Pagina principale The practice of conceptual history: timing history, spacing concepts

The practice of conceptual history: timing history, spacing concepts

Reinhart Koselleck is one of the most important theorists of history and historiography of the last half century. His work has implications for contemporary cultural studies that extend far beyond discussions of the practical problems of historical method. He is the foremost exponent and practitioner of Begriffsgeschichte, a methodology of historical studies that focuses on the invention and development of the fundamental concepts underlying and informing a distinctively historical manner of being in the world.The eighteen essays in this volume illustrate the four theses of Koselleck’s concept of history. First, historical process is marked by a distinctive kind of temporality different from that found in nature. This temporality is multileveled and subject to different rates of acceleration and deceleration, and functions not only as a matrix within which historical events happen but also as a causal force in the determination of social reality in its own right.Second, historical reality is social reality, an internally differentiated structure of functional relationships in which the rights and interests of one group collide with those of other groups, and lead to the kinds of conflict in which defeat is experienced as an ethical failure requiring reflection on what went wrong” to determine the historical significance of the conflict itself.Third, the history of historiography is a history of the evolution of the language of historians. In this respect, Koselleck’s work converges with that of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, all of whom stress the status of historiography as discourse rather than as discipline, and feature the constitutive nature of historical discourse as against its claim to literal truthfulness.Finally, the fourth aspect of Koselleck’s notion of the concept of history is that a properly historicist concept of history is informed by the realization that what we call modernity is nothing more than an aspect of the discovery of history’s concept in our age. The aporias of modernismin arts and letters as well as in the human and natural sciencesare a function of the discovery of the historicity of both society and knowledge.
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Timing History, Spacing Concepts

Reinhart Koselleck
Translated by Todd Samuel Presner and Others
Foreword by Hayden White


Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 2002 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University
Printed in the United Scates of America
on acid-free, archival-quality paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Koselleck, Reinhart
The practice of conceptual history : timing history, spacing concepts I
Reinhart Koselleck ; translated by Todd Samuel Presner, wich ochers.
p. em.- (Cultural memory in che present)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN o-8047-4022-4- (doth : a1k. paper) - isBN o-8047-4305-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. History-Periodizadon.
2. Hisrory-Philosophy.
3· Historiography.
4· Semantics, Historical. 5· History-Methodology. I. Presner, Todd Samuel.
II. Tide. III. Series.
016.15 .K67




Original Priming 2002
Last figure below indicates year of this printing:





Typeset by James P. Brommer in nhn Garamond

The publication of chis work was subsidized by a granc
from che Goeche-Insricuc Inter Nationes, Bonn


Foreword by Hayden White

On the Need for Theory in the Discipline of History


Social History and Conceptual History

3 Introduction to Hayden White's Tropics ofDiscourse

Transformations of Experience and Methodological Change:
A Historical-Anthropological Essay

5 The Temporalization of Utopia
6 Time and History





Concepts of Historical Time and Social History


8 The Unknown Future and the Art of Prognosis


9 Remarks on the Revolutionary Calendar and Neue Zeit



The Eighteenth Century as the Beginning of Modernity

I 54


On the Anthropological and Semantic Structure of Bildung



Three burgerliche Worlds? Preliminary Theoretical-Historical
Remarks on the Comparative Semantics of Civil Society in
Germany, England, and France




&; quot;Progress" and "Decline'': An Appendix to the History of
Two Concepts




Some Questions Regarding the Conceptual History
of "Crisis))


15 The Limits of Emancipation: A Conceptual-Historical


r6 Daumier and Death


17 War Memorials: Identity Formations of the Survivors



Afterword to Charlotte Beradt's The Third Reich ofDreams



Hayden White

It is a great honor to be invited to present this collection of Reinhart
Koselleck's essays and addresses. Some Anglophone readers will already
know his Futures Past, a seminal work of historical theory. This collection of
essays is much more far-ranging and evidences Kosellec.Ks status as one of
the most important theorists of history and historiography of the last halfcentury. Koselleck's work has implications for contemporary cultural studies that extend far beyond discussions of the practical problems of historical
method. He is the foremost exponent and practitioner of Begriffigeschichte,
a methodology of historical studies that focuses on the invention and development of the fundamental concepts (Begrijfe) underlying and informing a distinctively histOrical (geschichtliche) manner of being in the world.
If this formulation of Koselleck's project seems somewhat intimidatingly Hegelian to Anglophone sensibilities, it is because his work is itself
deeply grounded in the tradition of Geisteswissenschaften that extends from
Kant and Hegel through Marx, Dilthey, and Nietzsche, down to Weber,
Heidegger, and Gadamer. But there is nothing insular about Koselleck's
work. He has a profound knowledge of the British, American, and French
contributions to philosophy of history, and he takes the whole sweep of
European history, from the Greeks to the present, as his field of inquiry.
It is, however, to the study of the concept of history itself that Koselleck has devoted most of his scholarly life. It is not that Koselleck treats history,s concept as some kind of Platonic paradigm against which every individual "idea,, of history can be measured. On the contrary, he believes
that the notion of history itself had a long period of historical development, extending from Herodotus to Gibbon, before it achieved conceptualization as a fundamental mode of human existence in the nineteenth cenrury. Before this epoch, men certainly possessed a number of ideas about



"hisrory," viewing it as a method of research ("inquiry"), a place ('\he past"),
a process (temporality), a practice (memorialization, celebration, remembrance), a literary or, more precisely, rherorical genre (history writing), and
even a manifestation of an ontological category (humanity). Bur they did
not, on the whole, or except very rarely (as in Vico), conceive a difference
between natural temporality and historical temporality which, according to
Koselleck, is crucial for understanding the role played by the concept of
history in the identity of modern European society and culture.
For Kosell~~k._,_Jh~.modernity of our epoch differs.from-all.of.the other
modernities of past. epochs of S()ci(ll transformation, techn..9Jogiq.Lrey.olution, and cultural renaissance_by virtue of European culrq~'~.a.~_hi,~~~~-nt
of"rhe C:()llcep~ ?f history." While European culture has always been charac~~;i~~d by·~ s~nse.ofhisto.ry, a sense of having a hisrory, a sense of being a
historical phenomenon, only in its modern phase-sometime between 1750
and 185o-did European society begin to think and act as if it existed in
hisrory, as if irs "historicity" was a feature, if not the defining feature of its
identity. So Koselleck argues, and the essays in this collection so ably translated by Todd Presner and his colleagues bear out this contention with impressive force and amplitude.
These essays should not be thought of, however, as a contribution to
"philosophy of history'' in the speculative and prophetic mode of Hegel,
Marx, and Spengler. They are intended, rather, as contributions to the theory of history, without which, Koselleck insists, historical studies must remain something less than a true science even if they continue to produce
more and more truthful information about the past.
Modern professional historical studies were born in the nineteenth
century-of a desire for a knowledge of the past free of all theological, metaphysical, and ideological preconception and productive of detailed information about the natures of those peoples aspiring to nationhood in the wake
of the French Revolution. History was to be studied in an objective and disinterested manner in order to construct a picture of historical reality by
which to measure the falsity of various ideological constructions thereo£ But
since ideology was thought to be a result of theory overriding the gathering
of information about the past-as witnessed by the nefarious effects of philosophy of history on social and political thought-historical studies remained caught on the horns of a dilemma: in order to become a science,
they had to have a theory; but an interest in theory appeared to foreclose




that interest in particular facts about the past on which historical studies was
focused. The resolution of this dilemma was, however, implicitly contained
within what came to be called the historist (or historicist) vision of historical
reality, which posited historicity as not only a specifically social mode of being in the world but also a social mode of being in the world marked by a
particular experience of temporality. Thus, the "content" of history could be
grasped as social reality undergoing changes quite unlike those that mere
nature underwent. Historical change cotild be seen to differ from natural
change by its heterogeneity, multileveledness, and variability of rate of acceleration. With the discovery that the time of history was different from the
time of nature, men also came to believe that historical time could be affected by human action and purposiveness in ways that natural time could
not, that history could be "made" as well as "suffered,'' and that a historical
knowledge true to its "concept" provided the prospects for a science of society that balanced the claims of experience with the insistencies of expectation, hope, and faith in the future.
Anglophone readers may have some difficulties with a few of Koselleck's key terms and especially with that of "concept." Permit me to try to
unpack the term by contrasting it with some other terms occupying the
same semantic field. Consider the phrase "the concept of history." This
phrase can be differentiated from affine phrases such as "figure of history,))
"idea of history," "theory of history,n "philosophy of history," and so on.
Examples of figures of history would be mythical representations of the
muse Clio, the Fates, or Destiny; Machiavelli's "fortuna/' Walter Benjamin's <'Angel of History," Hegel's "rose in the cross of the present," or the
classical "historia magistra vitae." These are metaphorical expressions intended to bring the notion of history before the mind's eye by endowing it
with the attributes of some conventionalized image or symbol.
An "idea of history," by contrast, would be an intuition (or perception)
of historical phenomena submitted to rationalization by the application of
categories of thought deemed adequate to their analysis. Thus, for example,
Thucydides may be said to have had an idea of history different from that
of Herodotus by virtue of the specific categories of thought he used to order
his materials, assess conflicting accounts of the same phenomena, emplot his
story, and present it in a manner uniquely his own. Thucydides uses many
of the same categories used by Herodotus, but he adds a number of other
categories-borrowed, for example, from Hippocratean medicine-in or-



der to work up the materials of his subject and present its truth as different
in kind from that of Herodotus. And so too for Polybius, Livy, Tacitus, Orosius, Commynes, and Salurati, down through Machiavelli and Guicciardini,
Scaliger, Bayle, Voltaire, and Gibbon. Each of these historians brings to his
labors a different «idea" of history-considered as a sequence of actions and
events occurring in a given space over a given span of time-by which to
distinguish between what will count as a historical as against some other
kind of event, betWeen significant or important events and insignificant or
unimportant events, and between truthful accounts of these events and a
merely imaginary, fictional, mythical, duplicitous, or simply erroneous account thereof.
What none of these purveyors of "ideas)) of history provides, Koselleck suggests, is a proper "concept of history," bY.W'!;_a._JPf?.4el'
of a st~ucture of logical rela,tiQ!l~hip~. by_ 'Which to distinguish br;::rween a,
properly historical accoupt of r~~H!Y.. a~d a nonpistorical or ahistorical ()r
antihisrorical account there~:{~,~ concept of history will specify the common content of all of those ideas of history informing the works of the master historians of the world: the content of history's subject matter, on the
one hand, and the content of the forms of historical writing, on the other.
A concept of history will identify the shared contents of all the ideas of history that have contributed to the definition of a distinctively historical way
of knowing reality as history.
I will not further block the reader's access to the essays that follow,
and that spell out all of this in persuasive detail, but will only add that, in
general, Koselleck's theory of the concept of history features the following
Firs~,. hi~~~~js<.IJ..process .is. mar.ked by.~ ~~~!i!J:ctiv.e ~n~ ()~ ternpor.~­
iry._4~ffe_r(!nt from ~~a,~_fo1Jild in nature.jThis tempo·~~ity is ~ul'ri'iev~i~d, is
subject to differential r~tes ~facceleracion and deceleration) and functions
causal force in the determination of social reality in its own right.
Se~()nd, historical ~e<tlity is.soci<tl r~alit:y, ~~J.~te~naJlydifferel.l.Ji~te_d
structure of functio!lal_ ~elationship~ -whiCh the rig~.r~ ~d i~terest; ()f one
grot~:p C()llide with those of other g~Ql1P§ ancilc:a4.!o the kin'cis ~{~o~flict~I~
which d.~fe~t is .c:~pr;::rie.nceci as a..D. ~.t4i~Jailt1r~ requi~~~g reflection on ((~hat
went wrong" in order to determine.thehistorical significance of the co~fli~t
itsel(/Koselleck makes the interesting argument that historical knowledge




(as against information about the past) is driven fotward by the kind of theoretical reflection to which the vanquished in a conflict of world historical
significance may be driven (he cites Thucydides, Tacitus, Machiavelli, and
Niebuhr as cases in point) by the need to ask "What went wrong?" or: What
is the nature of historical reality, that the best laid schemes of mice and
men so often go astray? In the J.omain of historical theory, Koselleck tells
us, nothing sl1cceeds like failure in a combat in which both sides feel they
repres~~t th~ right: The victorious have. little reason for theoretical reflection~Ar-~~s~:" th~yonly need to know the facts. The vanquished, on the
oth~r hand, must inquire into the nature of a reality that perm.its expansive
to dash it to despair._:Thus, the pattern of "rise and fall" is in..........,__,.. /./
trinsic to a genuinely historical thinking, but another pattern, that of"progress," is discernible ro the historical consciousness capable of distinguishing between a defeat and the new knowledge of reality that the experience
of defeat makes possible.
Thirdly, a critical historical consciousness is born of an awareness of
a gap between historical events and the language used to represent themboth by the agents involved in these events and by historians retrospectively
trying to reconstruct them. Awa!eness of the 4ispar~ty bet\\'e~n.J~JJ,guage
and historicaJ real~ty is rhe basis' ()f history's pri~ea~li~f dls~lpline, so~r~~­
crir1~r8t;--(p·~~!~J9gy~_p~k_9.gr_~ehy,_ 4ipJ(')_~_~ii'~~--h~_~i.IS'd~§~:·.h~iii1~n.e~!i_~s.i? .·

g~!?:~.r-~f.-. it·}§~-~~.2-~ bas~~~~-~ r~~~~~}5Jon t~-~!.--~~~_:r. h~~~~!.~al a~co11:~-~
is a construction in d!Sco4rse of past re~ity rather th~l1 si1nply a translation
of th~-:'f~~ri:~;~~-~-~din..Jh~ -~Y!d-~.n~~jgtQ_c~;t~~p~~~~~y: Liil:gq~g~.--Tlie·
disparlcy. between our experience of reality and the language we hav~- available for representing both this reality and this experience is what infuses
the concept of history with rhe realization rh~~<Mt9..e__e.?.:~~~~4. PS.Q::~.
cess r~~h~r ..rhan.-a-Glosed__science.~~A. ~-f<ttaliry\The critical historian must
'proceed on the basis of the realization th~t--sh·e~has to invent a language ad-


equate to the representation of historical reality f?r her()_':Y.~_!!ms:~.~-£~-~~~-

()f W.Qrk. . _\


The history of historiography, in Koselleck's view, is a history of the
evolution of the language of historians, a language that is ever more conceptually self-conscious, ever more aware of the difficulty of grasping the
experience of others in terms adequate to its reality. In this respect, Koselleck's work converges with that of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, all of
whom have stressed the status of hist-oriography as discOurse ratlier-than as



discipline and featured the constitutive nature of historical discourse as
against its claims to literal truthfulness.
Finally, and this is the fourth aspect of Koselleck)s notion of the concept of history, a properly historicist concept of history will be informed by
the realization that what we call "modernity," "modernization," and "modernism, are nothing other than aspects of the discovery of history's concept
in our age. The Enlightenment program of modernization, with its expectations about the possibility of bettering society through the progressive extension of the hegemony of reason, science, and technology over nature
and culture, presupposes the concept of history as its condition of possibility. Our difference from all earlier eras and epochs of our history consists
precisely in the belief that we exist in history understood as a process of
progressive development in which both society and our knowledge of it are
historical in nature. The aporias of modernism-in arts and letters as well
as in the human and natural sciences-are a function of the discovery of
the historicity of both society and knowledge.
Th.e_idea . that .our knowledge .is_subje~Lt.oth~_.s.ame__ru,l~gf..~yglut.ion
as our objects 9fs!~dy generates a ~.1!4._Qf!_~J.a.~~yi~.m,.tQ.he .slJr~,
ep istemic vali di ry has to .be see11. a..s g~.QlJ.-P4.~4 i 11 the ti~c;:,. P~?:<::e.~ .C1.11~ .~.C?~i:~}
drC:lJl:!l:~~~~'=-~-~- ...9fits. PF<J4uct_~2.I?::·\But Koselleck insists that this relativism
provides no grounds for nihilism. or a crippling skep~icism. Historical relativism, he concludes, avoids Pyr.rh9_1].j_s,m,,by virtu~gf its ~~~~ritutior1ofthe
relat~ve certainty of the ·k~o~l~~g~-~~.. -~?.:P.:..h.~Y~. ,9f.?_~.$9,~~~i-~ii!~{.~.Y.tiui~
for the absolute certainty promised by all forms of idealism. \The concept
of history includes a concept ofhist~~i~~fkiiowledgethat"Iciio~s itself to be
always p~ovisional and open to ~~y_i~_i()~· As historical knowledge dissolves
the myths, lies,· ·and falsifications of history, it secures a stable base from
which to assess and augment that "space of experience" in which men build
a notion of a human reality that is both always changing and ever more becoming itself.






ROME, JULY 14, 2000



On the Need for Theory in the Discipline of History

Ever since the era of neo-Kantianism, our academic field has been
caught in a self-definition: history has to do with what is individual and
specific, whereas the natural sciences concern themselves with what is general. The history of science has passed this antithesis by. The hypothetical
character of its statements and the intertwining of subject and object in its
experiments have introduced an element of relativity into the natural sciences that can justly be called ((historical." At the same time, many of the
social sciences and the humanities have placed themselves under systemic
constraints, which have long since cut through the unifying tie of the histOrical worldview. As the dispute over Popperianism shows, a battle line no
longer divides the paired opposites of the natural sciences and the humanities. This has hardly affected our research practice, however, and in consequence the historical profession finds itself isolated. History has been thrown
back upon itself and no longer occupies a clear place within an academic
world that has in the meantime become dehistoricized.
We can escape from our isolation only via a new relationship to other
disciplines. This means that we must recognize our need for theory or,
rather, face the necessity of doing theory if history still wants to conceive
of itself as an academic discipline. This is not an attempt to borrow theorems from neighboring disciplines to establish hyphenated alliances. It
would be rash to couple sociology and history in a way that would set the
conditions for deriving our own disciplinary concept from a social science


Chapter 1

(Gesellschaftswissenschaft) somehow conceived in sociological terms. Instead, I would propose that we can push our way out of our own characteristic bottlenecks only by concentrating on those points that are themselves in need of theory or that promise theoretical insights.
I. It is an irony of the semantic history of "history" that "history itself' (Geschichte selber) or "history pure and simple" (Geschichte schlechthin)
originally meant the need for theory within our discipline. As soon as people gave up thinking "history" in conjunction with certain subjects and objects that were assigned to it, the discipline of history was obliged to conform to a system. When the terms "history itself" and "the philosophy of
history" (Geschichtsphilosophie) first appeared around 1770, they were identical in meaning. In the course of time, the metahistorical component of
these expressions was absorbed by the newly coined term "historicity" (Geschichtlichkeit).
Recent discussions of historicity face the theoretical challenges that
have resulted from the crisis of historicism. The concept of historicity is
used to halt the permanent process of relativization for which historicism
was reproached. Historicity absolutizes relativity, as it were, if I may use
this nonconcept. The influence of Heidegger cannot be overlooked here,
even though he did not exactly promote this discussion within our field.
As early as Being and Time, there is an almost complete abstracting from
history. Historicity is treated as a category of human existence, yet no intersubjective or transindividual structures are thematized. Although Heidegger points the way from the finitude of Dasein to the temporality of
history, he does not pursue it any further. That is why, on the one hand,
the danger of a transhistorical ontology of history (as, for example, devised
by August Brunner) lurks behind the fruitful category of historicity. On
t~e other hand, when Heidegger applies his philosophy to history-where
it receives an eschatological coloring as the history of Being-,it is no accident that traditional historical-philosophical schemata of decay and ascent become visible.
Historicity and the categories assigned to it open onto a histories (Historik) and onto a metahistory that investigate mobility instead of movement
and changeability instead of change in a concrete sense. There are many
similar formal criteria concerning historical (historisch) acting and suffering,
which are basically "timeless" across history and serve to unlock history
(Geschichte). I am thinking of such criteria as: "master and servant"; "friend

The Need for Theory in History


and foe,; the heterogony of purposes; the shifting relations of time and space
with regard to units of action and potential power; and the anthropological
substratum for generational change in politics. The list of such categories
could be extended; they refer to the finitude that sets history in motion, so
to speak, without capturing in any way the content or direction of such
movements. (Often enough, Christian axioms-like those of negative theology-are hidden behind such categories; they appear again and again in
Wittram's book on interest in history, for example).
Historicity is supposed to outline both the conditions of possibility for
histories (Geschichten) as such and the place that historical research occupies
within them. It clears the historian of the charge of a putative subjectivity;
one cannot escape this subjectivity to the extent that "history'' (die Geschichte) constantly passes both the historian and the writing of history (die
Historie) by. Here, the "transcendence" of history signifies the process of
overtaking that continuously forces the researcher to rewrite history. Thus,
the rewriting of history becomes not only the correction of mistakes or a
compensatory act, but part of the presuppositions of our profession-provided that Geschichte is transcendent with regard to Historie. We can therefore say that just as in the past history (Historie) as the art of narration developed its own histories (Historiken), the discipline of history today has
conceptualized historicity as outlining the conditions of possibility both for
history in general (Geschichte uberhaupt) and for the discipline of history
(Geschichtswissenschaft) more narrowly defined.
The problematic of historical anthropology demonstrates how difficult it is to introduce metahistorical categories into concrete research. Nipperdey has recently pointed this out, and no doubt our western neighbors,
with their structuralist, ethnological, and psychosociological approaches,
are ahead of us in this respect. Again and again, one is faced with the aporia that enduring formal criteria are themselves historically conditioned
and remain applicable only to phenomena that can be delimited historically. In other words, in the course of research, all metahisrorical categories
will change into historical statements. Reflecting on this change is one of
the research tasks of historical anthropology in particular and of any kind
of history in general.
2. Discussion of the systematic premises of "history in itself, (Geschichte an sich) leads to a reversal of the question, to a turn toward the
need for theory in the practice of research. A specifically historical question


Chapter 1

can legitimate itself academically only by going back to the histories that
inhabits or precedes it; for the purpose of research, it has to unfold its own
theoretical premises.
The individual disciplines that have distanced themselves from the
assumption of a historical experience of the world have all developed particular systematics relative to their own objects of research. Economics, political science, sociology, philology, linguistics: all can be defined in terms
of their objects of study. By contrast, it is much more difficult for history to
develop a historical systematics or a theory referring to an object of study
based on its actual objects of research. In practice, the object of hisrory is
everything or nothing, for history can declare just about anything to be a
historical object by the way in which it formulates its questions. Nothing
escapes the historical perspective.
Significantly, history "as such'' (Geschichte "als solche") does not have
an object-except for itself, which does not solve the question of its object
of research but only doubles it linguistically: the "history of history.'' Here,
the extent to which "history pure and simple" (Geschichte sch!echthin) originally was a metahistorical category becomes clear. The question, then, is
whether defining an object of study will help the discipline of history regain the historical character that distinguished it up to the eighteenth century. Certainly not. Our concept of history rem~ins ambivalent: in reference to an object, history becomes a historical category; without an object,
it remains a metahistorical quantity-and a reservoir of theological, philosophical, ideological, or political classifications that are accepted more or
less uncritically.
I would therefore like to narrow down my thesis: history conceived
as ubiquitous can only exist as a disCipline if it develops a theory of periodization; without such a theory, history loses itself in boundlessly questioning everything. I assume that metahistorical and historical categories
will be forced to converge in the question of periodization. Such a question
has both a systematic and a historical character. This can be demonstrated
by means of a few examples.
a) Let me first refer to a topic of our study group for modern social history, namely, conceptual history. Conceptual history, as we attempt it, cannot
manage without a theory of periodization. We do not mean temporality of
a general kind, which can be procedurally stylized into historicity and which
has to do with hist01y in a fundamental way. It is, rather, a question of the-

The Need for Theory in History


orerically formulating in advance the temporal specifics of our political and
social concepts so as to order the source materials. Only thus can we advance
from philological recording to conceptual history. One hypothesis regarding
our dictionary of fundamental historical concepts is that, despite continual
use of the same words, the political-social language has changed since the
eighteenth century, inasmuch as since then a "new time" has been articulated. Coefficients of change and acceleration transform old fields of meaning and, therefore, political and social experience as well. Earlier meanings
of a taxonomy that is still in use must be grasped by the historical method
and translated into our language. Such a procedure presupposes a frame of
reference that has been clarified theoretically; only within such a frame can
these translations become visible. I am speaking here of the "saddle period"
(Sattelzeit), as it was called by the study group. This period thematizes the
transformation of the premodern usage of language to our usage, and I cannot emphasize strongly enough its heuristic character.
We cannot master our task if we try to write a historical-philological
history of words at a comparatively positivistic level. We would then get
bogged down in the mass of source material and could at most provide an
incomplete glossary of sociopolitical expressions. In doing so, we would
have to record the history of a lexical item with different meanings or be
forced to trace word by word what are supposedly constant meanings. Such
an additive description, by which we proceed hand over hand through history, requires a temporal indicator, which, drawing on the sum of the linguistic findings, points out to us that there is a history at all. The theoretical anticipation of the ((saddle period" between about 1750 and about 1850
amounts to a statement that during this period the old experience of time
was denaturalized. The slow decline of Aristotelian semantic content, which
referred to a natural, repeatable, and therefore static historical time, is the
negative indicator of a movement that can be described as the beginning of
modernity. Since about 1770, old words such as democracy, freedom, and the
state have indicated a new horizon of the future, which delimits the concept
in a different way; traditional to poi gained an anticipatory content that they
did not have before. A common denominator of the sociopolitical vocabulary can be found in the increased emergence of criteria pertaining to movement. The productivity of this heuristic anticipation is demonstrated by a
series of ideas that thematize concepts of movement themselves, such as
progress, history, or development. Although these words are old, they areal-


Chapter I

most neologisms, and since about 1770, they have had a temporal coefficient of change. This offers a strong incentive to read and interrogate other
old concepts of the political language in terms of features indicating movement. The hypothesis of a denaturalization of the historical experience of
time, which also affects the semantics of sociopolitical expressions, is supported by the emergence of the modern philosophy of history, which appropriates these terms.
In other words, only a theoretical anticipation that uncovers a specific
time period can open the possibility of working through certain readings
and transposing our dictionary from the level of positivistic recording to
that of a conceptual history. Only theory transforms our work into historical research. This presupposition has so far proved its worth. The entire linguistic space of sociopolitical terms has-while retaining the identity of
many words-moved from a quasi-static tradition that changed only over
the long term to a conceptuality whose meaning can be inferred from a future to be newly experienced. This presupposition does not have to hold for
all words, however.
Once the natural constants determining the old historical experience
of time have been destroyed-in other words, once progress has been set
free-a wealth of new questions emerges.
b) One of the most important concerns t~e theoretical premises of
structural history. The answer can be found only by asking about the historical determination of time in statements that are supposed to indicate
duration. If one assumes that historical time remains embedded within
natural time without being entirely contained in it; or, put differently, that
whereas the time of day may be relevant for political decisions, historical
connections cannot be measured with a clock; or, put differently yet again,
that the revolution of the stars is no longer (or not yet again) relevant for
historical time, we must find temporal categories that are adequate to hisrorical events and processes. Categories of the type developed by Braudel
can therefore be introduced into empirical research only if we are clear
about the theoretical significance of what can last. This consideration leads
us into a fundamental dilemma.
We are always using concepts that were originally conceived in spatial
terms, but that nevertheless have a temporal meaning. Thus we may speak
of refractions, frictions, and the breaking up of certain enduring elements
that have an effect on the chain of events, or we may refer to the retrospec-

The Need for Theory in History


rive effects of events upon their enduring presuppositions. Here> our ex~
pressions are taken from the spatial realm} even from geology. They are un~
doubtedly very vivid and graphic, but they also illustrate our dilemma. It
concerns the fact that history, insofar as it deals with time, must borrow its
concepts from the spatial realm as a matter of principle. We live by naturally
metaphorical expressions, and we are unable to escape from them, for the
simple reason that time is not manifest (anschaulich) and cannot be intuited
(anschaulich gemacht werden). All historical categories, including progress,
which is the first specifically modern category of historical time} are spatial
expressions by origin, and our discipline thrives because they can be trans~
lated. "History" originally also contained a spatial meaning} which has be~
come temporalized to such a degree that we refer to the doubling of "structural history" if we wish to (re-)introduce statistics, duration, or long-term
extension into our concept of history.
In contrast to other modes of study, history as a discipline lives by
metaphorical expression. This is our anthropological premise, as it were, for
everything that must be articulated in temporal terms is forced to rely on
the sensory bases of natural intuition. The impossibility of intuiting pure
time leads directly into methodological difficulties concerning whether
meaningful statements about a theory of periodization can be made at all.
A specific danger lurks behind these difficulties: namely, that our empirical
research naively accepts metaphors as they come to us. We must rely on
borrowings from everyday linguistic usage or other disciplines. The terminology borrowed and the necessity of using metaphorical expressions-because time does not clearly manifest itself-requires constant methodolog~
ical safeguards that refer to a theory of historical time. This leads us back to
the question of"duration."
Evidently, certain long~term processes prevail, whether they are supported or opposed. One can, for example, ask whether the rapid industrial
development after the Revolution of 1848 happened despite the failed revo~
lurion or because of it. There are arguments for and against; neither side is
necessarily convincing, but both sides indicate a movement that establishes
itself across the political camps of revolution and reaction. In this case, the
reaction may have had a more revolUtionary effect than the revolution.
If revolution and reaction are both indicators of one and the same
movement, sustained by both camps and driven forward by both, then this
pair of ideological concepts evidently indicates a continuous historical move-


Chapter I

ment, a structure of irreversible, long-term progress, which transcends the
political pros and cons of reaction and revolution. Progress itself is thus more
than an ideological category. Even the category of the reasonable middle
way, which was habitually invoked at the time, is only meaningful if a stable
coefficient of change is introduced. The scope of action for a movement that
is already pregiven makes it impossible to statically grasp any reasonable
middle way, for this middle way is forced to oscillate between "right" and
((left.'' Its meaning changes by itself over time. When we ask about their
temporal meaning, spatial metaphors thus necessitate prior theoretical considerations. Only then can we define what, for instance, is meant by duration, delay, or acceleration in our example of the process of industrialization.
c) The destruction of natural chronology leads to a third issue. Chronological sequence, by which our history is still guided at times, can quite
easily be exposed as a fiction.
In the past, the natural course of time served as the immediate substratum for possible histories. The calendar of saints and sovereigns was organized by means of astronomy; biological time provided the framework
for the natural succession of rulers, on which self-reproducing legal titles in
the wars of succession depended-until 1870, symbolically enough. All histories remained rooted in "nature," directly embedded in biological pregivens. The mythological superelevation of astrological and cosmic time,
which contained nothing ahist~rical in the prehistoric age, pertains to the
same experiential realm. But since the triad of antiquity, the Middle Ages,
and modernity has structured chronological succession, we have succumbed
to a mythical schema that tacitly structures all of our scholarly work. This
schema is obviously not of any immediate use for the relation between duration and event. We must, rather, "learn to discover the simultaneity of the
.nonsimulraneous in our history: it is, after all, part of our own experience
to have contemporaries who live in the Stone Age. And since the largescale problems of the developing countries are coming back to haunt us today, it becomes imperative to gain theoretical clarity about the nonsimultaneiry of the simultaneous and to pursue related questions. The seemingly
metahistorical question about historical structures of time has again and
again proved relevant to concrete research questions. Among these, there
also belongs
d) the interpretation of historical conflicts. Historical processes are driven forward only so long as the conflicts inherent in them cannot be solved.

The Need for Theory in History


As soon as a conflict dissolves, it belongs ro the past. A historical theory of
conflicts can be sufficiently developed only by bringing out the temporal
qualities inherent in the conflict. In historiography, conflicts are usually
dealt with by introducing opponents as stable subjects, as fixed entities
whose fictive character can be recognized: "Hitler" and "Hitler within us.,
The historical subject is an almost inexplicable quantity. Think of any
famous personality or of the "people," which is no less vague than "class";
think of the economy, the state, the church, and other such abstract entities
or powers. Perhaps only in psychological terms can we understand how "effective forces" come about and how they are reduced to subjects. If one applies the temporal question to such subjects, they dissolve very quicldy, and
it turns out that intersubjective connections are the proper topic of historical research. Such connections, however, can be described only in a temporal way. The desubstantialization of our categories leads to a temporalization
of their meaning. Thus the scale of past or future possibilities can never be
outlined on the basis of a single modality or unit of action or from one unit
of action. Such a scale refers, rather, to that of one's opponents. Therefore
only temporal differences, refractions, or tensions can express the trend toward a new structuring of reality. In this way different temporal relations
and factors of acceleration and delay unexpectedly come into play.
When one thematizes long, average, and short periods of time, it is
difficult to establish causal relationships between the temporal layers thus
singled out. We recommend working with hypotheses that introduce constant factors, against which variables can be measured. This does not prevent
us from seeing the constant factors as themselves dependent on variables or
other constant factors. Such historical relativism, if well thought through,
seems to lead to the functional method. This method excludes infinite regress. Once temporal differences among the intersubjective connections have
been thematized, it is difficult to hold on to the supposedly scientific character of causal chains, on whose basis we are accustomed to interrogate the
past so as finally to arrive at the absurdity of linear questions of origin. Perhaps lines of direct derivation from past pregivens hide a secularized derivative of the Christian doctrine of creation, living on undetected.
In the course of nineteenth-century research, the categories of spontaneity, of historical uniqueness, and of historical forces, which were originally designed with an eye to genuine historical time, became bound up in
substances such as personality, the people, class, certain states, and so on.


Chapter I

This made possible historically naive statements at which we smile today.
Nevertheless, there is a hidden difficulty here as well. Though I am not in
a position to evaluate it, I would like to direct attention to it. I mean
e) temporal series. Schumpeter once said that one can only make historically meaningful statements if there is a possibility of comparison in
sufficient temporal depth. Comparisons based on temporal series, however,
presuppose a subject conceived as being continuous. Only when measured
against such a subject can changes be discernible at all.
I feel that these subjects, thought to be continuous, should be introduced only hypothetically. Here I would invoke the New Economic History.
What is exciting about these researchers' view of history, in my opinion-if
I judge the work of Fogel correctly-is that they gain genuinely historical insights via theoretical premises that are not characteristic of our discipline.
Fogel once presented calculations based on his theories that refute the argument that slave labor in the United States was economically unprofitable before the outbreak of the Civil War. The number sequences were verified empirically, and they indicate that the efficiency of black labor rose in relation
to westward migration. Through such an insight, the moral significance of
liberal propaganda gains a tremendous weight per negationem, for the purely
moral argument that no human being must be a slave increases in conclusiveness to the degree that the supposed economic proofloses power (a proof
that the liberals, of course, also used in a subsidiary fashion).
This is an example of how determinable phenomena emerge more
clearly thanks to a theory that excludes certain data from consideration.
Moreover, excluding certain questions under certain theoretical premises
makes it possible to find answers that would otherwise not have come up:
a clear proof of the need for theory in our discipline. If one supposes the
p.ecessiry of forming theories-and such theories must not be restricted to
temporal structures-it follows from previous examples that we must become aware of the hypothetical character of our method. This will be
demonstrated by way of further examples, which can instruct us about the
naive use of historical categories and about the similarly naive criticism of
these categories.
f) Our discipline works under a tacit presupposition of teleology. We
all know a book that is disreputable today, Treitschke's history of Germany
in the nineteenth century. 1 In this book, Treitschke presented the glorious
path of Prussian history, which led to the unity of the German Reich, ex-

The Need for Theory in History


eluding Austria. In so doing, Treitschke deployed a teleology that organized and oriented the wealth of his recorded references, like a magnet.
The unity of the German Reich, excluding Austria, was the premise ex post
facto under which he read his sources. In chis, he openly admitted that his
statements were conditioned by his position. And in the preface, he made
clear that he intended to show that everything had to happen the way it
did and that those who had not comprehended this yet could learn it from
his book. Three theorems are contained in this bundle of statements:
The teleological principle as the regulating idea of his statements
and as the organizing principle for the selection of sources;
2. Consciously admitted positionality; and
3· The historical-philosophical certainty with which Treitschke
claimed to have history pure and simple on his side.


He thus wrote a history of victors who, on the basis of their own success, reproduce world history as the Last Judgment. These three theorems
-knowing history to be on one's side, the teleological principle as a regulative idea of analyzing sources, and the historian's positionality-cannot
be tackled as easily as someone who accuses Treitschke of bias or nationalism might believe.
If every historian remains rooted in his situation, he will be able to
make only observations that are framed by his perspective. These, however,
evoke final causes. A historian can hardly escape them, and if he disregards
them he relinquishes the reflection that teaches him about what he is doing.
The difficulty does not so much lie in the final causality deployed but in
naively accepting it. It is possible to come up with as many causes as one
wishes for any event that ever took place in the course of history. There is no
single event that could not be explained causally. Whoever gets involved in
causal explanations will always find reasons for what he wishes to demonstrate. In other words, causal derivations of events do not themselves contain any criteria for the correctness of the statements about them. Thus
Treitschke, too, was able to come up with proofs for his theses. If one reads
the same sources from different angles today, Treitschke's political position
will be found to be outdated, but its theoretical premise, which triggered the
causality he was searching for, will not. We must keep this reservation in
mind when we seek to reject explanations of final causality in an ideologicalcritical way.


Chapter I

Any history, because it is ex post facto, is subject to final constraints.
It is impossible to do without them. Yet one can escape the schema of causal
addition and narrative arbitrariness only by introducing hypotheses that,
for example, bring into play past possibilities. Put differently, perspectivism
is tolerable only if it is not stripped of its hypothetical and, therefore, revisable character. Stated more concisely: everything can be justified, but not
everything can be justified by anything. The question of which justifications
are admissible and which are not is not only a matter of the sources at hand,
but above all a matter of the hypotheses that make these sources speak. The
relationship between the circumstances, the selection, and the interpretation of the sources can only be clarified by a theory of possible history and,
therefore, a possible discipline of history.
Chladenius was probably the first to reflect upon positionality as a
premise of our research. He wrote a theory of the discipline of history,
which, although it was conceived before historicism, contains many ideas
that surpass Droysen's histories. Because of its dry and didactic language, it
has unfortunately not yet been republished, but it remains a treasury of insights untouched by historicism. Chladenius defined all historical statements as reductive statements about a past reality. '~ narrative completely
abstracted from one's own point of view is impossible." But Chladenius
did not historically relativize point of view or regard the formation of judgments as subject to revision. Consequently, he believed that he could discern a reality congealed within past objects. Statements about such a reality were, in his opinion, however, necessarily subject to rejuvenation, given
that no past totality could completely be reproduced. The expression "rejuvenated" is already conceived in temporal terms and is no longer spatial.
For Chladenius, what is "young" is what is present, and the past is interrogated from this epistemological-formal perspective of progress. History becomes visible only through the lens of the present. Such a teleology dispenses with a criterion of direction that points toward the future, as it is
sought within the horizon of the philosophy of history.
The third theorem that Treitschke brought into play, namely, having
history on his side, is an ideological fiction. This fiction thrives on the category of necessity, which Treitschke tacitly introduces in order to represent
as inevitable the course <;lf German history to the point at which the German Reich excluded Austria. 'T'he determination of necessity hides a flat
tautology, which is not only deployed by Treitschke but by any historian

The Need for Theory in History


who refers to it. Identifying an event as necessary amounts to a double
statement about that event. Whether I say that something happened or
whether I say that it happened by necessity is identical from an ex post
facto perspective. Something did not happen more so only because it had
to happen. By making a statement about an event and by adding that it
had to have happened, I vindicate for this event a necessary causal chaina necessity that in the end derives from the omnipotence of God, in whose
place the historian is acting.
Put differently, the category of necessity continuously obscures the necessity of forming hypotheses, which alone can allow for causal chains. We
can risk making statements of necessity insofar as we formulate them with
reservations. Cogent reasons can be devised only within the framework of
hypothetically introduced premises. This does not exclude the possibility
that different ways of asking questions will bring into view completely different causes. Correctness in interpreting sources is not only assured by the
source data but, first of all, by making the question concerning possible history theoretically evident.
Thus teleological questions and the questioner's positionality cannot
be eliminated; rather, any statement about reality involving a claim of necessity is subject to our critique. This critique refers to temporal determinations: it is directed against the uniqueness and the unidirectionality of
historical processes, which in some respect are a secularized derivative of
providence, of a providence that for us remains hidden in the declaration
of urgent necessity. A theory of periodization that is adequate to the complex historical reality requires multilayered statements.
g) This leads to the well-known discussion about (vulgar) Marxist
monocausality, a discussion in which Western historians often congratulate
themselves on their own superiority. The charge that history cannot be interpreted in a monocausal way, however, can easily be reversed. Whether I
introduce one cause, two, five, or an infinite amount of causes says nothing
at all about the quality of my historical reflections. A monocausal schema
permits statements that are very reasonable from a hypothetical point of
view. Let me call to mind the works of Schoffler; their insights often rest
upon monocausal explanations-which is the very source of their fruitfulness and their surprising accuracy. When Marxists offer monocausal constructions-for example, when they indicate dependencies of the "superstructure" upon the ''base structure"-this is a legitimate procedure of


Chapter I

hypothesis formation. The real objection that can be raised against Matxists is not to be found in monocausality as a possible historical category but,
first, in the facts that they use this category naively (though precisely on this
point they agree with many of our historians); and, second and more importantly, that they are often forced to formulate their statements upon
command and are not allowed to question them critically. Properly seen,
the objection against monocausality is an objection against blindness to
hypotheses; on a different methodical level, it is also directed against any
subjection to political directives. The reflection on positionality and the
determination of goals is thus politicized and eludes scholarly verification.
This touches on a tricky problem; everyone is familiar with the ambiguous ground on which, for example, Communist historiography operates
as a discipline. Yet we must keep in mind, with regard to Marxist problematics, party-political ties and the compulsion both to change one's goals
(when the situation changes) and to self-criticism. I come thus to my concluding section.
3· The Communist camp has the specific political advantage of a continuous reflection on the relationship between theory and practice in scholarly work. However valid objections against the control of historiographical
guidelines by party politics in Marxist countries may be, every historiography does in fact perform a function within the public sphere.
Yet we must distinguish between the political JUnction that a discipline serves and the particular political implication that it may or may not
have. Thus rhe pure natural sciences do not have any political implications
if judged by their subject matter: their results are universally communicable, and, taken by themselves, they are apolitical. That does not preclude
the fact that the political function of these sciences-let me call to mind
the utilization of nuclear physics or of biochemistry-can be far more influential than that of the humanities or the social sciences. The discipline
of history, by contrast, always performs a political function, albeit a changing one. Depending on whether it is conducted as church, legal, or court
history, whether it is political biography, universal history, or something
else, its social place changes, as does the political function exercised by the
results it achieves as an academic discipline. The political implications of
historical research are not adequately determined in this way, however. They
depend on the kinds of questions posed by a given line of research. However trivial it may sound, one must bear in mind that topics in music his-

The Need for Theory in History


tory, for instance, do not involve political questions in the same way as do
topics in diplomatic history. Not even the ideological reduction of historical activity to political interests can substitute for the disciplinary evidence
of a given method and the results thereby achieved. Political function and
political implications are not enough. Those who blur the distinction transform history into lessons in ideology and deprive it of its critical task, a
function it may (but need not) have as a discipline.
Turning away from our initial question about the theoretical premises
that guide us on our path to the sources, the question of how dependent we
are on forming hypotheses, let us take a path that leads from our sources
back into the public sphere. Marxist reflection always takes this path into
consideration, whereas in our profession it is followed for the most part
naively or merely verbally invoked. Here, we take on the worn-out issue of
didactics, which can certainly be discussed scientifically, in a way analogous
to our specialized research. I assume that we can talk meaningfully about
the didactics of history only if history as a discipline uncovers its own theoretical premises. The discontent with history as a school subject might then
turn out to have the same roots as the lack of a capacity for theoretical reflection that characterizes our discipline. Stated positively, if we accept the
compulsion to do theory, didactic consequences that ''didactics" itself is unable to locate will impose themselves.
Although we have refined and mastered our philological-historical
tools over a century and a half, historians all too easily let their path from
the sources to the public sphere be mapped out for them by particular constellations of power. Precisely the great successes achieved on the posi tivistic level served to encourage an arrogance that has been especially susceptible to national ideologies.
The path from research into the sources back toward the public sphere
has different ranges: in the university, it remains comparatively close to research; at school, it leads further away; at a greater distance, it reaches the
public sphere of our political spaces of action; it finally extends to the public in the global sphere of addressees of historical statements.
Here we must remember that historical statements can reproduce past
states of affairs only in a reductive or rejuvenated way, for it is impossible to
restore the totality of the past, which is irrevocably gone. Strictly speaking,
the question of "how it really was" can only be answered if one assumes
that one does not formulate res foctae but res jictae. If it is no longer possi-


Chapter I

ble to restore the past as such, then I am forced to acknowledge the fictive
character of past actualities so as to be able to theoretically safeguard my
historical statements. Any historical statement is a reduction if measured
against the infinity of a past totality that is no longer accessible to us as
such. In the vicinity of a naive-realistic naively realist theory of knowledge,
any compulsion toward reduction is a compulsion to lie. However, I can
dispense with lying once I know that the compulsion roward reduction inherently belongs to our discipline. In addition, this both involves a political implication and allows didactics to gain a legitimate place within the
realm of the historical discipline. We must ask ourselves continually what
history means, what it can be and what it is supposed to be for us today: at
the university, at school, and in the public sphere. This is not to say that research activity ought to have its aims prescribed from the outside in political and functional terms, but we should always be aware of the specific political implications that our field of research does or does not have, and of
the propositional form that we must develop accordingly. Then we can better define the political function that history has or ought to have on the basis of the discipline of history itself. It is important to dissolve the aporia of
historicism-its adherents were convinced that one could not learn anything from histories any more, even though the discipline ofhistmy counted
as teaching. For this reason, I would like to bring out four practicaL consequences of the previous considerations:
(a) The types of systematic questions concerning "historicity» mentioned at the beginning and the demand for a histories directly lead to today's methodological dispute within the discipline of sociology. Method~
ologically, the compulsion to form hypotheses, once it has been articulated,
moves the discipline of history closer ro the social sciences in generalcl<?ser, that is, than has perhaps been recognized so far. In any case, it appears
to me that the commonalities go so far as to suggest combining social studies (Gemeinschaftskunde) and history Lessons (Geschichtsunterricht) in school.
(b) The supposed wealth of historical material and the difficulties of
theoretical premises concerning it discussed above both suggest studying the
discipline of history as a single major. This is not to say that minors are to be
dispensed with. Rather, minors ought to be studied for the very reason that
they offer different theoretical approaches, but as subsidiary and complementary subjects, which are of particular benefit to historical questions. Foreign
languages are certainly subsidiary subjects of this kind, and so are linguistics,

The Need for Theory in History


law, and economics, or any other subjects that promote specialization within
the subject area of history and, above all, widen the angle of vision.
For schools, this would mean that such subsidiary subjects could nonetheless be subjects for teaching. Why, for instance, should French be taught
only by philologists bur nor-for a certain stretch-also by historians of
French constitutional history or by experts on political or philosophical texts
in the French language?
At the university level, all minors would accordingly be utilized in
different ways, which would be subsidiary or complementary to the respective majors. Foreign languages for history majors would have to be taught
differently to some degree; instead of remaining truncated majors (which
they are), foreign language instruction would need to specifically thematize
historical or sociological types of questions.
Conversely, hist01y as a subsidiary subject for a student of linguistics
ought not to be taught as merely a thinned-down extract from Plotz [a standard reference work for historians]. Bridges ought to be built in interdisciplinary tutorials and discussion sections. Only experiment can succeed here.
(c) A further practical consequence results from the theory of periodization alluded to above. Neither a course of study determined by chronological sequences, which lives by filling in their gaps, nor the triad of introductory seminars in ancient, medieval, and modern history, which is
derived from a mythical schema, is methodologically cogent. Furthermore,
thus far professorships have been organized in a way that stems from the
humanistic myth of Cellarius, which is no guarantee of its correctness.
In addition, the purpose of a university degree required for the teaching profession must not be prescribed in political and functional termsby reference to didactics-from the outside; rather, this purpose can only
be defined anew by adhering to the necessity of theory formation in our
discipline. So long as the still customary three introductoty seminars differ
only in terms of the areas of linear chronology studied and their respective
means of analysis, their organization will remain implausible. The sequence of ancient, medieval, and modern history plus "contemporary history" is legitimated neither by the general historical-philological method
that they share nor by a theory of different temporal levels. The necessity
of forming hypotheses is also common to all three areas. In accordance
with ongoing planning at Bielefeld University, let me therefore suggest a
new canon ofundergraduate education.


Chapter I

A first course ought to serve as an introduction into the historicalphilological methodology that interprets sources from all time periods
comparatively. Continual use of the same method would be conducive to
identifying differences in source and temporal conditions in a particularly
clear way.
A second course could be defined as a seminar on "analyzing problems, (Blumenberg). Here it would be important to develop a wealth of
historical questions chat cannot be derived from the sources directly; answering them would require that information and hypotheses from all areas of the social sciences be consulted.
It goes without saying that both introductory courses will need to be
planned in conjunction; they could be merged in practice.
In a third-elective-introductory course, it would be important to
acquire the knowledge base and the fundamental principles of a subject that
is subsidiary or complementary to the discipline of history. This would be
the place to prepare for future specialization in ancient and medieval history, for example, by studying Greek or Latin literature and linguistics. It
would also be the place to begin studying other, auxiliary disciplines, depending on the main emphasis of one's interests. Statistics, economics, or an
introduction to jurisprudence might be recommended as subjects to complement modern history. Obviously there would be an infinite number of
possible combinations. It remains crucial that the subsidiary or complementary subject contain its own theory and also its own systematics, and
that it not be exclusively shaped by historical-philological methodology.
The refraction of different questions constitutes the stimulation in this third
introductOry course. To me, it seems inevitable that such a program can
only be fulfilled if the discipline of history is studied as the only major, if
subsidiary subjects are also tested in oral examinations, and if they become
subjects that can be taught in schools. Our theoretical considerations have
thus led us quite informally co a new canon of undergraduate education
that does not abolish the traditional topics of teaching but reconfigures
them in a disciplinary and didactic way.
(d) A final conclusion results from didactic considerations themselves.
It aims at what is often evoked as exemplary teaching and concerns the ways
in which such teaching can be accomplished academically and in terms of
personnel policies. Exemplary teaching concerns not only the issue of developing examples for past situations, conditions, or epochs but also the task

The Need for Theory in History


of making reaching exemplary for us as welL In order to grasp the doublesidedness of exempla-namely, being exemplary both for something and
for us, we need to go back before German Idealism, which has distorted exemplarity in a philosophical-historical way.
The question of meaningful selection continues to impose itself. Examples of social-historical and structural-historical phenomena for teaching
cannot be sought on a short-term basis. Here, schools and universities must
complement each other. It is important to stimulate the interaction between
schools and universities, and it appears to me that no one is more suited for
this than the secondary-school teacher who is teaching in a university. These
schoolteachers ought not to form a nonprofessorial teaching staff, which is
the worst of all possible solutions. Rather, such teachers really ought to be
able to come from schools and also return there or, upon proof of their academic qualifications, be able to change over altogether to university teaching
or to adult education in general. Secondary-school teachers at universities
ought to do both at the same time: teach school at halfload and teach at the
university by conducting rwo- to four-hour seminars. Disciplinary and didactic questions could then be blended together. Thus, an osmosis between
schools and universities would be established, which would prevent a new,
negative type of professorship from forming among the nonprofessorial
reaching staff when old full professors retire. The real threat is not the de~
mocracy of secondary-school teachers, but the democracy of secondaryschool teachers already looming behind plans for an integrated university
(Gesamthochschule). Secondary-school teachers who alternate between teaching at a university and teaching school certainly produce conflicts in social
status and prestige, but it seems more important to me that we face difficulties where they actually emerge instead of insisting on roral solutions whose
very wording is suspicious.

Translated by Kerstin Behnke


Social History and Conceptual History

Anyone who is concerned with history-whatever this may be-and
defines it as social history is obviously delimiting his topic. Anyone who
specifies history as conceptual history is obviously doing the same. Nevertheless, the two definitions are nor the usual delimitation. of special histories
within a general history. 'The economic history of England, for example, or
the diplomatic history of the early modern age or the church history of the
West are special topics of such a kind, predetermined as worthy of investigation via their subject matter, time period, and region. In such cases, we
are dealing with special aspects of general history.
Social history and conceptual history are different. On the basis of
their theoretical self-justification, they make a general claim, one that can
be extended and applied to all special histories. All history deals with intersubjective relationships, with forms of sociability or with social stratifications; therefore, the characterization of history as social history makes an
enduring, irrefutable, and, so to speak, anthropological claim that lies concealed behind any form of historiography. And which history would not
have to be comprehended as such.before it congeals into history? Investigating concepts and their linguistic history is as much a part of the minimal condition for recognizing history as is the definition of history as having to do with human society.

Social History and Conceptual History


Historical Retrospective
Both social history and conceptual history have existed as explicit
modes of questioning since the Enlightenment and the discovery of the
historical world it included, that is, since the time when previous social formations became porous and linguistic reflection also came under pressure
to change from a history that was being experienced and articulated as
something new. Anyone who follows the history of historical reflection and
historical representation since then encounters both approaches again and
again, whether they explicate one another, as in Vico, Rousseau, and Herder,
or whether they exist in isolation from one another.
The claim to reduce all historical utterances concerning life and all
the nineteenth century, up to regional histories that encompassed all aspects
By contrast, since the eighteenth century there have also been deliberately thematized conceptual histories (Begriffigeschichten) 1-the term apparently derives from Hegel-which have retained a permanent place in
translation into one's own present implies a conceptual history; Rudolf
Eucken has demonstrated its methodological inevitability in an exemplary

philosophischen Tenninologie. 2
In practical research, reciprocal references that bring together socialhistorical analyses or analyses of constitutional history together with questions of conceptual history are ubiquitous. Their mutual connection, more
or less reflected upon, has always been present in the disciplines concerned
with antiquity and in research on the Middle Ages: especially where minimal sources are available, no fact can be recognized without raking into ac-


Chapter 2

count the manner of its former and present conceptual assimilation. Obviously, the reciprocal interlacing of social and conceptual history was systematically explored only in the 1930s; we are reminded of Walter Schlesinger
and, above all, of Otto Brunner. In neighboring fields, Erich Rothacker was
a similar force in philosophy, as was Carl Schmitt in jurisprudence and Jost
Trier in linguistics.
In the political aspects of research, social and conceptual history were
conjoined against two very different tendencies, both dominant in the
1920s. On the one hand, there was a parting with concepts concerning the
history of ideas and of spirit (ideen- und geistesgeschichtliche), which were
pursued outside a concrete sociopolitical context-for their own sakes, as
it were. On the other hand, history ceased to be regarded as primarily a political history of events, and instead its longer-lasting presuppositions were
As Otto Brunner emphasized in the second edition of Land und Herrschaft, 3 he wanted "to ask about the concrete presuppositions of medieval
politics, without, however, representing it itself." He sought to focus on
long-term structures of social conditionality (Verjajtheit) and changes in
these-which were never merely of the moment-doing so by thematizing particular linguistic self-articulations of social groups, associations, or
strata and the history of their interpretation. It is no accident that the Annales, which emerged from an analogous research interest, established in
1930 the rubric "Things and Words.'' For Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch,
linguistic analysis was an integral part of social-historical research. InGermany, Gunther Ipsen did pathbreaking work in modern history by complementing his social-historical, specifically demographic investigations
with linguistic research. All these ideas were taken up by Werner Conze
when he founded the Workshop for Modern Social History in 1956-57.4
Thanks to Conze's initiative, conjoining social-historical and conceptualhistorical questions became one of its enduring challenges, as did the differential determination between them, which will be the topic of the following pages.

The Impossibility of an "Histoire Totale"
There is no history without societal formations and the concepts by
which they define and seek to meet their challenges, whether reflexively or

Social History and Conceptual History


self:.reflexively; without them, it is impossible to experience and to interpret
history, to represent or to recount it. In this sense, society and language belong to the metahistorical premises without which Geschichte and Historie
are unthinkable. Social-historical and conceptual-historical theories, questions, and methods thus refer to all possible areas within the discipline of
history. T'hus, too, the wish to conceive a "total history" occasionally sneaks
in. Though for pragmatic reasons the empirical investigations of social or
conceptual historians concern limited topics, this self-limitation does not
lessen the claim to generality; it follows from a theory of possible history,
which must presuppose society and language.
Social-historical and conceptual-historical approaches necessarily proceed in an interdisciplinary fashion, because they work within specializations that are methodologically mandated. It does not follow from this,
however, that their theoretical claim to generality could be posited as absolute or total. It is true that they operate under the constraint of having to
presuppose the totality of societal relations, as well as their linguistic articulations and systems of interpretations. But the formally irrefutable premise that all history has to do with society and language does not allow the
farther-reaching conclusion that it would be possible, so far as content is
concerned, to write a "total history'' or even to conceive it.
& numerous and plausible as the empirical objections against a total
history are, an objection against its possibility follows from the very attempt to make it conceivable. The totum of a social history and the totum
of a linguistic history can never be completely projected onto one another.
Even if we make the empirically unrealizable assumption that both areas
could be thematized as a finitely delimited totality, there would remain an
unbridgeable difference between any social history and the history of comprehending it.
Linguistic comprehension does not catch up with what takes place or
what actually was the case, nor does anything occur without already being
changed by its linguistic assimilation. Social history (Sozialgeschichte oder
Gesellschaftsgeschichte) and conceptual history stand in a reciprocal, histOrically necessitated tension that can never be canceled out. What you do will
only be told to you by the following day; and what you say becomes an
event by eluding you. What occurs interpersonally or socially and what is
said during that event or about it gives rise to a constantly changing difference that renders any histoire totale impossible. History takes place in


Chapter 2

the anticipation of incompleteness; any interpretation that is adequate to
it therefore must dispense with totality.
Characteristically, historical time again and again reproduces the ten~
sion between society and its transformation, on the one hand, and its linguistic processing and assimilation, on the other. Any history lives by this
tension. Social relations, conflicts, their solutions, and their changing pre~
suppositions are never congruent with the linguistic articulations by which
societies act, comprehend, interpret, change, and reform themselves. This
thesis can be rested on two counts: history occurring in actu, and history
that has happened and is past.

History, Speech, and Writing As They Occur
When social history and conceptual history are referred to each other,
the differential determination between them relativizes the claim of each to
generality. History neither becomes resolved in the mode of comprehending it, nor is it conceivable without such comprehension.
The connection between everyday events is pregiven in an undiffer~
entiated way, for humans, being endowed with language, are co-originary
with their societal existence. How can this relation be determined? As they
occur, individual events depend on linguistic facilitation; this is comparatively clear. No social activity, no political deal, and no economic trade is
possible without accounting, without planning discussions, without public debates or secret talks, without commands-and obedience-without
the consensus of those involved and the articulated dissent of conflicting
parties. Any everyday history in its daily course is dependent on language
in action, on talking and spealcing, just as no love story is conceivable without at least three words-you, I, we. Any societal event in its manifold
connections is based on advance communicative work and on the work of
linguistic mediation. Institutions and organizations, from the smallest association to the United Nations, must depend on them, whether in oral or
in written form.
As self-evident as this observation may be, it is equally self-evident
that it must be qualified. What actually takes place is, obviously, more than
the linguistic articulation that has led to the event or chat interprets it. The
command, the cooperative resolution, or the elemental cry to kill is not
identical with the act of killing itself. Lovers' figures of speech are not re-

Social History and Conceptual History


solved in the love that two people experience. The written rules of organization or their spoken modes of performance are not identical with an organization's acts.
There is always a difference between a history as it takes place and its
linguistic facilitation. No speech act is itself the action that it helps prepare,
trigger, and enact. Admittedly, a word often triggers irrevocable consequences; think of the Fuhrer's command to invade Poland, to mention a
striking example. But precisely in this case the relation becomes clear. A
history does not happen without speaking, but it is never identical with it,
it cannot be reduced to it.
For that reason, there must be further advance work and performative modes beyond spoken language in order for events to be possible.
There is an area of semiotics that transcends language. Think of bodily gestures in which language communicates only in an encoded form; of magical rituals, including the theology of sacrifice, which has its historical place
not in the word but on the cross; of modes of group behavior habituated
by symbols or by modern traffic signs. All are matters of a sign language
that is comprehensible without words. All of the signals mentioned can be
verbalized. They can be reduced to language, but it is particular to them
that one has to do without spoken language in order to trigger or control
appropriate actions, attitudes, or modes of behavior through them. Let me
call to mind further extralinguistic preconditions: spatial nearness or distance; distances that either harbor or delay conflict; temporal differences
between age groups within a generation or due to the bipolarity of the
sexes. All these differences contain in themselves events, conflicts, and reconciliations that are made possible prelinguistically, even if they can, but
do not have to, take place by virtue of linguistic articulation.
There are thus extralinguistic, prelinguistic, and posdinguistic elements in all actions that lead to a history. They are closely attached to the
elementary geographical, biological, and zoological conditions that, via the
human constitution, all have an effect on societal events. Birth, love, and
death; eating, hunger, misery, and diseases; perhaps happiness, but in any
event robbery, victory, killing, and defeat-all are also elements and performative modes of human history, reaching from the everyday to the
identification of political power structures. Their extralinguistic pregiven
data are difficult to deny.
Certainly, the analytic distinctions made here can hardly be compre-


Chapter 2

hended in the concrete context of the actions that constitute events. All
prelinguistic pregiven data are linguistically recovered by human beings and
are mediated in concrete conversation through their doings and sufferings.
The spoken language or the writing that is read, the particular conversation
that is effective-or overheard-intertwine in the topical performance of
what happens to form an event that is always composed of extralinguistic
and linguistic elements of action. Even if conversation ceases, linguistic preknowledge remains present-it is inherent in human beings and enables
them to communicate with those confronting them, be they human beings
or things, products, plants, or animals.
The more highly aggregated the human units of action-for instance,
in modern processes oflabor and their economic interconnections, or in the
increasingly complex political spaces of action-the more important conditions of linguistic communication become for maintaining the ability to
act. Linguistic mediation extends from the audible range of a voice through
communication devices-writing, the printing press, the telephone, and
broadcasting to the screen of a television set or a data processor-including
the institutions of their modes of transmission, from the postman and print
media to the news satellite, including the consequences that intervene in
any linguistic codification. People have always tried either to fix the range of
spoken language permanently or to expand and accelerate it so as to anticipate, trigger, or control events. This comment may suffice to demonstrate
the intertwining of any social history and any conceptual history in their respective enactment of speaking and acting.
Spoken words, writing that is read, or events that take place cannot be
separated in actu but can only be divided analytically. Someone who is overwhelmed by a speech will experience this not only linguistically but all over
. his body, and someone who is being silenced through an action will experience his dependence on language all the more, so as to be able to move
again. This personal interrelation of speech and action can be transferred to
all levels of the social units of action, which are becoming increasingly complex. The interrelation between "speech acts" and "actual" happenings ranges
from individual instances of speaking and acting to the multiple social interrelations through which events, in all their interconnections, occur. Despite all historical variation, this finding constitutes any history that occurs,
and it has considerable effects on the representation of past histories, especially on the difference between social history and conceptual history.

Social History and Conceptual History


Represented History and Its Linguistic Sources
The empirical connection between action and speech, acting and
speaking, as demonstrated so far, breaks up as soon as we shift our view
back from the history occurring in eventu to past history, with which the
professional historian deals ex eventu. The analytic separation between an
extralinguistic and a linguistic level of action gains the status of an anthropological pregiven datum, without which no historical experience can be
transferred into everyday or academic statements at all. What has happened,
and has happened beyond my own experience, is something that I can experience merely by way of speech or writing. Even if language may-in
part-have been only a secondary factor in the enactment of doings and
sufferings, as soon as an event has become past, language becomes the primary factor without which no recollection and no scientific transposition of
this recollection is possible. The anthropological primacy of language for
the representation of past history thus gains an epistemological status, for it
must be decided in language what in past history was necessitated by language and what was not.
In anthropological terms, any "history" constitutes itself through oral
and written communication between generations that live together and convey their own respective experiences to one another. Only when, with the
passing of older generations, the orally conveyed space of recollection melts
away, does writing become the primary carrier of historical imparting. It is
true that numerous extralinguistic remainders indicate past events and conditions: ruins left over from catastrophes; coins that are evidence of economic organization; buildings that bespeak communities, political rule, and
services; streets that bespeak trade or war; agricultural landscapes that testify
to age-long labor; monuments that testifY to victory or death; weapons that
indicate struggle; tools that indicate invention and use. These are all «relics"
or ''findings,-or images-that can testify to everything at rhe same time.
Everything is processed by special historical disciplines. Certainly, what "actualll may have taken place can, beyond all hypotheses, only be guaranteed
by oral and written records, that is, by linguistic evidence. Only at the linguistic sources does the path divide between what is to count as "linguistic"
and what is to count as "actual'' in the events of the past. Under this aspect,
genres and their differentiations can be related anew to one another.
What belonged together, and how it did so, in eventu can only be de-


Chapter 2

cermined by linguistic evidence post eventum; depending on how these linguistic records, this oral or written tradition, are handled, the most different genres move more closely together and others move apart.
Myths, fairy tales, dramas, epics, and novels all presuppose and thematize the original connection between speech and action, between suffering, speaking, and being silent. Only this making present of history as it occurs establishes a meaning that remains worthy of memory. All histories do
just this, using true and fictitious utterances to do justice to events worth remembering or retrieving words congealed into writing that testify to the
combination of speaking and acting.
Unmistakable situations bring about their own changes; behind them,
something like "destiny" can appear. It remains a challenge for any selfinterpretation and interpretation of the world to find them out and hand
them down. In a more or less accomplished fashion, all memoirs and biographies belong to this genre; in the English language, they emphasize the
interrelation between language and life-"Life and Letters." In addition, all
histories that follow events in their immanent dynamics belong here. "He
said this and did that; she said that and did something else; something surprising, something new followed from it that changed everything,-many
works are structured according to this formalized schema, especially those,
like histories of political events or of diplomacy, that make it possible to
construct in actu the course of events by virtue of the state of the sources.
Viewed as linguistic achievements, these histories enter into a series that
ranges from myths to novels. 5 Only when they claim academic status do
they depend on the authenticity-which needs to be checked-of the linguistic sources; these sources need to vouch for the interrelation of speech
acts and actions, an interrelation that previously had to be presupposed.
What can be distinguished analytically, the prelinguistic from the linguistic, is brought rogether again "in analogy to experience'' thanks to the
work of language: it is the fiction of rhe (f) actual. Viewed in retrospect,
what has actually taken place is only real in the medium of linguistic fiction. In contrast to the speech that acts in history as it takes place, language
thus gains an epistemological primacy that urges it continuously to make
decisions about the relationship between language and action.
When submitted to this alternative, some genres articulate themselves
in a very one-sided way. There are annals, which only register resultsnamely, what happened, but not how it came to happen. There are hand-

Social History and Conceptual History


books and "narrative" works of history, which concern actions, successes,
and failures, but not the words or utterances that led to them, only that
great men ace, or that highly stylized subjects of action become active in a
speechless fashion, as it were: states or dynasties, churches or sects, classes or
parties, or whatever else is hypostasized as a unit of action. Rarely, however,
are linguistic patterns of identification investigated; without them, such
units of action would not be able to act at all. Even where spoken speech or
its written equivalents are included in the representation, linguistic evidence
comes under ideological suspicion or is read only instrumentally with pregiven interests and evil intentions in mind.
Even investigations made from the perspective of the history of language, which primarily thematize the linguistic evidence itself, tend to refer
it to a "real" history that must first itself be linguistically constituted. But
the methodological difficulties of referring speaking and language to social
conditions and changes, to which sociolinguistics in particular is exposed,
cling to the aporia of having to constitute linguistically the field of objects
of which they are about to speak, an aporia that is shared by all historians.
For that reason, the other extreme will also be found in the future:
editing the linguistic sources as such, the written remains of formerly spoken or written utterances. The accident of tradition will then have thematized the difference between extralinguistic and linguistic action. And everywhere, it is the task of the good commentator to track down the sense of the
document that could not be found at all without the differential determination of speech and facts.
Thus we have established three genres, which, given the alternative
of speech act and actual act (Tathandlung) either refer to each other or, in
the extreme case, are thematized separately. Epistemologically, a double
task always falls upon language: it refers to the extralinguistic connections
of events as well as-by doing so-to itself Conceived historically, it is always self-reflexive.

Event and Structure-Speaking and Language
Although we have so far spoken only about history as it occurs and
history as it has occurred, asking how speech and action relate to each other
in actu, in a synchronic section, as it were, the question expands as soon as
diachrony is thematized as well. Here, as in the relation of speaking and


Chapter 2

acting in the enactment of events, synchrony and diachrony cannot be separated empirically. The conditions and determinants that, in a temporal
gradation of various depths, reach from the "past" into the present intervene in particular events just as agents ''simultaneously" act on the basis of
their respective outlines of the future. Any synchrony is eo ipso at the same
time diachronic. In actu, all temporal dimensions are always intertwined,
and it would contradict experience to define the "present" as, for instance,
one of those moments that accumulate from the past into the future-or,
conversely, that slip as intangible points of transition from the future into
the past. In a purely rhetorical manner, all history could be defined as a permanent present in which past and future are contained-or as the continuous intertwining of past and future that makes any present constantly disappear. If we focus on synchrony, history deteriorates into a pure space
of consciousness in which all temporal dimensions are contained at once,
whereas if we focus on diachrony, the active presence of human beings
would, historically speaking, have no space of action. This thought experiment is designed only to refer to the fact that the differential determination
between synchrony and diachrony, introduced by Saussure, can everywhere
be analytically of help without being able to do justice to the complexity of
the temporal intertwinings in the history that is taking place.
With these reservations, we shall use the analytic categories of synchrony, which aims at the topical presentness of events, and diachrony,
which aims at the temporal dimension of depth that is also contained in
any topical event. Many presuppositions have a long-term or a mediumrange effect-as well as a short-term one-on a history that is taking place.
They delimit the alternatives of action by making possible or setting free
only certain alternatives.
Characteristically, social history and conceptual history both, in ways
however different, theoretically presuppose this connection. It is the link
between synchronic events and diachronic structures that can be investigated historically. An analogous connection exists between spoken speech,
synchronically, and the diachroni~ally pregiven language that always takes
effect in a conceptual-historical way. What happens is always unique and
new, but never so new that social conditions, which are pregiven over the
long term, will not have made possible each unique event. A new concept
may be coined to articulate experiences or expectations that never existed
before. But it can never be too new not to have existed virtually as a seed

Social History and Conceptual History


in the pregiven language and not to have received meaning from its inherited linguistic context. The two lines of research thus broaden the indispensable diachronic dimensions, variously defined, of interplay between
speaking and acting within which events occur, and without which history
is neither possible nor conceivable.
A series of examples can elucidate this. Marriage is an institution
that, regardless of its prelinguistic biological implications, is a cultural phenomenon with numerous variants across the history of humanity. Since it
is a form of sociality between two or more human beings of different genders, marriage belongs among genuinely social-historical research topics.
At the same time, obviously one can talk about it in a social-historical manner only when written sources inform us about various kinds of marriages
and the ways in which they have been conceptualized.
Two methodological approaches can be constructed, in the simplified
form of a model. One is primarily directed at events, at acts of speech,
writing, and action; the other is primarily directed at diachronic presuppositions and their long-term changes. The latter approach seeks to find social structures and their linguistic equivalents.
1. This way, an individual event can be thematized: for instance, the
marriage ceremony of a ruler, about which dynastic sources offer us ample
information, including the political motives that were in play, the nature of
the contractual conditions, the kind of dowry that was negotiated, the way
in which the ceremonies were organized, and suchlike. The course of this
marriage can also be reconstructed and narrated anew, including thesequence of events, up to such terrible consequences as when, for instance,
following the death of a spouse, the contractually determined inheritance
led to a war of succession. Today an analogous, concrete history of a marriage can also be reconstructed from the circle of people making up its subhistories-an exciting topic in the history of the everyday, which uses numerous sources that have not been deployed before. Both concern unique,
individual histories, which may contain some unparalleled suspense between happiness and misery, and which both remain embedded in their religious, social, and political contexts.
2. Social history and conceptual history cannot manage without such
individual cases, but it is not their primary interest to investigate them. To
characterize the second methodological approach-again, in a model-like
simplification-both focus on the long-term conditions that are effective


Chapter 2

diachronically and that make possible each individual case. Both inquire
into rhe long-term occurrences that can be derived from the sum of individual cases. Put differently, they inquire into the pregiven linguistic conditions under which such structures have entered into social consciousness
and under which they have been comprehended and also changed.
Let us first follow specifically social-historical and then specifically
conceptual-historical modes of procedure.
The synchrony of individual marriage ceremonies and of the speeches
and letters exchanged in connection with them is not omitted by social history. Rather, it is embraced diachronically. Thus, for example, numbers of
weddings can be statistically ascertained from the perspective of socialhistorical questions so as to prove population increases for each social stratum. Questions to be asked include: When did the number of weddings expand beyond the number of the houses and farms pregiven by estates that
had a specified amount of food? How can the number of weddings be related to wage and price graphs, to good and bad harvests, so as to make it
possible to weigh the economic and natural factors relating to the reproduction of the population? How can numbers of marital and extramarital
births be related to each other so as to measure social situations of conflict?
How do numbers of births and deaths of children, mothers, and fathers relate to each other, so as to explain long-term ch:mges in "typical" married
life? How does the graph of divorces run, allowing us to draw conclusions
about the typical marriage? All these questions, which have been singled out
almost at random, have in common that they help construct "actual" longterm occurrences that are not directly contained as such in the sources.
Laborious preparatory work must be done to render source statements comparable in order to aggregate series of numbers from them, and
systematic reflection is needed, both beforehand and afterwards, to interpret the aggregated series of data. Longer~term structural statements cannot be derived directly from the linguistic sources. The sum of the concrete
individual cases that occur synchronically and that are verified is itself mute
and unable to "verify, long-term, medium-range, or in any way diachronic
structures. In order to derive permanent statements from past history, preparatOiy theoretical work and the employment of a subject-specific disciplinary terminology are necessary. These alone enable one to track connections and interrelations that could not yet have been perceptible to the
people affected by them.

Social History and Conceptual History


What has "actually"-and not linguistically-occurred in history in
the long term remains an academic construction, viewed in social-historical
terms; evidence for it depends on the plausibility of the underlying theory.
Any theoretically based statement must submit to methodological control
by the sources in order to claim past actuality, but the reality of long-term
factors cannot be sufficiently justified on the basis of individual sources. For
that reason, ideal types can be formed, following Max Weber, for instance;
they combine various criteria of describing reality in such a way that the
connections that are to be presupposed can be interpreted with consistency.
To take a case from our series of examples, it is possible to develop typical
marriage and family trajectories for peasants and those below them, together
with the average number ofbirrhs and deaths, in correlation with wage and
price series or with the sequence of crop failures, working hours, and the tax
burden, to determine how marriage and family trajectories at the peasant
level can be distinguished from those at lower levels, and how both changed
in the transition from the preindustrial age to the industrial age.
The factors in individual cases, not the cases themselves, can then be
structured in such a way that the economic, political, and natural presuppositions-depending on the importance of the wage and price structure, the
tax burden, or harvest results-become understandable for a marriage typical of a certain social stratum. Questions to be asked are: Which factors are
homogeneous and for what period of time? When are they dominant and
when recessive? The answers make it possible to determine time limits, periods, or thresholds of epochs, according to which the history of peasant marriages and of those below the peasant level can be organized diachronically.
So far our series of examples has been consciously selected for clusters of factors that allow primarily extralinguistic series of events to be
structured diachronically and to be related to each other. Establishing them
presupposes a social-historical theory. Aided by a subject-specific terminology (here that of demography, economics, and finance), it permits a determination of permanence and change that cannot be found in the sources
as such. The theoretical claim thus grows in proportion with the distance
it must keep from any "self-proclamation» of the sources so as to construct
long-duration limits or typical societal forms.
Certainly, quite different clusters of factors than those mentioned so
far also enter into the history of marria