680. In a separate chapter, moreover, I discuss the
importance of gender issues to the debate on politeness and
politics. These chapters focus on individual authors whose
works significantly contribute to our understanding of politics
and sociability in the first years of Louis XIV's personal rule.
In an epilogue, fmally, I intend to adress the relation between
absolutism and the Enlightenment, an issue which at least
1 Daniel Gordon. Citizens without Sovereignty. Equality and
Sociability ill Frellch Thought, 1670- 1789 (Princeton 1994).
2 Robert Muchembled, La societe policee. Politiqlle e/
pulitesse ell Frallce dll XVle all XXe siecle (Pari s 1998).
9
since Paul Hazard's Crise de fa conscience europeellne (1935)
has been at the forefront of historical scholarship.
The political theory of absolutism during the reign of Louis
XlV has long been studied mainly through the writings of
Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, bishop of Meaux. In his Discollrs
Sllr I 'hisloire lIf/iverselle (1681) and the Polilique linie des
propres paroles de I 'Ecriture sainle (1709) divine right
sovereignty reached its apogee. A shift of focus enables us to
give an alternative account of absolutism, Bossuet worked on
the Discours and the fIrst chapters of the Polilique during the
I 670s, a period in which he was the preceptor of Louis de
France, the son of Louis XlV. An account of the other men
who bore the primary responsibi lity for the education of Ie
Grand Dauphin - Montausier, Flechier, Huet and the
Cartesian Cordemoy - sheds a somewhat different light on
absolutist political thought. The unpublished ref/exiolls of
Charles de Sainte-Maure (1610-1690), Duke of Montausier
and governor of the Dauphin from 1668 to 1680, are of
particular interest in this respect. In some two thousand
reflections on the nature of the meh'er du roi, Montausier
developed an understanding of absolutism that derived from
the language of patronage. He argued for a political culture in
which merit and royal service would be paramount, a political
culture, that is, which was closely affiliated with traditional
nobiliaire discourse], The Dauphin circle, however, was not
merely a receptacle for traditional views. They counseled for
reform on an institutional plane (emphasizing the need for a
vital aristocracy) and for a redirection of the monarch's
attention towards the internal problems afFrance, In this way,
this coterie became an important passageway from
seventeenth-century deVOl and nobiliaire discourse to the
views propagated by d,e Burgundy circle in the I 690s and d,e
early eighteenth century.
In nobiliaire discourse the fmaDciers were held responsible for
the transformation of traditional French political culture. In
the narratives nobles constructed key concepts from dle
language of patronage (honour, service and merit) were
strategically employed to argue against the growing
importance of the fmanciers in French politics. Traditional
political sociability was undermined, they argued, by interest
(a concept which had gained prominence in political discourse
from the Renaissance onwards)4. The intricate relations
) On this topic see Jay M. Smith, The eullllre of Merit.
Nobility, Royal Service, and the Makillg of Absolllle
MOllarchy, 1600-1789 (Ann Arbor 1996).
4 For a recent account see lohan Heilbron, 'French Moralists
10
between the language of patronage, the concept of interest and
the ethics of hOf/netele provide the background for my
treatment of cultural and religious sociability. Charles de
Saint-Evremond (1614-1703), an exiled libertine with
Epicurean sympathies, transformed traditional nobiliaire
discourse by producing an account of the sociable selr derived
from Gassendi and Bemier. 10 Pierre Nicole's Essais de
Morale the culture of exchange was castigated from a
religious perspective. In the enormously popular Essais Nicole
(1625-1695) constructed a moral 'science of salvation' which
was meant to produce in his readers a new religious sense of
perspective. To achieve this object, he pitted political against
cultural sociability, defming the latter as an enlightened foml
of self-interest. Gender issues, as both Saint-Evremond and
Nicole understood, were of central importance in seventeenth-
century French political culture. Women were prominent
actors in the culture of exchange. They presided over the
salons and factions were often controlled by the wife or the
mistress of the central (male) fIgure. The writings ofMarie-
Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne (1634-1693), Countess of
Lafayette, enable us to understand the way in which
reflections on intimate and personal relationships were
inextricably intertwined with matters of a political nature. An
account of the relation between the language of patronage,
polite culture and gender will also help us to reflect on the
moral virtues (and their gendered nature) required to
participate in the culture of exchange.
The period from 1660 to 1680 has been frequently studied by
intellectual historians. Its political t h o u g h ~ however, has often
been reduced to a simple formula. Suspended between the
Fronde and the Edict of Nantes, the Memoires of Louis XlV
and Bossuct's political writings have been taken to capture
what was most salient about French political thought in this
period. 1ltis view derives from a venerable historiographical
tradition. At least since the 1920s it has been argued that the
1680s marked a radical departure from the period that
preceded it. Both in Henri See' s Les idees politiques ell
Frallce all XVlle sieele (1923) and George Sabine's A HislolY
of Political Thoughl (1937), the 1680s were presented as a
watershed. This view received canonical status through Paul
Hazard' s study on La crise de la conscience europeenne
(1935). Although Hazard's study is still one of the most
and the Anthropology of the Modem Era: On the Genesis of
the Notions ofUlnterest"and "Commercial Society"' in:
Johan Heilbron et al. (eds.), The Rise oflhe Social Sciell ces
ami {h e Formation of Modernity (Dordrecht and Boston
1998) 77-106.
stimulating and provocative accounts of the period, this
picture of radical cbange needs to be reconsidered. It has
become clear that most of the views identified by Hazard as
' enlightened' had already been formulated earlier. Although
important changes did take place from, say, the 1650s
onwards, they were more gradual than Hazard imagined. At
least as far as the domain of political theory is concerned,
moreover, continuity was much stronger than has been usually
granted.
The language of patronage provides us with the conceptual
means of rethinking the way in which absolutist political
culture was gradually transformed in the course of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and eventually gave
rise to Enlightenment discourse. The languages of
sociability and political economy, it would seem, should be
understood in relation to a culture of exchange in which
reciprocity and interdependence were regarded as
paramount. Although at this stage of my research the
multiple intellectual trajectories which derived from or were
closely related to the language of patronage remain to be
cbarted, it seems clear that such an investigation not only
enables us to formulate a more richly textured account of
French political culture in the first years of Louis XIV's
personal rule but also provides us with some leads on the
genesis of Enlightenment discourse.
The research-group on the concept of
citizenship in the Low Countries:
preliminary symposium report
Freya Sierhuis/Karin Tilmans
T
he following article is based on the research results
presented at the symposium on the history of the concept
of citizen in the Netherlands which took place in Amsterdam,
29'" and 30'" of January 1999. The symposium was made
possible by fmancial support from the Huizinga Institute and
file Amsterdam Institute for Cultural Studies.
Participants - the names marked with an asterisk gave a
presentation - were:
Prof. Dr. P.H. Leupen Uuridical notions of citizenship in the
Low Countries in the Middle Ages),
Prof. Dr. M. Boone' (socioeconomic aspects of citizenship in
the Flemish cities oftlle Late Middle Ages)
Prof. Dr. H. Pleij' ( the burger in late Medieval literature)
Mrs. Dr. C. P.H.M. Tilmans' (political citizenship in the
Burgundian-Habsburg Netherlands/the citizen in humanist
political thought), chair
Dr. P. Knevel ' (burger and city in the Dutch Republic)
Mrs. Dr. M. Meijer-Drees ' (the burger in 17'" century
literature)
Dr. H. W.Blom' (the burger in 17-18'" century moral
philosophy)
Dr. W.R.E. Velema (the burger in 18'" century political
theory)
Prof. Dr. J.J. K1oek' (the burger in 18-19'" century literature),
chair
Mw Dr. M. Aerts' and Mw Dr. M. Everard' (gender and
citizenship)
Dr. R. Aerts and Dr. H. te Velde (the historical and cultural
concept of citizenship, 19'" and 20'" century)
Dr. 1. De Haan ' (citizenship, social stratification and political
exclusion)
Dr. T. Eijsbouts' (citizenship after 1945; European citizenship
and the citizen of the 21" century
Prof. Dr. M. Prak' , discussant
From Burger to Civis
The Dutch concept of burger which contains both the notion
of 'citizen' and that of 'bourgeois', is characterized by an
inherent ambiguity. At least three distinct 'types' of burger
can be discerned: the burger as someone possessing a
privileged juridical status, a notion that was dominant during
the Middle Ages, but did not disappear until 1798; the burger
as a member of a social-economical class; and the burger as
member of a political community. In addition, the term burger
has always possessed very strong moral and cultural
overtones, as the burger was often defmed in a very general
way as a member of the civic society. Consequently, the
concept burger forms part of several semantic fields, and has,
in many cases, been subject to radical changes in meaning and
appreciation.
From the outset, the group decided to focus on two main
conceptual developments: the transition from a restrictive,
urban (or at least urban oriented) concept of citizenship to an
inclusive, nation-based concept of citizenship and secondly,
the dynamics between formal criteria of citizenship and the
way in which the concept was morally and culturally defmed.
At the moment, research is still in an early stage. TIle rmdings
presented in this conference-report are therefore preliminary
and in need of further expansion. In the forthcoming volume
on the Dutch concept of burger a more comprehensive and
nuanced history will be presented.
11
Citizenship, a dynamic concept
The history of the concept of citizen begins with the rise of the
cities. The Medieval word for citizen, poorter (which was for
a long time more common than burger), is derived from the
Latin portus, meaning harbor or halting-place, a term which
was common in the Western parts of the Low Countries.
Originally the term 'poorterij' (citizenry) was used to denote
the cornmunity of citizens. But as social hierarchy hardened,
the term came to be reserved for the richer citizens, those who
were able to pay taxes for the maintenance of the city walls. A
distinction grew between the community of the citizens at
large, the so-called 'gemeene poort' who enjoyed civic rights,
and the poorterij, the ruling elite, consisting of those families
who held property within the territory of the ancient portus,
and who, in many cases, controlled the city's industry/texti le
manufacruring and long-distance trade. Apart from this tl,e
poorterij cherished a number of aristocratic privileges, such as
the right to bear arms, to have a pedigree, to enjoy their own
administration of j ustice and to live in fortified houses. The
poorrerij managed to virrually monopolize the political
institutions of the city, until , in the last quarter of the thirteenth
cenrury their dominance was challenged by the groups that
had formerly been excluded from political participation, the
guilds. The years 1300-1302, when the inner-city conflicts
became intertwined with the struggle for power between
France, England and the County of Flanders, culminating in
the famous Battle of the Golden Spurs, marked a turning point
in this process. After 1360 the guilds consolidated their hold
on city politics by making membership of one of the guilds a
precondition for receiving the full civic rights of citizenship.
One striking aspect of medieval citizenship is that eligibility
requirements were not fixed. There were, of course, certain
regulations and procedures, like the swearing of an oath and
the payment of a fee. But, in general, city governments
interpreted regulations at their own discretion. By tightening
or loosening the requirements for citizenship, the city's ruling
elite could attract economically valuable immigrants, while
keeping unwanted newcomers at bay. Wealth was in this
respect the most (and one might be tempted to say, only)
criterion. City governments went to great lengths to attract
immigrants who could bring new crafts to the city or bring life
to languishing branches of industry. On the other hand, tllOse
described in the charter of the Countess of Flanders, Mathilda
of Portugal , as 'toto oppidi et universitatis inutilis' (useless to
the city and the body of citizens) were to be excluded from
citizenship. Significantly, the term ' inulilis' , which recurs
12
frequently in documents on citizenship, can be understood as
noxious and harmful as well as useless. Apart from these
economic demands, the accusation of qua/ic poorterscap
(' poor citizenship') was another reason for which one's name
could be removed from the citizens' register. Not only
governments, but also citizens calculated the costs and profits
of citizenship. It was possible, for instance, to be citizen of
more than one city. Frequently, the civic rights of a small
town were used as a stepping stone towards the citizenship of
one of the great towns. Neither was citizenship, strictly
speaking, an urban phenomenon. In large parts of Flanders, as
well as in the region around Dordrecht, there existed so-called
'buitel/poorters, (bourgeoisie/ormille, in the terminology of
the Burgundian chancellery), inhabitants of the countryside,
who enj oyed full civic rights. It was especially this
phenomenon of buitenpoorterij, together with the efforts of
the cities to persuade as many people as possible to rum to the
urban courts for the administration of justice that caused many
conflicts with the central government.
The high level of urbanization and the flourishing urban
culrure of the Low Countries could not but leave its mark on
literarure and poetry. This can be shown even for authors who
worked for a predominantly aristocratic audience. In epic
literarure, for instance, the merchant, seen as the archetypal
city dweller, is portrayed as a friendly character, who assists
damsels in distress, rather different from his more obnoxious
French counterpart. In didactic works, like the mirror of
princes genre, writers tend to lay emphasis on the usefulness
of merchants and on the prosperity and fame they bestow on
their cities, and in consequence, on the lands of the prince. For
sure, there is also criticism of their greed and cupidity, but
nowhere does this amount to an overall rejection of merchants
as a group. Though it is generally recognized that during the
Middle Ages, and even later, courtly ideals and values
retained a strong influence on urban culture, it is undeniable
that the rise of the cities created a need for a new kind of
literature, and a new set of values.
This new urban ' mentality' was an adaptation of an older lay-
ethics. Many of the characteristics of this mentality, like
industry, moderation and economy were adopted from
monasticism, while others, like ambition and individualism,
can be found in the epic stories about knights errant. In one
respect, however, the new ideas clashed with traditional views
on man and his place in society. In the competitive,
commerc ial envirorunent of the cities, the traditional view of
the mutual dependence of tl,e tlltee estates was gradually
replaced by the ideal of independence and self-reliance. This
can be seen in the literature on the maintenance of the
household, and in collections of popular proverbs or
rijrnbundels. Certain aspects of this new individuality, such as
the emphasis on the need to look after one's own welfare rust,
seemed directly to contradict the Christian duty of charity.
Writers went out of their way to prove that looking after
oneself was not in any way contrary to the Scriptures. Beyond
they also found support from Stoic thinkers, who were, it
seems, less impregnated with Christian beliefs than is
generally assumed. There remained, however, a fair amount of
resistance, especially to new ideas concerning wisdom or
sapientia. The new morality advocated many forms of
behavior, such as using one's resourcefulness to outsmart
others, which were simply abhorrent to more traditional
thinkers, who insisted that what would before have been
called wickedness was these days labeled 'wisdom' .
The emergence of a civic consciousness -the
impact of Humanism
The development of an urban self-consciousness also found its
expression in political awareness. From early times the great
cities of Flanders, as a group with shared economic interests,
had acted together, at times even dealing on their own account
with foreign powers. (Even though the concerns of the cities
were primarily of economic nature, which led them to follow
national interests only when it suited them to do so) This
experience in self-government laid the basis for the
development of a republican ideology. Resistance to
imprudent and spendthrift monarchs was legitimated by
calling upon the aristotelian-thomist notion of the common
good, and, in addition upon time-honored privi leges and
liberties. In the course of their struggles with tile higher
authorities the cities developed the view, which can be
detected for the rust time during the succession crisis of 1127-
1128, that it was their right, and, in a certain way, their
function, to act as a counterweight against the power of the
prince. In the fourteenth century, the powers of the Count of
Flanders were temporarily taken over by a condominium of
cities, led by Ghent. In the treaty of 1339 it was stated that the
Count was to deliberate with the cities on a basis of equality
and that the cities had the right to depose him should he fai l to
observe the clauses of the treaty. If anything, it was the
memory of these historic attainments that shaped political
consciousness. Thus the work of Galbert ofBruges, who
describes the events of 1127- 11 28, gained new popularity
during the last years of the fifteenth century, when the Flemish
cities rose in rebelli on against Maximilian l. In the same way,
the treaty of 1339, reissued on the authority of the prince of
Orange, served to lend weight to claims of disaffected subjects
during the Dutch Revolt.
Civic humanism, which established itself in the Low
Countries at the close of the fifteenth century, furthered this
pre-republican tradition, to which it added many of its own
ideas and conceptions. At the heart of this form of humanist
thought lay the idea ofhuunan society as a political
corrununity. a respub/ica or societas civilis, and of man as rust
and foremost a political creature. Humanism introduced the
Ciceronian concept of the citizen; a man who was not only
willing to serve his country in times of war but who also
dedicated his political , moral and intellectual capacities to his
fatherland. This concept would prove to be oflasting
influence and of tremendous importance.
Whereas in Italy the virtual absence of monarchical authority
had led to the development of a republican ideology centered
around the idea of liberty, civic huunanism in the Low
Countries can be dermed as republican within a monarchical
and based on the notion of consensus rather than that
ofliberty. While humanist thought in the second half of the
sixteenth century took on many forms, there is a common
ground in the basic assumption that the cities enjoy, within a
monarchical framework, an independent status, and act as a
bridle on, and a counterweight to the powers of the monarch.
Even a pragmatic monarchist like Nicholas Biases, who
dedicated his work De republica Iibri quattuor ( 1555) to
Granvelle, delegated far-reaching powers to the city's
magistrates in the guidance and controlling of the monarchy.
Of all political thinkers, the ideas of the Brugian politician and
lawyer Franciscus Goethalsius were by far the most radical.
He was also the most outspoken critic of monarchical
goverrunent in his treatise De [oelid et in[oelici Republica,
published in 1566. Monarchical rule, in his view, was likely to
lead to high taxes and the accumulation of riches, with all the
resulting consequences. A monarch was also more prone to
imprudent expenditure, as experience taught that monarchs
spent their money on public building and warfare, instead of
using it for the education of their citizens. Goethalsius' ideal
city is a small republic of artisans that is able to cater for its
own needs, and shies away from foreign commerce. In spite
of Ciceronian influences, Goethalsius' concept of citizenship
does not break with medieval traditions: it is a socio-juridical
notion, based on the exclusion of non-privileged groups
(foreign merchants, in this case) and centered on a notion of
. utilitas' .
13
The persistence of Classical Republicanism
Though the juridical concept of the citizen, as membership of
an urban conununity, did not disappear until 1798, the
hwnanist notion of the state as a respublica or civil society
continued to develop. In many ways, it might be argued that
republicanism in its various forms served as a transfer point,
preparing the way for a wider, nation-based concept of
citizenship. One of the fmit instances where this appears to be
the case is in the political works of Pieter de la Court. In his
Political Considerations and Examples concerning the
Foundations a/various Fonns a/Government (1660) he uses
the tenn 'civis' in two different ways: in the traditional , socio-
juridical sense as well as in the political sense, citizen
a g a i n s ~ for instance, ' lord' or 'tyrant'. When he comes to
describe the republic of Genoa, however, he remarks that all
its inhabitants, even the rabble, are defrned as cives. Is this
perhaps an indication of a newly developing, politically
defmed concept of citizenship?
How exactly citizenship evolved from a privileged juridical
status to membership of a political community needs further
investigation. An interesting parallel, however, is offered by
the development within the genre of the pamphlet literature.
One particularly popular genre, was that of the so-called
' burgerpraatjes' , the 'citizens' talk'. These pamphlets usually
took the form of a discussion between two or three people (in
most cases a burger and a courtier. or a citizen and a soldier),
settling down after a chance meeting to talk about the issues of
the day. In the ensuing discussion the merchant, with whom
the burger is equated voices the narrow, strictly economic
interests of the ruling oligarchy, whereas the courtier, who
usually wins the argument, has a broader and more mundane
outlook. In course of the seventeenth century, however, the
role of the citizen changes. The pamphlets become dialogues
between burgers, instead of between burgers and non-
burgers, and the burger changes from a mouthpiece of the
ruling elite to a representative of a political community.
someone who has a political stake in society.
Even outside the fi eld of political theory, the more general
notion of man as a social being therefore exerted a profound
influence on Dutch literature of the Golden Age. Considering
that historians have often used the term 'burger/ijk' in the
sense of bourgeois as a key term in interpreting Dutch culture
of the seventeenth century, it is remarkable how rarely the
term is used in this sense by seventeenth-century authors.
Indeed, when seventeenth-century literati lI sed the tern}
14
'burger/Uk', it usually did not refer to the burgers as a social
group, or even to the inhabitants of a city. 'Burger', in their
vocabulary, referred to all the good people, the virtuous and
respectable members of society who fulfilled their obligations
towards the community. The burger, in short, was a member
of the civic society. It is only at the end of the seventeenth
century, under the influence of Classicism, that the notion of
'burger/ijkheid' became more distinctive, and criteria such as
wealth and that social status became more important in
defming what was and wbat was not ' burger/ijk' or bourgeois.
A reaction against this 'aristocratisation' of the concept of
' burgerlijkheid', civicness, soon arose. Against French
conceptions about literary style Dutch writers of the
eighteenth century set a new kind of literature which they
themselves labeled as 'burger/ijk '. TIus new literature was
realistic and appealed to the reader' s own experience. In this
way, writers aimed to move their audience, while at the same
time showing them the rewards of virtuousness, and the
dangerous consequences of unbridled passions. These ideas
about the educational value of literature held ground well into
the nineteenth century, when they were fmally discarded as a
result of new, Romantic ideas on art.
As we have seen, the concept of citizenship bad since long
been connected with cultural notions of morality and
virtuousness. It was in the eighteenth century however, that
both conceptions of citizenship, that of the burger as a
member of a pol itical community, and the more general
notion of the burger as full member of society were
deliberately and purposefully linked. This -again- had set new
standards for civilized behavior. Critics of the general vogue
for politesse, like the republican thinker Justus van Effen
warned against its possible pernicious consequences. In his
view, politesse, with its obsession with outward fonns, social
standing and its essentially courtly orientation formed a threat
to the civil freedom ('burger/ijke vrijheid) that was one of the
most precious attairunents of the Dutch constitution. In his
journal, the Hollall dsche Spectator (1731-1735), Van Effen
set out to create a new ideal of civility that was compatible
with Dutch political culture. He did this be combining some of
the elements of the ideal of politesse,like sociability, courtesy
and civil conversation, with traditional civic virtues, thereby
creating a new political figure - that of the civilized
republican.
Towards a National Concept of Citizenship
The late eighteenth century was a seminal period in the history
of the concept of the ' burger' . The clashes between the
followers of the 'stadhollder', the Orangists, and the Patriots,
led to a further politicization of the concept of the citizen.
While the meaning of burger as a member of an urban
community slowly faded into the background, the term in its
political sense, connected to key-words like 'Fatherland' and
'Freedom', appeared ever more frequently in national debates.
This development reached its high point in 1798, when radical
anti-Orange men seized power and 'burger' became a kind of
code-word to express one's adherence to - or at least
sympathy for- the anti-Orangist cause. This is also the period
in which the tenn <burgeres " 'citizeness', first appeared in a
new, political sense: no longer simply wife or daughter of a
burger, but now a fully-fledged member of society. This
political coloring was to remain its characteristic: only in the
languages of socialism and feminism did the term really gain
currency.
In 1798, also, citizenship as a restrictive, juridical status was
abolished, and replaced by an inclusive notion of nation-based
citizenship. However, this did not end the tension, so
characteristic of the Dutch concept of ' burgerschap', between
the notion of the burger as a member of the community and
the burger as a member of a privileged social class, enjoying
certain political rights. In the period up to 1848 the divergence
between these two conceptions of I burgerschap " citizenship,
was illustrated by, on the one hand, the official aim to give a
larger section of the population access to citizenship, and on
the other, census-suffrage andlor socia-economic restrictions
inhibiting social mobility. Remarkably, being classified as a
burger in the second sense still depended on one's status in the
local community. This, in turn, not only depended on wealth,
but also on the social status one possessed by fulfilling public
roles. as, for instance, in providing cbarity for the poor.
Another important factor was whether or not one was
classified as a 'gezeten burger' ('a citizen of substance').
When this was the case, one retained the status of burger even
after having fallen into poverty.
The revision of the Constitution of 1848 gave rise to debates
about the need to broaden citizenship, even though census-
suffrage was maintained. At the same time, the ' liberal'
character of the constitution and of the concept of
'burgerschap , came to be challenged by the confessional
parties as well as by the soc ialists. As the state gradually
established its grip on more aspects oflife the distinction
between fonnal and socio-economical citizenship became
untenable, a development which eventually resulted in the
revision of the consti tution of 191 7.
Citizenship in the twentieth century
With the introduction of universal suffrage in 1917 the
dynamics between inclusive national citizenship and exclusive
socio-economical citizenship seemed to have come to a
standstill. As everybody now was a full-fledged citizen,
political distinctions came to be sought in other fields. During
the inter-bellum denominational segregation left its mark on
every segment of Dutch society. Citizens became members of
a confession, of a party or a union. TIle liberals suffered most
from the new political subdivision and sought a legitimization
of their political role by appealing to ' typically Dutch'
bourgeois traditions from which their party sprung. In this
period also the idea of the bourgeois character,
'burger/ijklz eid', of Dutch culture was further developed.
After the Second World War, as involvement of the state in
the lives of its citizens grew, it seemed that nation based
citizenship would take firm root.
The creation of the welfare state prepared the way for a new
form of citizenship that of the citizen as owner of rights
guaranteed by the state. The gradual disappearance of
confessional division lines only reinforced this trend. From
the late 1950s and early I 960s onwards, the initial optimism
about the feasibility of this ideal began to flag. Criticism was
aimed in particular at what was seen as the opportunistic, self-
seeking character of the citizen of the welfare state. The new
citizen, it seemed, lacked the very qualities essential for
citizenship. On the other hand more emphasis was given to
reversing of state-interference, the growth of bureaucracy and
the growing dependence on the state. As a result, a renewed
interest in the social, economic and cultural aspects of
citizenship arose. These ideas found expression in the liberal
ideal of economic independence, the Christian-democratic
notion of cultural rootedness, and the socialist aspirations at
radical democracy. None of these ideals, however, was
thought of as an alternative to nation-based citizenship.
At the end of the twentieth century, these issues are still held
to be of vital interest. The dynamics between socio-
economical, cultural and forma l aspects of citizenship, far
from being outdated, continue to stimulate its conceptual
development. At the moment it appears that the naturalization
of immigrants and the creation of a new, European form of
citizenship will pose the greatest challenges for the twenty-
first century.
To conclude we would like to remark that the tendency of
15
historians to associate all important developments since the
emergence of the cities with the bourgeoisie has led to an
excessive attention for the citizen as a socio-economic actor.
It is therefore one of our main aims within the conceptual
analysis of citizenship to get a more balanced view of the
historical relationship between the socio-economic, political
and cultural forms of the concept of the Dutch citizen and of
Dutch citizenship.
Agenda
15-18 September 1999
History of Concepts - The Finnish Project in European
Context
The purpose of the conference is to present the preliminary
results of the research project "The Conceptual History of
Finnish Political Culture" to an international audience for
discussion and criticism and to advance co-operation and
comparative work between the European projects on
conceptual history.
Dates: Wednesday - Saturday, September 15-1 8, 1999.
Place: Tampere Hall, Cabinet 200, Yliopistonkatu 55.
University ofTampere, Pinni, Paavo Koli lecture hall
Kehruukoulunkatu I . '
Daily slots (talks below numbered accordingly)
Workshop, Tampere Hall , Cabinet 200
Paper 1: 10.00-11.10
Coffee break 11.1 0 -11.30
Paper2: 11.30-13.00
Lunch break, 13- 14
Paper3: 14.00-15.10
Coffee break 15.10-1 5.30
Paper 4: 15.30-17.00
Lectures, University of Tampere. Paavo Koli lecture
hall: 17.30- 19.00
Wednesday 15 September
9.30 Gathering, opening, a couple of words about the project
1.
2.
3.
4.
16
Kari Saastamoinen: The 'Finnish' Political Languages
Before the 1860s.
Torkel Jansson, Uppsala: The Century When the
Swedish Language Became 'Worn out' (19.)
Matti Hyviirinen: Valta (Power)
Wolf-Dieter Narr, Berlin: Political Language, the
Language of Political Science - Some Reflections of an
Old and Disloyal Political Scientist
5. lain Hamsher-Monk, Exeter: Speech Acts, Languages
or Conceptual History?
Thursday 16 September
I. Risto Alapuro: Vallankurnous (Revolution)
2. Eeva Aarnio: Puolue (Party)
3. Ky6sti Pekonen: Hallinto, hallitus (Government)
4. Ismo Pohjantammi: Edustus, eduskunta
(Representation, Parliament)
5. Pim den Boer, Amsterdam: Comparative history of
concepts: perspectives and problems
Friday 17 September
I. Ilkka Liikancn: The politicitzed People (Kansa)
2. Henrik Stenius: Kansalainen (Citizen)
3. Tuija Pulkkinen: Valtio (State)
4. Pauli Kettunen: hteiskunta, yhteis6 (Society,
Community)
5. Wyger Velema, Amsterdam: Dutch Conceptual History
in Theory and Practice
Saturday 18 September
I . Kari Palonen: Learning to Use a Common European
Concept: Conceptual Changes in the Understanding of
'Politiikka' in Finnish
2-3 Roundtable discussion: Experiences from the Finnish
and Dutch Projects - Critical, Comparative and Future
Perspectives. Wyger Velerna and Pim den Boer (The
Dutch Project), lain Hamsher-Monk, Lars Petterson
(open), Tuija Pulkkinen (The Finnish project).
Conference fee: FIM 600 or EUR 100.
For further information and preregistration, please contact:
Dr. Matti Hyviirinen
Research Institute for Social Sciences (YTY)
University ofTampere,
P.O. Box 607,
FlN-33 101 Tampere, Finland
Tel: +358-3-2156 999;
Fax: +358-3-2156 502
E-mail: ytrnahy@uta.fi
or:
Administrative Secretary
Sinikka Hakala
Research Institute for Social Sciences (TY)
University ofTampere,
P.O. Box 607,
FlN-33 10 1 Tampere, Finland
Tel: +358-3-2156992
Fax: +358-3-2156 981
E-mail : ytrnahy@uta.fi
14-16 October, St-Cloud.
Conceptual Changes in European political
Cultures"
Reunion 1999 du n!seau II Histoire des concepts" organisee
par I'equipe " Pratiques du langage au 18eme siecle" de
I'UMR " Analyses de corpus linguistiques : usages
traitement" de l'Ecole Normale Superieure de Fontenay-
Saint-Cloud et Ie Laboratoire de Sciences soci ales de l' Ecole
Normale Superieure de la rue d 'Ulm
14 October, 14: 00 (ENS de Saint-Cloud)
- Allocution de bienvenue par Ie Directeur de l'Ecole
Normale Superieure
- Presentation of the organisation by Kari Palonen and
Melvin Richter.
- Presentation par Jacques Guilhaumou et Raymonde
Monnier du debat thematique sur les concepts socio-
politiques: usages, controverses, arguments.
- Use and abuse of words: usages discursifs des concepts
socio-politiques
Patricia Springborg, moderatrice
Melvin Richter (New-York City University), " The concept of
' despotism' in the half-century prior to 1789 ".
Raymonde Monnier (ENS de Fontenay/Saint-Cloud),
II Autour des usages d'uD nom indistinct : 'Peuple' SOllS la
Revolution ".
Martin J. Burke (New York City University), "'Papists' or
'Catholics'? ' Popery' or 'Catholicity' ? Confessionnal
Terminology and Political Culture in Ireland and the United
States in the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries ".
Jan Ifversen (Aarhus University), " ' Globalization' - a
catch-all concept for the end of the millenium ".
15 October 9:00 (ENS de Saint-Cloud)
Histoire comparative des concepts socio-politiques
Catherine Larrere, moderanice
Kari Palonen (Jyviiskylii University), " Modes of
Themalization and Rhythms of Conceptual Changes.
Towards a comparati ve Hi story of 'Politics' in some
European Political Cultures ".
Patricia Springborg (Sidney University), " Classical
Translation and Politi cal Surrogacy: English Renaissance
Classical Translations and Imitations as Politically Coded
Texts ".
Pim den Boer (Universite d'Amsterdam), .. Vers une histoire
comparee des concepts: l'exemple de 'civilisation' n.
Alexis Keller (Universite de Geneve). "Dessine-moi un
Suisse. La naissance de la citoyennete helvetique ( 1798-
1848) ".
Stuart Jones (Manchester University), .. The concept of
'representation' in French debates on electoral reform, 1880-
1914 ".
15 October 14:00 (ENS de Saint -Cloud)
Debats actuels autour de l'histoire des concepts socio-politiques-I
Kari Palonen (Jyviiskylii University), moderateur
Intervention de Quentin Skinner (Cambridge University) sur
" Freedom and the State ..
Pierre Rosanvallon (EHESS, Paris), Patricia Springborg
(Sidney University), commentateurs
15 October 16:00 (ENS deSaint-Cloud)
Tuija Pulkkinen (Helsinki University), .. The State and the
Nation. Two Battelfiels of Conceptual Hegemony in Mid-
19th Century Finland ".
Balazs Trencsenyi (Budapest University), " The
development of the concept of 'nation' from mid- 16th to
late 17th century in Hungary ".
16 October 9:30 (Paris, EHESS 48 Bd Jourdan) Salle
des Colonnes
Seance organisee par Ie Laboratoire de Sciences Sociales,
ENS ParislEHESS
Discussion autour de I' histoire et la pragmatique des
concepts avec une intervention de Reinhart Koselleck
(Universite de Bielefeld), "Peuple, Volk and Nation.
Comparative perspective".
Gerard Noiriel (EHESS, Paris) moderateur
Pierre Fiala (ENSlFontenay-Saint-Cloud), .. Des usages
lexicaux aux concepts: variation, saillance, normes ".
Sandro Chignola (Verona University)," The logic of the
modem concepts of politics ".
Christine Faure (Paris, CNRS), " Histoire des concepts et
histoire des femmes".
16 October 14:00
,
Debats actuels autour de I'hi stoire des concepts socio-politiques-
17
14-16 October, St-Cloud.
Conceptual Changes in European political
Cultures"
Reunion 1999 du reseau .. Histoire des concepts" organisee
par I'equipe" Pratiques du langage au 18eme siec\e" de
I'UMR ,. Analyses de corpus linguistiques : usages
traitement" de l'Ecol e Normale Superieure de Fontenay-
Saint-Cloud et Ie Laboratoire de Sciences sociales de l'Ecole
Normale Superieure de la rue d'Ulm
14 October, 14: 00 (ENS de Saint-Cloud)
- Allocution de bienvenue par Ie Directeur de l'Ecole
Normale Superieure
- Presentation of the organisation by Kari Palonen and
Melvin Richter.
- Presentation par Jacques Guilhaumou et Raymonde
Monnier du debat thematique sur les concepts socio-
politiques: usages, controverses, arguments.
- Use and abuse of words: usages discursifs des concepts
socio-politiques
Patricia Springborg, moderatrice
Melvin Richter (New-York City University), ,. The concept of
'despotism' in the half-century prior to 1789",
Raymonde Monnier (ENS de Fontenay/Saint-Cloud),
II Auteur des usages d'uD nom indistinct : IPeupie' sous 1a
Revolution
Martin J, Burke (New York City University), ,. 'Papists' or
' Catholics' ? ' Popery' or ' Catholicity' ? Confessionnal
Terminology and Political Culture in Ireland and the United
States in the Late 18th and Early 19th Centuries",
Jan Ifversen (Aarhus University), ,. 'Globalization' - a
catch-all concept for the end of the millenium ",
15 October 9:00 (ENS de Saint-Cloud)
Histoire comparative des concepts socio-politiques
Catherine Lanere, moderatrice
Kari Palonen (Jyviiskylii University), ,. Modes of
Themalization and Rhythms of Conceptual Changes,
Towards a comparative Hi story of 'Politics' in some
European Political Cultures ",
Patricia Springborg (Sidney University), " Classical
Translation and Political Surrogacy : English Renaissance
Classical Translations and Imitations as Politically Coded
Texts ",
Pim den Boer (Universit" d' Amsterdam), ,. Vers une his to ire
comparee des concepts : I'exemple de ' civilisation' ",
Alexis Keller (Universite de Geneve), ,. Dessine-moi un
Suisse, La naissance de la citoyennete helvetique (1798-
1848) ",
Stuart Jones (Manchester University), ,. The concept of
'representation' in French debates on electoral reform, 1880-
1914 ",
15 October 14:00 (ENS de Saint -Cloud)
Debats actuels autour de I' histoire des concepts socio-politiques - I
Kari Palonen (Jyvaskylii University), moderateur
Intervention de Quentin Skinner (Cambridge University) sur
" Freedom and the State ..
Pierre Rosanvallon (EHESS, Paris), Patricia Springborg
(Sidney University), commentateurs
15 October 16:00 (ENS deSaint-Cloud)
Tuija Pulkkinen (Helsinki University), "111e State and the
Nation, Two Battelfiels of Conceptual Hegemony in Mid-
19th Century Finland ",
Balazs Trencsenyi (Budapest University), "The
development of the concept of 'nation' from mid-16th to
late 17th century in Hungary ",
16 October 9:30 (Paris, EHESS 48 Bd Jourdan) Salle
des Colonnes
Seance organisee par Ie Laboratoire de Sciences Sociales,
ENS ParislEHESS
Discussion autour de l'histoire et la pragmatique des
concepts avec une intervention de Reinhart Koselleck
(Universite de Bielefeld), .. Peuple, Volk and Nation,
Comparative perspective",
Gerard Noiriel (EHESS, Paris) moderateur
Pierre Fiala (ENSlFontenay-Saint-Cloud), .. Des usages
lexicaux aux concepts: variation, saillance, nonnes ",
Sandro Chignola (Verona University)," The logi c of the
modem concepts of politics ",
Christine Faure (Paris, CNRS), " Histoire des concepts et
histoire des femmes ",
16 October 14:00
DebalS actuels autour de I'hi stoire des concepts socio-politiques-
17
II Pierre Fiala (ENSlFontenay-Saint-Cloud), moderateur
Elena Meleshkina (Samara State University), " Conventional
and non-conventional Protest : modem conceptual transfer
of the Idea of Rights' claim"
Catherine LaITere (Universite de Bordeaux), "Le concept d'
< ckonomie' ".
Mikhailllyin (Moscow State Institut oflnternational
Relations), " In search of the union forlorn : the idea of
federation in Russian political discourse of the 90s ".
16 October 16:00
Handbuch politish-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich (1680-1 820)
Jacques Guilhaumou (ENSlFontenay-Saint-Cloud), moderateur
Ilona Pabst ( Tubingen Universitlit), " La Revolution de A a
Z. Les dictionnaires fran,ais 1789-1794 ".
Hans-Jiirgen Lusebrink (Saarbrucken Universitat), Le
Halldbuch en perspective ( a preciser).
OTHER MEETINGS
I . ECPR (European Consortium for Political
Research) Joint Sessions of Workshops,
Copenbagen, Denmark, wi ll also be holding a workshop
from 14-19 April 2000: "The History of Political Concepts:
A New Perspective on European Political Cultures" Co-
directors: Matti Hyvarinen, Tampere & Tina
Buchtrup Pipa, Copenbagen. The ECPR will publish its
official call for papers in August-September 1999, and the
deadline for abstracts is November 30, 1999. For further
information, please contact: Malti Hyvarinen, e-mail :
Matti.Hyvarinen@uta.fi, Tina Buchtrup Pipa, e- mail:
TL@ifs.ku.dk
ECPR homepage: http: //www.essex.ac.uklECPR
For the topics cf. the text in the February circular
((http://ww.jyu.polconticircularlhtrnl)
2.For the IPSA World Congress in Quebec, I to 6
August 2000, Jose M.Rosales and Kari Palonen will arrange
two panels of Special Session 14, Conceptual
Changes and Political Changes. Both the call fo r papers and
information on the panels can currently be found in a
website addendum of the circular
from February 1999 (http://ww.jyu.poiconticircular/htrnl).
The deadline for applications is November 1999.
Book announcements
18
Dictionaire des usages socio-politiques (1770-
1815), fasc, 6, notions practiques.
Nicole Arnold and Raymonde Monnier, eds. (Saint Cloud
1999) Notions pratiques (Harmonie, hospitalite, humanjte,
insttuction, publique, loi, reaction, n!generation)
Paris: Klincksieck 1999,205 p. ISBN
2-252-03220-0.
Archiv fiir Begriffsgeschichte, Band XL mit einem
Register der Blinde 32
bis 40, 199711998, Bonn: Bouvier, 312 p. ISBN 3-4 16-
02858-9, cf. esp. Helge
Schalk on the concept "Diskurs" (p. 56-101) and the
Register p. 202-3 11).
In/egalites, Usages lexicaux et variations
discursives (18e20e sjeeles),
Pi erre Fiala ed. (Paris: Harmattan 1999), The volume seems
to be an apt representative of the various applications of the
"St. Cloud"styJe of conceptual, lingistic and rhetorical
analyses.
The discourse on political pluralism in early
eighteenth-century England. A conceptual study
with special reference to terminology of
religious origin.
Pasi Ihalainen ed. (Helsinki 1999) 375 p. ISBN 95 1-710-
100-7, paperback.
"Democratie et Revolution franc;aise,"
Raymonde Monnier, Mots 59,juin 1999, p. 47-68.
Finish yearbook of politcal thought, volume
(SoPhi 36 1999) 244 p. ISBN 951-39-0432-6, paperback,
GBP 12,95, Contributions by Melvin Richter, Janet
Coleman and Kari Palonen, and Quentin Skinner.
SoPhi is distributed worldwide by Drake International
Services, Market House, Market Place, Deddington, Oxford
OXI5 OSE, United Kingdom, telephone (+44) 01 869
338240, fax (+44) 01 869 3383 10, e-mail
info@drakeint. co.uk
For further information on SoPhi books please visit the web
page at: http: //www.jyu.fIl- yhtfil/sophilSOPHI36.html
Vaderland. Een geschiedenis vanaf de vijftiende
eeuw tot 1940. Reeks Nederlandse
begripsgeschiedenis 1. N.C.F. van Sas ed. Amsterdam
University Press. Amsterdam 1999. ISBN 90 5356 3474.
Mn, p,hadc fl 69,50
Vrijheid. Een geschiedenis van de vijftiende tot
de twintigste eeuw. Reeks Nederlandse
begripsgeschiedenis 2. E.O.G, Haitsma Mulier, W.R.E
Velema eds Amsterdam University Press. Amsterdam 1999.
371 pp. Papaerback 59,50
Res Publica, Revista de historia y el presente de
los conceptos politicos, no. 1
( 1998) ref: prof. Vi llacanas, villacanaj l@iglobal.es.
Per la storia dei concetti politici
Giuseppe Duso (Roma-Bari 1999).
In the next Issue:
-Hans Erich Badeker: on "Gattinger Gesprache zur
Geschichtwissenschaft 9": Begriffsgeschichte -
Diskursgeschichte - Metapherngeschichte.
-Reports on the Tampere and St-Cloud conferences.
-Wyger Velema on " Dutch conceptual history in
theory and practice."
Call for copy
Pl ease send contributions and announcements
relevant for the Newsletter to:
Karin Tilmans I Wyger Velema,
University of Amsterdam,
Department of History,
Spuistraat 134,1 012 VB Amsterdam,
The Netherlands.
Please enclose also a diskette (WordPerfect or Word) or
send your copy to: Karin.Tilmans@let.uva.nl
19
Prof. dr. P.B. M. Blaas Dr. M. Fennema
History of
Mozartlaan 4 Mw. M. Carasso-Kok Vakgroep Al gemenc
190 I XS Castricum Dr. Koomansstraat 21 Politicologic
Political and Thc Netherlands 1391 XA Abcoude Oudezijds Achterburgwal 237
Social
The Netherlands 1012 DL Amsterdam
Prof. dr. W.P. Blockmans
The Netherl ands
Concepts
Vakgroep Gesehiedenis RUL Daria Castiglione
Group
Postbus 9515 Dept. of Politics Pierre Fiala
2300 RA Lciden University of Exeter ENS. Fontanay Saint Cloud-
The Netherlands Exeter EX4 4RJ laboratoire de Icxicologie
UK Le Parco 92211
Hans Blom e-mai1:D.Castiglione@exeter Saint Cloud Ccdex
Dept. of Philosophy .ac.uk France
Dr. R.A.M. Aerts
Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam e-mail :Fiala@ens-fcl-fr
Lage der A 16a
9718 BK Groningen
P.O Box 1738 Sandro Chignola
The Netherlands
NL-300 DR Rotterdam Via S. Mattia 16 Michael Freeden
The Netherlands 1-37 128 Verona Mansfield Col legc
Peter Baehr
fax: +3 1-10-212 0448 Italy Oxford OX I 3TF
Dept. of5ociology
e-ma; l: H.W.Blom@fwb.eur.nl fax : +45-913880 UK
Memorial University of
e-mai l: chi sha@Sis.i t c-mai l:
Newfoundland
Hans Erich Bodeker michael. freedcn@socstud.ox.ac.
St. John's New Foundland
Max-Pl anck-Inst. fur Geschichte Janet Coleman uk
Canada A IC 557
Hermann-Foge-Weg I I Dept .of Govemmcnt
e-mail :
D-3400 Gottingcn London School of Economics Jan-Hein Furne
pbaehr@morgan.ucs. mun.ca
Germany and Political Science Vakgroep Geschiedenis
Houghton Street Oude Kijk in ' t Jatstr.lat 26
Prof. Or. Jens Bartelson
Pim den Boer London WC2A 2AE 700 AS Groningen
Department of Political Science
Dept. of Cultural Studies UK The Netherlands
University of Stockholm
University of Amsterdam Fax: +44-171-831 1707
S10691 Stockholm
Spuistraat 210 Prof. dr. M. van Gelderen
Sweden
1012 VT Amsterdam Dr. E. Dekker School of Eur. Studies, Arts
e-mai l:
The Netherlands Emmastraat 27 Building
jens.bartelson@Statsvct.su.se
leI. +3 \-20525 3503 (office)! 2802 LA Gouda Falmer. Brighton BN I 9NQ
+31-30-25 1 5426 (home) The Netherlands Sussex
Gyorgy Bence
Fax +31-20-525 3052 UK
Dept. of Philosophy
Arjan Van Dixhoorn
ELTE
Prof. Dr. Mare Boone Koningslaan 22 Daniel Gordon
Piarista k6z I
Fac. dcr Leu. en Wijshegcerte )58) GE Utrecht Dept. of History
Pf. 107
Blandijnberg 2 B- 9000 The Nctherlands University of Massachusscts
1364 Budapest
Gent Amherst MA 0 I 00))9)0
Hungary
Bclgic Dr. H. Duits USA
Tel.+)61 266 )769
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