contributions to the history of concepts

Contributions to the History of Concepts 4 (2008) 27-56

www.brill.nl/chco

Translation and Comparison II: A Methodological Inquiry into Reception in the History of Ideas*
Lszl Kontler
Central European University, Budapest

Abstract This article addresses the methodological issues involved in the study of interlingual translation as an avenue of reception in the history of ideas. In particular, it assesses the possible uses of linguistic contextualism and conceptual history (Begrisgeschichte) in this endeavour. It argues that both of these approaches have been, or are capable of being, far more sensitive towards the phenomenon of reception and, indeed, this is an area where cross-fertilization between them (often commended in general but rarely if ever in specic terms) is a practical possibility. Perspectives from Rezeptionsgeschichte may provide useful tools for building bridges between them. A few case studies in translation history are then critically examined, and on the basis of the foregoing methodological reections propositions are made for further rening the approach taken in those case studies. Keywords translation studies, early-modern period, reception, Skinner, Pocock, Koselleck, Rezeptionsgeschichte

This article is a sequel to the one that appeared in Contributions, volume 3, number 1, on translation and comparison in the history of ideas. In that article I suggested ways in which an approach to the subject could be
*) This article was written while the author held a Marie Curie Fellowship of the European Commission at the Department of History and Civilization of the European University Institute (Florence). I would like to thank Martin van Gelderen and Heinz Gerhard Haupt for the opportunity to present a version of it in their comparative cultural and intellectual history seminar, and to Edward Hundert, Peter Jones, Nicholas Phillipson, Antonella Romano, Karin Tilmans and Orsolya Vincze for comments on early drafts.
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2008 DOI: 10.1163/187465608X290798

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developed on the basis of the properties of the source material itself, i.e., the theory and practice of inter-lingual translation, chiey in early-modern European history. I now proceed to relate those thoughts to the methodological directions in intellectual history that have arguably inspired the greatest amount of work as well as debate over the past generation or so, namely linguistic contextualism and Begrisgeschichte. This is a vast topic, and my perspective will be limited to the reciprocal relevance of these approaches and the interpretation of translated texts. Critiques of both schools will also receive some attention. As to the Cambridge view, for a concise statement of a highly complex programme one might turn to Quentin Skinners preface to the collection of his re-published and revised articles:
I argue that, if we are to write the history of ideas in a properly historical style, we need to situate the texts we study within such intellectual contexts and frameworks of discourse as enable us to recognise what their authors were doing in writing them. To speak more fashionably, I emphasise the performativity of texts and the need to treat them intertextually. My aspiration is . . . to use the ordinary techniques of historical enquiry to grasp their concepts, to follow their distinctions, to recover their beliefs and, so far as possible, to see things in their way.1

Similarly, one can pick out a prcis of methodological priorities within the immense output of John Pocock in the eld for instance:
[O]ur understanding of what [the author] was doing when he made his move thus depends in a considerable measure on our understanding of the practical situation he was in, of the case he desired to argue, the action or norm he desired to legitimate, and so on [. . .] But the practical situation also includes the linguistic situation: that arising from the constraints and opportunities imposed on the author by the language or languages available for him to use [. . .] the historian looks for ways in which [the move] may have rearranged, or sought to rearrange, the possibilities of language open to the author and his co-users of language.2
Quentin Skinner (2002), vii. J.G.A. Pocock (1985), 14-5. Several of Pococks early methodological writings appear in his Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (1973). See also J.G.A. Pocock (1987a), 19-38.
2) 1)

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Texts are regarded by both scholars as key vehicle that enable articulate and literate individuals to act socially, and language as the principal means to bring such vehicles into motion. They both recognize that just as any other type of means of production, of transport, and so forth language provides such individuals with the opportunity to realize their intentions, and at the same time determines the orbit within which this is feasible; though at their most ingenious, they can also be seen as capable of stretching such boundaries. Pocock and Skinner both conceive of texts as speech acts, in the style of Austin and Searle (both drawing upon Wittgenstein), in which the expressive functions of language are used to realize intentions which thereby are transformed into meanings. Both of them also readily attribute to language more specically, to the vocabularies and discourses into which clusters of verbal expression consolidate through the accumulation of meanings intended by users the quality of a paradigm which, in the fashion of Thomas Kuhn, sets certain limits to what is doable by speech acts, i.e. the thinkable. Undoubtedly, Skinner has been more interested in the former aspect of language, that is, authorial intention, and Pocock (whose orientation in linguistic theory also embraces Saussures distinction of langue from parole) in the latter, but their overall methodological allegiances are not dissimilar. I deliberately chose the above synoptic representations instead of more sophisticated statements of Skinner and Pococks allegiances as they are more t to withstand the objections advanced by their latest and perhaps most trenchant critic: Mark Bevir.3 Bevir has labelled and challenged them as representatives of soft and hard linguistic contextualism,4 and more recently dubbed their approaches conventionalism and contextualism (without a qualier),5 respectively. Taking advantage of some of the more radical statements of Pocock and Skinner which are undoubtedly not

3) The main thrust of earlier objections was that their approach reduces the study of the history of political thought to antiquarianism and divests it of contemporary relevance, and that their empirical work does not as radically surpass their predecessors as it is claimed in their methodological manifestos. For a few examples, see Charles D. Tarlton (1973), 307-328; J.G.A. Pocock and John G. Gunnell (1981), 3-62; and James Tully (1988). As these are of less immediate concern to the present subject, I do not discuss them at length. 4) Mark Bevir (1992), 276-298. 5) Mark Bevir (1999), especially Chapter 2.

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too dicult to nd and select, especially in their earlier writings6 , Bevir construes them as equally fallacious opponents of intentionalism, with Skinner suggesting that authors must follow the ruling conventions since they want to be understood, and Pocock, even worse, restricting authors to bit parts as the mouthpieces of the script-writing paradigms which constitute their conceptual frameworks.7 On the basis of this caricature of their positions, they are more or less atly thrown in the same camp with Michel Foucault to whom their relationship is rather ambivalent8 and other representatives of structural idealism, who supposedly reduce individual ideas to copies of a collective episteme or knowledge structure.9 Bevir presumes to redress such errors by making a distinction between semantic meanings, which are determined by language, and hermeneutic meanings, which are not. The latter, while intentional, are also the only ones that concern historians, since they are the meanings that exist for speciable people and because they originate from the ideas the author intended to express. In proposing that texts in general cannot signify anything without individuals intentions and that all meaning-giving activity in the world is intentional, this approach, which we can call Bevirs weak intentionalism amounts to a diluted version of a more nuanced position that, in addition to agency, also takes into account the role of culture without necessarily subscribing to a model of inevitable cultural reproduction.10 Bevirs contentions in no way seem to constitute a plausible challenge to an approach that combines the exploration of speech acts, performed by individuals with sovereign intentions but whose performance is nonetheless dependent on a stock of tools that they may or may not wish or be able to modify.

But, for instance, in the preface to his re-edited methodological writings, among many other changes, Skinner avows to have toned down the noisy polemics [he] used to enjoy. Quentin Skinner (2002), vi. 7) Quentin Skinner (2002), 34-5 and 41. 8) See, for instance, Quentin Skinner (2002), 90-1 and 117-9. 9) Mark Bevir (1999), 177-264. 10) Bevirs book evoked a torrent of critical response, almost and perhaps a bit undeservedly in the fashion of the exchanges between Pocock and Skinner and their critics in the 1980s. Concerning this polemic, I have relied on the contributions of Mark Erickson, Austin Harrington and Andreas Reckwitz (2002), 99-133; Robert Stern, (2002), 1-12; Melissa Lane (2002), 33-41; Brian Young (2002), 101-117; and Donald Kelley (2004), 81-95.

6)

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However, Bevir makes a point that is no doubt, unintentionally helpful in approximating the survey of translation theories and practices, attempted in my previous article, to linguistic contextualism. We have to conceive of an intention not as the prior purpose of the author, but rather as the meaning an utterance has for a particular individual, whether he be its author or reader [italics added].11 The proposition that it is legitimate to attribute to readers intentions that constitute meanings would not be unfamiliar or untenable to Pocock and Skinner. As the former argues, [t]he history of discourse is concerned with speech acts that become known and evoke response, with illocutions that are modied as they become perlocutions by the ways in which recipients respond to them . . . The reader himself becomes an author [italics added], and the complex mode of Rezeptionsgeschichte is required of the historian.12 Pocock invokes Stanley Fish and his argument that the text can be said to exert no authority over those who interpret it, but rather becomes dissolved in the continuum of interpretation to which it once gave rise.13 Skinner also refers to Fish, besides other theorists of interpretation working within the readerresponse framework. These include Wolfgang Iser and his proposition that one must take into account not only the actual text but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text.14 They also include Paul Ricoeur and his suggestion that because of the polysemic and metaphorical features of language, any text will acquire an autonomous space of meaning which is no longer animated by the intentions of its author, and therefore in the act of interpretation [w]hat the text says now matters more than what the author meant to say hence, interpretation should assume the character of appropriation.15 Reecting on these possibilities, Skinner clearly distinguishes between three types of meaning: rst, that of the words or sentences in a given text; second, what the text means to me, i.e. the reader; and third what a writer means by what is said in a given text. Though not inattentive to

Mark Bevir (1999), 67. J.G.A. Pocock (1985), 18. 13) J.G.A. Pocock (1985), 2; Stanley Fish (1980), 305. 14) Wolfgang Iser (1972), 279. 15) Paul Ricoeur (1981), 174 and 201. For Skinners references to Iser, Ricoeur, and Fish, see Quentin Skinner (2002), 92-3.
12)

11)

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meaning 2, he has always shown himself more interested in meaning 3 perhaps because of his greater concern with the pointillist study of sudden conceptual shifts rather than conceptual change over the slower march of time,16 as he admits while comparing his own work to that of Reinhart Koselleck. On the other hand, Pococks classic explorations of the language of the ancient constitution, or of the Atlantic republican tradition17 can be plausibly interpreted as a reconstruction of a series of acts of reading18 performed on the texts of these traditions by the protagonists, who are competent enough in using the extant vocabularies to turn them to new speech acts and thereby pursue agendas specic to their own political, social and cultural contexts. As in the period in focus the principal medium of passing down a tradition is the printed text, and the ticket to membership of the community of speakers of a political language is the absorption of such texts, these speakers authors are also readers who, in Skinners terms, rst construe meaning 2 and then, on the condition of having done so, go on to construing meaning 3. Insofar as these processes remain within the boundaries of a single discursive tradition, like civic humanism or natural law, they would mainly resemble intra-lingual translation, a notion introduced by Roman Jakobson to describe the interpretation of verbal signs by other verbal signs of the same language.19 In a certain sense, redescription, the use of synonyms whose eect, either as a result of a deliberately chosen rhetorical strategy or by way of unintended consequences, is conceptual change, is a case of intralingual translation.20 But as the history of political discourse has been convincingly shown to involve a great deal of interaction among various available vocabularies, it is not very dissimilar from inter-lingual translation, and on several occasions Pocock was tempted to describe it as such:
The history of discourse now becomes visible as one of traditio in the sense of transmission and, still more, translation. Texts composed of langues and

Quentin Skinner (2002), 180. J.G.A. Pocock (1987b) and (2003). 18) Cf. one of the most inuential studies in literary reception theory (to be considered in some detail below), Wolfgang Iser (1978). 19) Roman Jakobson (1987), 428-35. 20) Redescription is a crucial category in Skinners reinterpretation of Hobbes, see Quentin Skinner (1996).
17)

16)

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paroles, of stable language structures and the speech acts and innovations that modify them, are transmitted and reiterated, and their components are severally transmitted and reiterated, rst by non-identical actors in shared historical contexts, and then by actors in historically discrete contexts. Their history is, rst, that of the constant adaptation, translation, and reperformance of the text in a succession of contexts by a succession of agents [. . .].21

Elsewhere he urges that [w]e should pay more attention than we have done to the phenomenon of translation [this time inter-lingual], and suggests that much depends upon Rezeption and reader response; the reader and interpreter may have the resources of rhetoric at his disposal too. Many an author has found himself a more radical innovator than he intended to be or ever admitted he was.22 Thus, inasmuch as Bevirs above-mentioned point which is not developed further by him is also a tacit criticism of linguistic contextualism, it seems to be misplaced. Similarly, while preoccupied with intentions as they become manifest in speech acts, Skinner and especially Pocock in no way imply that authors possess a sort of monopoly over the meaning of the texts they produce,23 and their approaches can incorporate reader response. Martyn P. Thompson has in fact proposed a renement of what he calls the new history of political thought. He has examined the methods of Pocock and Skinner in comparison with the interpretation of historical meaning in literary Rezeptionsgeschichte. While Thompsons summary judgment that the reader has been largely neglected by the former is somewhat exaggerated (and attenuated by Thompson himself later on),24 it is certainly acceptable that the historical understanding of texts aimed by linguistic contextualism would stand to gain in sophistication by incorporating some of the insights of reception theory, in which the reader as creator of textual meanings occupies the central position. Launched as a provocation25 to both the marginalization of historical studies in literature, and its canon-centred approach (in this sense sharing some of the

J.G.A. Pocock (1985), 20-1. J.G.A. Pocock (1987a), 20 and 34. 23) Cf. the objection to Skinner by Dominick LaCapra (1980), 245-276. A revised version can be found in Dominick LaCapra and Steven J. Kaplan (1982), 47-85; especially 57-60. 24) Martyn P. Thompson (1993), 248-72; especially 248 and 271. 25) As the very title of the book conveys. Hans Robert Jauss (1970).
22)

21)

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main concerns of linguistic contextualism), reception history dismissed substantialist text theory, which restricts any meaning a text might have to what could have been intended by the author, and embraced pragmatic theory, which attributes to the text merely a potentiality for meaning.26 It is worth remembering that speech act theory, also a pragmatic approach to language, signicantly inspired Rezeptionsgeschichte in conceptualizing reception as both a reproductive and creative activity.27 On this view, the intended meaning of the author, even if recoverable, matters little in comparison with the specic meanings (Konkretisationen) that arise in the act of reading and whose understanding depends on the reader according to the context of reading time and place, historical and cultural circumstances, and the resulting horizon of expectations (Erwartungshorizont). While it is not clear why it should be necessary, as Hans Robert Jauss claims, that historians also ought to place themselves within a tradition of interpretations by adopting the role of the critic, the contention that historians should pay more attention to reconstructing the changing stock of experience, expectations and purposes with which readers approached texts and (re)constructed their meanings is very valid. While the text to a considerable extent determines the range of meaningful questions to be asked by its readers, they are the ones who decide, in terms of their horizon of expectations, what exactly they will ask not to speak of the possible answers. The reader as co-author certainly harbours intentions which come into play when [t]he convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence.28 To recall Skinners categories, the meaning 2 created by the reader inevitably reects these intentions before, in case s/he is also an author in the more usual sense, they are moulded into intentions and thereby turned into meaning 3. This is also a useful perspective on authors preparing a revised edition of their own work when, in an act of re-reading, their intentions and horizon of expectations might have become dierent from what they were when the text was rst conceived.

On the allegiance of Rezeptionsgescichte to pragmatic, rather than substantive text theory, see Hans Robert Jauss (1970), 154-67; Gnter Grimm (1977), 117-44. 27) See, for instance, Wolfgang Iser (1978), 54. Other sources, again, similarly to linguistic contextualism, included hermeneutics, associated with Gadamer, and the approach to the philosophy of science represented by Kuhn. For a survey, see Robert C. Holub (1984). 28) Wolfgang Iser (1972).

26)

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As Thompson suggests then, the history of receptions is constantly involved with as many attempts to elicit the recipients intended meanings as there are pieces of textual evidence available.29 If it is desirable that a correlation exists between the character of the source material and the methodology whereby it is interpreted, Thompsons proposition that Rezeptionsgeschichte provides useful strategies for intellectual history is both reinforced by the survey of translation theories and practices from the Renaissance to early Romanticism presented earlier and ought to be taken seriously when dealing with the role of translation in this period. One need only recall the humanists who, to a very considerable extent, set the framework in which translation was conceptualized and pursued into the eighteenth century. Fausto da Longiano explicitly dened two levels of the translating act, the translator being a reader at the rst and a writer at the second. Similarly, in tienne Dolets work, reading and analysis, aiming at the full comprehension of the authors sense and subject, are processes distinct from, and preceding those of composition and articulation, the conceptual distinctiveness of these phases also being reected in the character of rules and procedures to be followed by the translator in them. In terms of the composition and articulation, criteria of a new autonomous art form are promoted, abandoning reference to its origins in the translated text, which has forgotten its beginnings, not to mention its stated purpose.30 The humanists did not raise the issue of Erwartungshorizont because they were convinced that their enthusiasm for the ancients guaranteed that their questions were the same as theirs. If this element is added, however, translation may be regarded not as an act of reading inspired by a quest for the authors sense and subject, but in terms of questions asked by the translator, which may or may not coincide with the authors own. This is then followed by a speech act, which consists of a conversion of meaning 2 resulting from the act of reading into meaning 3 whose overlap with that of the author is even more contingent because the translator acts no longer only as an interrogator but as an author with at least partially independent claims. It must be added that the partial character of the independence of such claims, i.e. the boundaries within which

29) 30)

Martyn P. Thompson (1993). Glyn P. Norton (1984), 200-16.

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the translators intentions can be realized, arise not only from constraints that the original text (provided by both authorial intentions and the discursive traditions or language, in the Pocockian sense, manifest in it) might place on the translator the translators natural language to some extent also possesses and exerts the force of a paradigm. Let us imagine the encounter between Abb Prvost, an habitu of Parisian polite society, and Richardsons Pamela. The Abb would certainly be taken by the eective representations of middle class sensibility and morality and also taken aback by the manifestations of a rusticity still perceived as characteristic of the English that would seem out of place in such a literary work. He nevertheless recognizes in the novel a suitable vehicle for the advancement of an agenda, partially shared with Richardson, and decides to weed out remainders of the old and uncouth British ways that to him seem restrictive. Furthermore, this would be done in full conviction that this is also the most appropriate way of doing justice to the qualities inherent in the original. To all intents and purposes, in this case the horizon of expectations with which the translator performs the act of reading is the same as the range of intentions that can be detected in the original. Also, the translators agenda, while shaped independently from and prior to the encounter with the original text, consists of intentions not very dierent from those of the author only to the extent that they also include the intention of improving the original performance for the sake of reaching shared objectives through an act of re-composition. Even in this case, while Prvosts meaning 2 is not substantially dierent from Richardsons meaning 3, the formers meaning 3 in the French translation is somewhat removed from that of Richardson in the English Pamela.31 In a rather dierent case, Christian Garve was fully aware that Ciceros De Ociis was written for persons of the higher classes who participated in the aairs of the state for whom moral prescription often transformed into political instruction. Yet he recognized that the book, when translated into German and equipped with a proper philosophical commentary, might forward the cause of German popular philosophy, a philosophical theory of

31) To be sure, contemporary discussions of the issue fully warranted him to consider his own reputation as well as that of his model to interfere with the original. Sir Samuel Garth (1720), 1 and George Steiner (1975).

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moral and aesthetic action educating the private citizen to virtuous life and sociability.32 Here, Garves Erwartungshorizont very substantially determines the sense he makes of Cicero through reading De Ociis, and Ciceros meaning 3 is hardly more important than the arising meaning 2 in developing Garves own meaning 3 in the translation. We shall see that there are more extreme cases too. For the time being these examples are already sucient to argue that while it is certainly possible to propose that in translating an author X, translator Y got him/her wrong, this also entails an imposition of our current horizon of expectations vis--vis other past translations produced when such expectations did not exist. Such mistranslations carried a value for their producers and intended consumers, and that should be the primary concern for the historian of translations. What is more, even when the plea for delity, and its counterpart, the case for foreignizing translation appeared towards the end of the eighteenth century, translations were also conceived as instrumental, rather than an end in themselves, and their underlying domestic agendas are of as much interest and consequence as their philosophical underpinnings. Valuable studies now exist on the history of reception through translation, and I shall present a few examples below. Before that, however, it will be helpful to relate the methodological endeavours outlined above to the German study of the history of concepts as it has emerged since the 1960s. Begrisgeschichte has been usually, and certainly not without merit, associated with the towering gure of Reinhart Koselleck and the emblematic undertaking of the Geschichtliche Grundbegrie, the multi-volume lexicon of social and political language in Germany.33 The initial methodological commitments of Begrisgeschichte can be identied in Kosellecks introduction to this project. Basic concepts are clusters of words which constitute a eld of meaning and express goals and expectations as to the nature of the organization of society and the polity, and thereby function as vehicles for the movement of history. As such, they do not merely indicate and register social and political change, but also aect it, because it is through concepts that a horizon of expectations is conceived, against which structural transformation is conceptualized and acted upon. The character of being contested is essential for a concept to

32) 33)

Johan van der Zande (1998), 75. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (1972-1978).

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be basic: in times of social and political conict, the clash of interests is accompanied by a semantic struggle to dene and control positions and settle disagreements about usage and rules to ones advantage. The methodological principles of Begrisgeschichte that arise from these features comprise, besides the application of traditional historical criticism, historical semantics, i.e. the diachronic and synchronic analysis of language using both semasiology (the study of all meanings of a single term) and onomasiology (the study of all terms for the same concept), and the reliance on an unusually broad range of sources discrepant in origin and appeal: texts by classic thinkers, the press, government, administrative and bureaucratic documents, reports of speeches, private papers, and contemporary dictionaries. Some of these sources are distinct due to their unique and time-bound character, others by their greater amount of normativity. Such complexity is required by the fact that, similarly to social history, Begrisgeschichte is concerned with iterative structures or the repeatability of phenomena, for it is from the juxtaposition of these to the historically unique that the momentum of change can be demonstrated.34 The editors of the Geschichtliche Grundbegrie also posited a time period and subject matter they regarded especially appropriate to the methodological principles of the history of concepts: the so-called Sattelzeit, the period of the transformation of Alteuropa into modern Europe between c. 1750-1850, which is marked by accelerated conceptual shifts. The hypotheses being tested included that of Verzeitlichung (the tendency to use notions of historical time for creating a horizon within which concepts are to function the imposition of temporal patterns upon social and political thought); Demokratisierung (the spread of the use of political and social vocabulary beyond the elite); Ideologisierbarkeit (the increasing incorporation of concepts into isms that record the tension between experience and expectations); and Politisierung (the tendency of concepts to be caught up in political mobilization). However, given that the study of continuity and change in the semantic coverage of basic social and political concepts requires a concern with the time layers (Zeitschichten) manifest in them, i.e., leftovers of earlier meanings whose permanence varies, the majority of the 118 entries in the Geschichtliche Grundbegrie take a

34)

Reinhart Koselleck (1972), 116-31 and (1983), 7-21.

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longue dure approach and reach back and forth in time according to the character of the concept under scrutiny. Just as the Cambridge school came into being as a critique of the history of ideas hallmarked by the names of Lovejoy and Sabine, the programme of Begrisgeschichte arose from reservations towards traditional Geistesgeschichte. Both of them have long been recognized as parts of the general movement in the 1960s towards a heightened awareness of the signicance of language for historical analysis. Nevertheless, the approach taken in the Geschichtliche Grundbegrie has been criticized not only because, supposedly, the previously established thesis of the Sattelzeit 35 more or less predetermined the ndings of the projects contributors.36 And the method itself has been regarded with some suspicion not only by social historians, to whom it seems to represent an older, historicist and hermeneutical style of historiography. After all, Koselleck himself has repeatedly emphasized the social and political function of the relationship between words and things, and has warned against the dilution of history in discourse: no speech act is itself the action which it helps prepare, trigger, and enact; or elsewhere: even though all speech is action, not all actions are speech acts.37 However, precisely this feature has seemed too narrow from the angle of a programme of social-historical semantics, inconceivable without the inspiration from the Geschichtliche Grundbegrie, yet formulated at some critical distance to it. Its initiator, Rolf Reichardt has suggested that the reality content (Wirklichkeitscharakter) which concepts possess is not inferior to that of material relations, and therefore ought to be considered as independent socio-political factors in the construction of consciousness and the

35)

Koselleck himself has acknowledged that the notion of Sattelzeit has obscured rather than advanced the project, though without any detrimental consequence to the method. Reinhart Koselleck (1996), 69. Again, I am not concerned here with an important line of criticism which attributes any shortcomings Begrisgeschichte might have inccured due to its inter-war radical conservative origins and to the intellectual disaection experienced in relation to modernity in general (and not merely to German modernity), and identies the notion of Sattelzeit as providing a framework for the practice of conceptual history rather than being generated by the study of concepts itself. See for a concise statement Daniel Gordon (1999), 23-29. 36) For criticism of the practice of Begrisgeschichte even when its approach was applauded, see Helmut Berding (1976), 98-110; James Sheehan (1978), 312-19. 37) Reinhart Koselleck (1972), 94 and (1993), 84.

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motivation of conduct. He has proposed to abandon walks to the summits of the history of ideas (i.e., the study of canonical texts still a widely pursued path in the articles of the Geschichtliche Grundbegrie) altogether, and explore collective linguistic usages and ways of thinking strictly on the basis of sources whose character is, appropriately, equally collective, but which also include visual material, collective symbols, and rituals.38 At the same time, linguists have warned that the theoretical eclecticism of Begrisgeschichte tended to undermine its methodological clarity.39 One of the reasons for the uneasiness with the Koselleckian brand of conceptual history, also not entirely oset by Reichardts intervention, is the allegation that it studies the history of language without speakers, and indeed this is the criticism that has repeatedly been made by scholars working within the Anglo-Saxon tradition of intellectual history. Skinners own attitude for a long time was summed up in the claim that there can be no histories of concepts; there can only be histories of their uses in argument, while Pocock, though nding the idea (and reality) of a historical lexicon of principal terms and concepts a genuinely interesting possibility, he also queried to which history the terms collected in such a lexicon are basic, and what morphology of life forms is uncovered in tracing their history.40 What is at issue is agency, without which, from the Cambridge perspective, there can be no historicity. More recently, Skinner has claimed that he is not unhappy with the suggestion that much of his own research might be regarded as a contribution to one aspect of the vastly more ambitious programme pursued by Reinhart Koselleck, which is nothing else than the entire process of conceptual change, while he himself is interested in one of the techniques by which it takes place, adding that the two endeavours do not seem incompatible.41 Yet, [h]ow far one can capture the historicity of concepts by adopting Kosellecks approach remains a question to him, as to several other scholars.42
38) Rolf Reichardt (1985) and (1998), 7-28. For the research tendencies inspired by Begrisgeschichte in the broader sense, see Gnter Scholtz (2000). 39) See Dietrich Busse (1987). 40) Quentin Skinner (1998), 283 and J.G.A. Pocock (1996), 50, 52, and 54. 41) Quentin Skinner (2002), 186-7. For the distinction between Skinners and Kosellecks approach to conceptual change, see Kari Palonen (1997), 61-80 and (1999), 41-59. 42) Most particularly perhaps, James Schmidt (1999), 9-14, even claiming that especially the use of contemporary dictionaries and encyclopaedias as sources suggests that the Geschichtliche Grundbegrie is concerned not so much with what individuals are doing to

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It can be argued that since basic concepts are, by denition, contested, Begrisgeschichte cannot avoid a strong concern with interests, which can only belong to specic groups of speakers, and hence the issue of agency cannot be circumvented. It can also be said that familiarity with the history of the conceptual resources available to an author is a prerequisite for identifying the uses to which they were put by him. Finally, while the imaginative use of the philosophical theory of speech acts, combined with the identication of political languages, might be recommended as a means to refresh Begrisgeschichte, the perspective of the latter might be a welcome corrective to the lack of interest, detected in Pocock and Skinner, in the way groups, movements, or parties evaluate and perceive social changes. Based on such considerations, and many more, Melvin Richter has, over the past twenty years or so, tirelessly called for a closer understanding between these two approaches.43 There are also numerous other attempts to examine them in a comparative perspective. Some share Richters goal, namely, methodological cross-fertilization, and some choose to stress the diculties involved.44 It has also been suggested45 that, if such an endeavour is to yield results, it ought to rely not merely on the achievement of the Geschichtliche Grundbegrie itself, but rather on case studies that emerged from the same research context but resorted to social-historical discourse analysis46 a line of inquiry which, besides the already mentioned German initiatives, has also been emerging in France since the 1970s, inspired by the linguistic theories of Michel Pcheux, and whose proposition to interpret each utterance as a concretised usage of concepts and arguments deriving from the general themes and conventions of socio-political discourse47 is highly relevant.

a concept, but rather with what a concept is doing, behind the backs and above the heads of individuals. 43) Melvin Richter (1987), 247-63 and (1990), 38-70 also republished as Chapter 6 of Melvin Richter (1995). See, also, Melvin Richter (1999), 131-37 and (2000), 135-43. 44) Iain Hampsher-Monk (198) and Terence Ball (1998) tend to take the latter approach, while the former is represented by Martin van Gelderen in Iain Hampsher-Monk, Karin Tilmans, and Frank van Vree (1998), 37-50, 75-86, and 227-238. 45) Hans Erich Bdeker (2002), 7-28, and 73-122. 46) For instance, Willibald Steinmetz (1993). For the methodological considerations see 30-44. 47) See, among a huge number of studies, Rgine Robin (1973) and Rgine Robin, Jacques Guilhaumou, and Denise Maldidier (1986), 43-56 and (1994). Also, see Jacques Guilhaumou (2000), 15-38.

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A satisfactory account of the polemics around Begrisgeschichte would require a more extensive and detailed analysis. The reason why the present account serves the purpose of this essay is that it aims at identifying a signicant lack in the criticism levelled at Begrisgeschichte as well as in the attempts to build bridges between this approach and the Cambridge School: the centrality of the phenomenon of reception. While neither the fact nor its value has been disputed, reception has not appeared as a possible common platform between the two approaches. While this may have to do with the apparent insensitivity of Pocock and Skinner to the issue of reception, I hope to have demonstrated that this is not the case. Contrary to the more general suggestions made by Richter, this is a specic area in which identiable methodological pursuits in Begrisgeschichte may clearly have an impact on linguistic contextualism, and vice-versa, in a fashion similar to that of Rezeptionsgeschichte. Scholars have called attention to the fact that both Jauss and Koselleck encountered the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer in Heidelberg and this became a shared intellectual legacy which was put to highly creative usage by them. In its own way, Begrisgeschichte is a form of Rezeptionsgeschichte, charting the course of the reception of concepts, and examining the experience that they both contain and make possible, writes the English translator and editor of Kosellecks essays on historical theory.48 The term Erwartungshorizont, which Jauss appropriated from sociological literature (notably Mannheim) for literary studies,49 and its counterpart Erfahrungsraum, serve remarkably similar purposes in the two approaches, and in both of them were perhaps the keys to taking philosophical hermeneutics from its ontological and epistemological heights thus making it relevant for the practice of history.50 It is through them that the historicity of concepts evolves: the idea that texts, on the one hand, cease to operate as stable entities but become subject to transformation by the readings, re-readings, commentaries etc. which constitute the process of reception, while on the other hand they emerge as elements in the modication of the experience of readers. The idea of the existence of dierent Zeitschichten,

48) 49) 50)

Keith Tribe (2004), xviii. Cf. Melvin Richter (1995), 34-5. Hans Robert Jauss (1974), 36. An image used in Van Gelderen (1998), 229.

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time layers in any given concept, has the same eect by suggesting that, independently of their initial application, concepts are capable of acquiring and accumulating a variety of meanings, some of which are sifted out relatively soon but others survive long and converge or conict with new ones. To put it bluntly, concepts do not have histories, only their reception has a history, and it is only by recognizing this that it becomes possible to grasp conceptual change.51 Closely related to the framing of the history of concepts as the history of reception is Kosellecks fascination with translation and his stress on the importance of the comparative study of concepts in dierent languages, explained by reference to the fact that semantics concerns not language in general, but particular languages.52 He briey points to a few examples that open up an immense eld for comparisons, such as the virtual untranslatability of Bildung, or the diculty of Germanic and Slavic languages in rendering terminology of Latin derivation. However, a more systematic attempt to highlight the possibilities of the inter-lingual comparison of concepts inherent in translation is made by Ulrich Ricken in an article following Kosellecks in the same collection. Ricken discusses the discrepancy between Aufklrung and lumires, immediately visible in the hopeless struggle of French translators with the German term for instance, Mendelssohns famous 1784 title Was heit aufklren has been rendered as Que signie aufklren. Part of the diculty stems from the fact that while in French lumires was one among several important terms to denote the concept, Aufklrung had no rival. A fact that sprung, rather from the dierent character of the phenomenon itself, from the greater capacity of the German language to organize the lexical eld in a mono-centric fashion, thanks to the innite possibility of crafting composite words from the same root. Thus, Kants subtle distinction between in einem aufgeklrten Zeitalter and in einem Zeitalter der Aufklrung result and process can only be rendered in French by paraphrase. Next, and related, while aufklrer and Aufklrung were neologisms, lumires and clair belonged to the basic French vocabulary, frequently used in their concrete and complex sense, with the result that their application to the concept of enlightenment

51) 52)

For a concise statement, see Reinhart Koselleck (2002a). Reinhart Koselleck (2002a), 40.

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required (and still requires) additional contextual means.53 To be sure, the mere fact that Was ist Aufklrung? was chosen as a prize question demonstrates that the eld of meaning itself was unstable or, heavily contested even within one community of speakers, so it should be even less surprising to discover barriers in the way of the relevant vocabulary when transposed into a community of speakers with a dierent natural language. But the dierence between each of the connecting terms of the eld, and the relationships of synonymity, antonymity and complementarity that exist between them shows nothing less than the dierence of those contexts themselves, which is very nearly what comparative history is about. The recognition that historians of ideas should seriously reckon with translation as a path of reception in the history of ideas is certainly not new. Nevertheless, the past fteen years or so have witnessed an intensication of this interest, and in several studies some of the methodological assumptions outlined above have been explicitly or implicitly applied. Let us briey examine three such studies, very dierent in scope, in the chronological order of their subject matter. The rst one is a recent article by David Saunders on the translations of the works of Samuel Pufendorf by the Huguenot migr Jean Barbeyrac, which established the latters reputation as a pre-eminent translator of seventeenth-century Latin natural law texts into French.54 The title itself leaves no doubt that translation is regarded as adjustment, a strategic art, a weapon for serious struggle, in which the goal for the Protestant refugee was to reunite civil duties to religious morality and delimit state authority in the face of individual conscience a rather far cry from Pufendorf s radical separation of natural law from moral theology and his consequent secularization of civil authority for the sake of the protection of public peace. Saunders takes adjustment, explained by him with reference to the heterogeneous character of early-modern natural law, to be overwhelmingly a matter of the translators deliberate intervention, and illustrates this in several ways. First, some lexical and syntactic choices are adopted, not primarily in Barbeyracs own 1707 translation, but in the English edition of Pufendorf in 1717, which relied for the revision of the 1691 English

See Ulrich Ricken in Hans Erich Bdeker (2002), 49-72. See also Rolf Reichardt (1997), 879-999. 54) David Saunders (2003), 473-490.

53)

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text on Barbeyracs French version. Second, we are presented with Barbeyracs 1718 translation of and especially his response to Leibnizs critique of Pufendorf, which show him to be ambivalent between the both contenders: while distancing himself from Leibniz, by allowing conscience to pre-empt civil authority, these texts also jeopardize Pufendorf s strategy of legitimating an absolutist state that would not subordinate civil authority to confessional ends, and tend to re-insert natural law into moral theology. Third and last, Saunders discusses Barbeyracs discourses on morality and civil laws, published as appendices in the 1718 edition of Pufendorf s Les devoirs de lhomme et du citoyen, to arrive at a similar conclusion. The article successfully undermines the view that Barbeyrac was a mediator, both in the sense of presenting Pufendorf in a medium dierent from Latin, and in the sense of occupying a middle ground between the voluntarism of Pufendorf and the rationalism of Leibniz. It also enhances our appreciation both of the variety of natural law in the early Enlightenment, and adds to our understanding of the nuances of rival Enlightenments along the cleavage between civil and metaphysical philosophy.55 What it does not do, of course, is analyse the function, the process, the instrumentality of the very act of translation in all of this. Translation indeed functions as an excuse here, most probably not for Barbeyrac but denitely so for Saunders, and could be safely deleted from the title of an article which treats Barbeyrac as an independent natural law theorist polemicizing both with the author he happens to have translated and his chief opponent, a polemics presented as taking place largely outside the translated text. It is not asked why and to what extent this exercise of adjustment should seem to Barbeyrac himself as depending on his very substantial investment in the translation of Pufendorf, nor is it shown how it is pursued by the act of translation itself. Under such circumstances the question of the extent to which the linguistic and conceptual tools available for the translator played a role, besides his well-documented intentions, in determining the meaning of the translated text, cannot even be raised.56
Cf. Tim J. Hochstrasser (2000) and Ian Hunter (2001). It must be added that exactly this kind of historical semantics is carried out very eectively in another article by Saunders, co-authored with Ian Hunter, focusing on the notion and uses of state in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century English translations of Pufendorf. David Saunders and Ian Hunter (2003), 218-234.
56) 55)

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Such questions certainly occupy an important place in Fania OzSalzbergers ambitious book that traces the trajectories of Scottish civic discourse in eighteenth-century Germany.57 In many ways, this is a pioneering work in Enlightenment studies, bringing together subjects such as the ourishing of eighteenth-century Scottish studies and the debate over the plurality of the Enlightenment in national contexts, with the aim to provide a comparative history that draws upon the evolution from reception through translation. It explicitly relies on the Cambridge-style analysis of political languages (mainly its Pocockian version) with some methodological borrowings from Begrisgeschichte. The substantive achievement of the book is dened by Oz-Salzberger as having shown that religious language was capable of transforming a vocabulary of political action into a spiritual and inward-looking discourse, as part of an inadvertent shift of meaning in translated texts,58 while she strongly rejects any anity with the Sonderweg thesis: the story presented is one of the depoliticization of political ideas, but it is not a story of a straightforward rejection of liberal or radical political theory in favour of a conservative or reactionary status quo. . . . [it is] a transformation of a moderate statement of republican activism into a language of spiritual perfectibilism.59 In dening her unit of comparison, she shows that so many similarities between Scotland and Germany in the eld of national and historical consciousness, problems of identity, traditions of learning, social proles and intellectual character were anities bordering on dissimilarities, which congealed especially in the dierent character of politicization in the two countries, with the result that Germans lacked the contexts of a terminology that was new and controversial in Scotland too. This observation gives Oz-Salzberger the occasion to introduce her methodological principles. The concept of political language is vital for studying the German reception of Scottish texts, she argues, for translation in this case involves problems of transmitting a vocabulary and indeed a blend of several vocabularies of interdependent terms denoting particular traditions of thought.60 Elsewhere, a vocabulary is dened as

57) 58) 59) 60)

Fania Oz-Salzberger (1995). Fania Oz-Salzberger (1995), 27. Fania Oz-Salzberger (1995), 84. Fania Oz-Salzberger (1995), 40.

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a group of terms which are frequently repeated together, mutually elucidating, often syntactically or rhetorically complementary, its eect being that it gradually familiarizes the reader with a set of ideas which the author develops in the work and elicits verbal associations in which the meaning of the text is, in a way, encapsulated.61 Oz-Salzbergers project to study translation focusing on the question of whether such vocabularies retained their integrity and inner connections is proposed to go beyond earlier models of reception or rather, misreception, which she assumes most or all of the examined cases to have been. Indeed, she atly rejects Rezeptionsgeschichte (identied as a positivist account of circulation, reading or reaction) as well as post-modernist reception theories because they render the concept of misreception meaningless. Misreception is approached by her in terms of the authors intended meaning and is understood as its subversion or neglect by translators, arising not as a necessary corollary of reading, nor linked to bad reading or bad translation, but quite likely an outcome of multiple transmission, or the impossible, or limited, translatability, of certain key terms (while it is also acknowledged that various aspects of the original texts can facilitate misunderstanding or even deliberate mishandling).62 Several models of misreception are then presented. These include Gadamers deterministic model of how socio-political backwardness prevented Germans from grasping the moral meaning of the concept of common sense; Isaiah Berlins account of the ways in which German anti-rationalists, portrayed as radically free agents who deliberately translated Humes notion of belief (conviction arising out of custom, tradition or intuition) as Glaube (religious faith), thus turning Hume as an ally against himself ; Rudolf Vierhaus more nuanced approach to the selective reading of Montesquieu in Germany, which was partly intentional and partly conditioned by socio-political realities; and Peter Michelsens analysis of the intensication of Lawrence Sternes sentimental language through the German translators choice of words. Oz-Salzberger attempts to absorb the last two approaches into her own, which is dened by the study of political language. In putting this framework to motion, Oz-Salzberger is specically concerned with three concepts crucial for Ferguson who wrote his works in a
61) 62)

Fania Oz-Salzberger (1995), 140. Fania Oz-Salzberger (1995), 77-8 and 84.

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linguistic context of which he was very conscious, and evidently expected similar awareness from his readers. The concepts of civil society, public / national / political spirit, (active) pursuit, together with their corollaries (polished, polite, civil, civilized, etc.) constituted a terminological battleeld in contemporary Scotland, with Ferguson trying to bring out (restore) their distinctly (originally) political meaning: civic language was utilized by him to appropriate and redene both jurisprudential terms (civil society, civil liberty) and Addisonian language (politeness, polished, civility, renement).63 Against this background the question in regard to the reception concerns the extent to which a German reader in 1768 could follow [such] linguistic transactions. Oz-Salzbergers answer is, rst, that besides mere carelessness, and the uncertainty and instability of terms, the use of vaguely resembling alternatives disrupted the tight logic of connotations and associations, resulting in a confusing multiplicity and a mollication of thorny issues. Only because of these, much of Fergusons critique of non-civic vocabularies was lost in the German translations. In addition, words used from the recognizable German terminologies of Pietism, mainstream Protestantism and sentimentalism to render Fergusons key terms that dene civic activism further contributed to their depoliticization and to a shift towards spirituality: they introduced a new system of mutually elucidating terms which caused a gradual distancing from the authors original vocabulary. This was particularly the case with the terminology around Fergusons pursuit: the main factor responsible for the overall misreception became the cumulative misunderstanding of Fergusons idea that political life is a worthy object of pursuit for citizens exercising their free will. The translation helped
to detach pursuit [Streben] from politics, make the citizen into a Mensch, his mind into a Seele, and his immediate goals into Endzwecke. The insertion of a spiritual striving towards a distant perfection was an easy move within the same vocabulary [. . .] the Scottish civic vocabulary was lost in the process of German translation and reception [. . .] not only because several terms were very dicult to translate into German [. . .] but also, and primarily, because it no longer formed a vocabulary.64

63) 64)

Fania Oz-Salzberger (1995), 150. Fania Oz-Salzberger (1995), 165-6.

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As my chief interest here is the proper method employed in the interpretation of translated texts, I shall not be concerned with some of the aspects of Oz-Salzbergers work that have been contested by other scholars.65 As to the interpretative tools, her analysis is distinguished by a hardly paralleled sensitivity among historians towards the subtleties of the linguistic resources of the vocabularies available for each community of speakers, and in this sense it is a ne example to follow. This sensitivity, however, does not go together with her rather surprising description of Rezeptionsgeschichte as positivistic, and her strong views on misreception. Discrepancy can be noticed between the notion of mis-reception and the accent on the authors original intention on the one hand, and the subject matter of the book, on the other hand, which cannot be disentangled from prevailing contemporary conceptions of translation and the translators roles, not to mention the intentions on the recipient side, when the agents of reception rst take to the text. Why did they translate Ferguson? What did they expect to bring out of him? Oz-Salzberger, who takes due notice of the standards of translation in the eighteenth century, also gives compelling answers to these questions in the subsequent chapters of her book. These answers do not seem to depend in any way on the notion of misreception, which, at the same time by the nature of its semantics tends to represent the recipients as mistaken or wrong. My third example is somewhat beyond the chronological scope of this study, yet it is highly instructive in a variety of ways. In his article on Translation and the Colonial Imaginary,66 Abdelmajid Hannoum aims to show how a fragment of Ibn Khaldns Ibar, translated in the early 1850s by William de Slane as Histoire des berbres, was discovered by French Orientalism in the context of the colonization of Algeria and converted into a text with colonial categories. More generally, Hannoum investigates how colonialism introduced and established a specic imaginary by transforming local knowledge into colonial knowledge, which also assured colonial domination after the collapse of the colonial enterprise and shaped

These include her unqualied construing of Ferguson as a representative of republican civic activism within his Scottish context, and the concomitant assumptions that if Germany was to possess such a tradition it would depend on the import of Ferguson for it, and by failing at this it would be and remain bereft of it. 66) Abdelmajid Hannoum (2003).

65)

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postcolonial identities. Hannoum draws a great deal of inspiration from theories of language and translation Ricoeur, Whorf and Jakobson gure prominently in his citations in arguing that the activity of translation is not to be understood as the reproduction of a foreign text, nor as the transmission of a message, nor its betrayal, but as domestication: an interpretation in which canons articulated by the recipient culture are applied. As such, it is not only an interpretation but also the production of a new text, the foreign text and the translated text being expressions of imaginary structures that are products of dierent historical moments. In the given case, Hannoum argues, colonial questions and answers are regulated by a European epistemology specic to the nineteenth century, as distinct from that found in the foreign text translated. He shows how a discourse about Ibn Khaldn emerged to create this context, in which he was distanced from his environment on account of his rationality and modernity qualities attributed to him on the authority of European standards held superior by French scholars. The intervention required for this canonization was performed in De Slanes introduction, to which Hannoum pays considerable attention: the introduction, which reveals the rectication and the correction of the author as an avowed aim of the translation, is represented as a discursive strategy to determine the reading of the text a cognitive manipulation to make the reader understand the text as intended by the translator. De Slanes narrative in the introduction, stressing that before being subjugated to the Arabs, North-Africa had been part of the Roman Empire, and expressing the opposition between Occident and Orient, seems to have become fundamental in French colonial historiography. Hannoum, however, is not content with the translators explicit claims put forth in the meta-discourse of the introduction. He also attempts to analyse some of the implicit claims made through the use of specic keywords in the translated text itself. These include, in the rst place, race and domination, which are claimed to represent quite unambiguously a language of conict and conquest, superiority and hierarchy which hallmarked the racial ideology of Gobineau overtones which are, however, missing from the original terminology of Ibn Khaldn, whose account was polemical in his time precisely because of being inclusive and integrative in representing the Arab conquest of North Africa as a reunion of two groups of the same origin (the other being the Berbers). By contrast, the translato-

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rial strategy was to make the history of North Africa that of a struggle between the Arabs and the Berbers, with the latter being consistently represented by contemporary ethnographers as primitive Europeans who have retained their racial specicity as well as numerical superiority. Ibn Khaldn, as it were, is turned inside out in the translation. On the whole, this conclusion is not unconvincing. Hannoums article has formidable strengths in the consistent and fruitful application of language and translation theories to his subject matter, and in the subtle analysis of the translators introduction as a genre with features that can be generalized. It stands on less rm ground when it comes to examining De Slanes use of the central categories, especially race. It is simply taken for granted that when using this term, the translator had in mind Gobineaus idea of races as marked by inherent, hereditary and permanent qualities, as well as inequality and antagonism vis--vis one another. The potential objection that Gobineaus Essai sur lingalit des races humaines, rst published in 1853, could hardly have been available for De Slane before he completed his translation, is oset by the claim that Gobineaus views became inuential not so much because they were novel, but because they were widely accepted even before he articulated them a claim supported from an article by Hannah Arendt published in 1944, hardly a time when the notion of race could have been a subject of dispassionate academic inquiry. On these grounds, existing alternatives within the contemporary European discourse on race, potentially available for De Slane,67 are neglected, and it is Gobineaus concept that is contrasted to the semantics of the Arab terms conveyed in the translation by race (mainly jl, in Ibn Khaldn a human group dened in time and by culture) with predictable results. But denitions of race not too remote from those of jl inherited from the eighteenth century could have been still available to De Slane, and before the above-mentioned conclusions are reached, it ought to be shown that he decided not to avail himself of these options. To be sure, in the lack of a sketch of the Begrisgeschichte of race in the early to mid-nineteenth century context, this is hardly possible to show. A survey of three highly respectable pieces of scholarship on translation in the history of ideas reveals that the methods applied in the study of this

67)

Robert Bernasconi (2000) and (2001).

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eld can be further developed and rened, especially in regard to its suitability to the peculiar features of the eld itself. Thus, in the closing lines of this article, I present a brief proposal of an approach based on my sketch of translation theories in the early modern period that could be adopted by linguistic contextualism, Begrisgeschichte or Rezeptionsgeschichte. Intentionality must be taken seriously. However, this stance would compel us to regard translation as an act of reading which becomes an independent speech act substantially conditioned by the translators historical circumstances: it prioritizes the intentions of the translator over those of the author of the text in its interpretation. This may be common sense, but there are important consequences. I suggest that even a decision on the part of a translator to conne him/herself to the re-enactment of the authors intention is, rst of all, an exception rather than the rule and, second, must also be understood in terms of an agenda specic to the translators historical context. Even in such cases at best it is only partially true that the original text sets a standard for the translator; therefore, any interpretation that explicitly or implicitly assesses translations in terms of such a standard, seems to disregard an important reality. Whether a translation is faithful or represents a case of misreception a heavily loaded term that carries value judgements and thus should be avoided , what one should be concerned with is the grounds on which texts arising from the authors realm of experience (including his/her being embedded in discursive traditions and intentions to use, promote or challenge them) and shaped to answer questions and oer solutions belonging to his/her Erwartungshorizont, still seemed suitable for pursuing agendas peculiar to the translators time and place; and the extent to which the reasons for selecting such texts as vehicles for dierent strategies have to do with properties inherent in the text, or with the translators agenda. It must be further considered that besides the conscious endeavour of translators to perform the act of translation in adjustment to their space of experience and their horizon of expectations, in many cases, the character of the vocabulary, the idiom and the grammatical structures of the natural language which is the target language of the translation, would leave them at a loss in rendering those structures which provide the discourse of the original with any degree of coherence it might possess, and compel them to look for substitute solutions. These substitutes, however, may well belong to discursive (ideological) traditions dierent from those in which the original text was conceived, resulting in its transposition through the subversion either of its

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consistency, or its purpose, or both. The analysis of synonyms, antonyms, complementary terms, terminological correspondences and discrepancies within and between elds of meaning or concepts, as they become objects of reception, is a feasible way to trace such transpositions.68

Bibliographical References
Ball, Terence. 1998. Conceptual History and the History of Political Thought. In History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives, edited by I. Hampsher-Monk, K. Tilmans, and F. van Vree. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Berding, Helmut. 1976. Begrisgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte. Historische Zeitschrift 223: 98-110. Bernasconi, Robert, ed. 2001. Concepts of Race in the Eighteenth Century. Bristol: Thoemmes Press. Bernasconi, Robert and Tommy Lee Lott, eds. 2000. The Idea of Race. Indianapolis: Hackett. Bevir, Mark. 1992. The errors of linguistic contextualism. History and Theory 31: 276-298. . 1999. The Logic of the History of Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bdeker, Hans Erich, ed. 2002. Begrisgeschichte, Diskursgeschichte, Metapherngeschichte. Gttingen: Wallstein Verlag. Brunner, Otto, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, eds. 1972-1978. Geschichtliche Grundbegrie. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, I-VIII. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Busse, Dietrich. 1987. Historische Semantik, Analyse eines Programms. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Erickson, Mark, Austin Harrington and Andreas Reckwitz. 2002. Constructing the Past: Review Symposium on Bevirs The Logic of the History of Ideas. History of the Human Sciences 15: 99-133. Fish, Stanley. 1980. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretative Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Garth, Sir Samuel. 1720. Preface. In Ovids Metamorphoses. London: Jacob Tonson. Gelderen, Martin van. 1998. Between Cambridge and Heidelberg. Concepts, Languages and Images in Intellectual History. In History of Concepts: Comparative Perspectives, edited by I. Hampsher-Monk, K. Tilmans and F. van Vree. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Gordon, Daniel. 1999. Modernity and Its Discontents: Some Critical Thoughts on Conceptual History. History of European Ideas 25: 23-29. To be sure, the test of the pudding is eating. A monographic study by the present author is in progress on the reception of the works of the Scottish historian William Robertson on national, European and global history in eighteenth-century Germany through translations and commentary. These two articles have attempted to outline the methodological requirements for such a study.
68)

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