Table Of ContentWORDS IN TIME
Through questions such as ‘What is power?’, ‘How are revolutions generated?’,
‘Does public opinion really exist?’, ‘What does terrorism mean?’ and ‘When are
generations created?’,WordsinTime scrutinizesthefundamental concepts bywhich
weconfermeaningtothehistoricalandsocialworldandwhattheyactuallysignify,
analysing their formation and use in modern thought within both history and the
social sciences.
Inthisvolume,FrancescoBenignoexaminestheorigins anddevelopmentofthe
words we use, critiquing the ways in which they have traditionally been employed
in historical thinking and examining their potential usefulness today. Rather than
being a general inventory or a specialized dictionary, this book analyses a selection
of words particularly relevant not only in the idiom and jargon of the social sciences
and history, but also in the discourse of ordinary people.
Exploring new trends in the historical field of reflection and representing a call
for a new, more conscious, historical approach to the social world, this is valuable
reading for all students of historical theory and method.
Francesco Benigno is Professor of History at Teramo University, Italy, and the
author of several books, including Mirrors of Revolution: Conflict and Political Identity
in Early Modern Europe (Brepols, 2010).
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WORDS IN TIME
A Plea for Historical Re-thinking
Francesco Benigno
Translated by David Fairservice
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mi Economic
o Economic
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EcEconomic
Firstpublished2017
byRoutledge
2ParkSquare,MiltonPark,Abingdon,OxonOX144RN
andbyRoutledge
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RoutledgeisanimprintoftheTaylor&FrancisGroup,aninformabusiness
©2017FrancescoBenigno
TherightofFrancescoBenignotobeidentifiedasauthorofthisworkhasbeen
assertedbyhiminaccordancewithsections77and78oftheCopyright,Designs
andPatentsAct1988.
Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereprintedorreproducedor
utilizedinanyformorbyanyelectronic,mechanicalorothermeans,now
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Trademarknotice:Productorcorporatenamesmaybetrademarksorregistered
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infringe.
TranslatedintoEnglishbyDavidFairservice
BritishLibraryCataloguinginPublicationData
AcataloguerecordforthisbookisavailablefromtheBritishLibrary
LibraryofCongressCataloginginPublicationData
Names:Benigno,Francesco,author.|Fairservice,David,translator.
Title:Wordsintime:apleaforhistoricalre-thinking/FrancescoBenigno;
translatedbyDavidFairservice.
Othertitles:Paroleneltempo.English|Pleaforhistoricalre-thinking
Description:1stedition.|Abingdon,Oxon,NewYork,NY:Routledge,
[2017]|Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
Identifiers:LCCN2016056793|ISBN9781138943759(pbk.:alk.paper)|
ISBN9781138943742(hardback:alk.paper)|ISBN9781315208817
Subjects:LCSH:Historiography.|Socialsciences--Historiography.
Classification:LCCD13.B4185132013|DDC901/.4--dc23
LCrecordavailableathttps://lccn.loc.gov/2016056793
ISBN:978-1-138-94374-2(hbk)
ISBN:978-1-138-94375-9(pbk)
ISBN:978-1-315-20881-7(ebk)
TypesetinBembo
byTaylor&FrancisBooks
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction: Writing history at a time of memory 1
PARTI
Rethinking Early Modern Europe 19
1 Violence 21
2 Popular culture 41
3 Public opinion 68
4 Revolutions 81
PARTII
Rethinking Modernity 97
5 Identity 99
6 Power 121
7 Generations 139
8 Terrorism 157
Index 189
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This English edition is considerably different from the original Spanish edition (Las
palabras del tempo. Un ideario para pensar históricamente, Ediciones Cátedra 2013) and
from the Italian edition (Parole nel tempo. Un lessico per pensare la storia, Viella 2013).
The present book is divided into two parts, the first dealing with early modern
European history and the second with contemporary history. Two chapters (‘Stato
moderno’ and ‘Mediterraneo’) have been omitted and an entirely new chapter on
‘Terrorism’ has been added. Moreover, the chapter on ‘Identity’ has been partially
reworked. These changes were all suggested by Routledge’s anonymous readers
whom I also thank for their very stimulating and helpful comments on other
aspects of my book. The responsibility for any errors and omissions is naturally
mine alone.
The idea of this English edition arose in conversations with Kenneth J. Bindas
and Marcello Fantoni whom I thank for their encouragement. My gratitude also
goes to Robert Black for the friendly advice which he gave me during the gesta-
tion of the book. Finally, I am grateful to my translator David Fairservice for his
patience indisentangling and rendering intoEnglishthe original Italiantext which,
I admit, was at times somewhat knotty. Just at the end of the translation, in June
2016, David sadly passed away, after a short and relentless illness. He was a very
pleasant person, provided with an acute sense of humour and a passion for the
Italian language and culture. Even sick he continued the translation till the end,
aided by his friend Dugald McLellan, whom I thank also for his help. This edition
is dedicated to David’s memory.
INTRODUCTION
Writing history at a time of memory
In orderto observe theworld, evenbeforeweare able toreflect onit, weneed, as
Walter Lippmann wrote, to categorize it: the concepts we use determine the shape
of things, how we see them and even the choice of things that we see (and hence
of the things that we do not see): ‘For the most part we do not see first and then
define, we define first and then see.’1 For Lippmann, who developed his thinking
on the basis of an average citizen who acquires knowledge of the world through
the media, the perception of social reality depends on what we already know and
on the preconceptions which we have interiorized, so that such knowledge is lar-
gely an elaboration of the already known, a re-cognition. Lippmann’s classic insight
essentiallyconcernsaveragepeoplecontendingwiththecomplexityoftheworldas
it is portrayed by the media but in fact even experts, commentators and social sci-
entists are engaged in the same discourse: it is a problem which they are neither
free from nor immune to.
Within these latter groups, the reflection about the role of fundamental con-
cepts, which serve as beacons to illuminate reality and hence to study it, has not
always developed coherently. Especially among historians, there long prevailed a
traditional empirical approach, which was often inspired by a conception of the
writing of history as an artisanal product, as an artistic rather than a scientific arte-
fact, and hence subject to scant conceptual formalization. Beyond this traditional
empiricism, time-resistant theoretical positions have been advanced over the years
which has stressed the transparency of sources, their direct connectedness to an
objective reality, the reality which was coherently ordered by being expressed in a
written form and thus needed no more than being explored through tried and
tested methods of philology. In practice this approach not infrequently entailed a
simple appeal to common sense. On the other hand, historicism’s clear insistence
that thereshouldbeanexusbetweenhistory andtheoryandthathistoricalenquiry
should therefore be characterized in terms of problems came under increasing
2 Introduction
pressure as it faced a decline in ethico-political social history with its concomitant
theoretical-idealisticorientations.Soitwouldhappenthatthelongheydayofsocial
history, despite its solid theoretical framework (however anachronistic it may
appear from the present-day vantage point), generally gave little heed to the cate-
gories which it employed, that is, the categories used both by the historical players
and by the historian as investigator.
Itmaybeusefulatthispointtorecalltheintellectualdisputeinitiatedbythefirst
important revisionist historian of the French Revolution, Alfred Cobban, whose
target was historians whose goals were, in his words, to ‘decerebrate history’.2
Cobbanopenedthediscussioninthe1950satatimeoftheascendancyofeconomic
andsocialhistorybasedonquantitativeresearchanddrawinginspirationfromMarc
BlochandLucienFebvre’sacclaimed‘Annales’,thenundertheeditorshipofFernand
Braudel.3 Cobban’s dissent from the prevailing approach to writing history –
mirrored a critique advanced against social discipline of his time, that is, both
functionalist sociology and structuralist anthropology – which promoted recon-
structions of past events which marginalized the role of the conscious ideas of the
leading players and which ascribed human actions to the play of deep invisible
forces, generally below the level of consciousness, which, although they could not
be presented as laws of nature, somehow mimicked their strength and ineluctability.
These were presumed to be social or socio-historical laws whose promptings indi-
viduals, surrounded by a network of constraints and constrictions, were, willy-nilly
and often unwittingly, obliged to follow.
Since then the debate aiming to reassert the role of the ideas of historical
players, has made such headway that it now seems taken for granted. And this
provides the necessary starting point for any reconstruction respecting the past as
viewed in ‘its own terms’. In the last two decades of the twentieth century the
ongoing debate generated a marked sensitivity for the so-called privilege of
the past and an aversion for the old vice of anachronism which often accom-
panied it. This generally implied not only a greater respect for the past as seen in
itsown terms (mindfulofOttoBrunner’slesson,oneistemptedtoadd,apastre-read
using its own lexicon) but also a keener awareness of the conscious opinions of
its historical players, of their political options and of their value systems.4 It is this
third facet which was the trump card of revisionist objections to traditional social
history. The discovery of the remoteness of the past, now seen as ‘a foreign
country’,5 led to a crisis of the taxonomic confidence with which historians,
borrowing models from contemporary sociological and anthropological theories,
ordered the world.
This antiteleological bias was accompanied by a growing awareness – among
both historians and social scientists – of the need to reassess their own conceptual
baggage, the tools of their trade and the interpretative instruments on which they
relied. The journey was often fraught with problems. More than half a century
after Cobban’s entry into the debate, historians and social scientists are certainly no
longerprisoners(butnotinperpetuity,notonceforall,itshouldberemembered)of
the functionalist and structuralist models which claimed to be able to explain social
Introduction 3
reality. This is not to say that in the meantime there has been a thorough-going
scrutiny of the legacy of received ideas which, lying as they do more or less below
consciousness, orient the choices of investigators through mechanisms not dissimilar
tothosewhichswaytheideasandactionsofsocial(orhistorical)players.Thereisstill
validity in Pierre Bourdieu’s warning that we should not fudge the knotty problem
ofquestioningtheconceptsweourselvesuse.Indeed,hewentsofarastodefinethis
crucial stage as an imperative condition for collective and individual lucidity.
Hence it was a realization of the ingrained relationship with the authoritative,
intellectual legacy which becomes a discipline’s standardized language, and its
receivedwisdom:weneedsuchreflexivemindfulness,asheputsit,soastoavoidboth
unwitting obedience and unintentional repetition.6 As well as this new awareness, it
was also a way of distancing oneself from the passive and subservient role so aptly
described by Michel de Certeau:7 traditionally the historian, like a know-all placed
auprès du pouvoir, fulfils the mimetic function of retracing the prince’s moves and
intentions. Over time similar servile functions were subjected to criticism by other
social sciences, in depth by anthropology and, perhaps less thoroughly, by
sociology.
Such general willingness to rethink one’s position was accompanied by the
acceptance of the fact that no intellectual construct can be completely separated
from a Dasein, from a social being basically defined by forming part of a group, the
intellectuals, who are traditionally entrusted with the production and reproduction
of culture; they are a group accorded legitimacy and special distinctive signs, and
divided into ‘fields’, groupings of disciplines organized by corporations, academic
institutions and professional associations; the various fields are crossed and in part
sustained byauthoritative traditions whichprovide each disciplinenot only withits
ownlanguagebutalsowiththeconceptualframeworkwhichdefinesthem,organizes
them and accords them social legitimacy, a legitimacy which recently has certainly
been dented and appears more and more in jeopardy.
In the case of history (and also of the social sciences), it was a period marked by
the emergence of what has been called the ‘linguistic turn’ and concomitantly of a
growing awareness of the profoundly discursive nature of all social analysis, which
is generally based on documentary materials themselves organized on a discursive
model.Significantcontributionstothisneworientationcamefromthehermeneutics
of Paul Ricoeur and Hans Georg Gadamer, from the conceptual analysis of John
G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner, and, above all, from Reinhart Koselleck’s
long-term historical-conceptual research, Begriffsgeschichte, as realized in the monu-
mental Lexicon, conceived and edited with Otto Brunner and Werner Conze, and
in an important series of essays from the same or a later period.8 For Koselleck, as
weknow,theconceptualsphereisbothindicativeandresumptiveofsocialchange.
Through the evolution of concepts, their semantic shifts, the rise of new words
and the transformation of terms already in use, it is possible to detect changes,
especiallythosewhichmarkanepoch.ClearlyBegriffsgeschichtedoesnotexhaustthe
entire range of historical research. Koselleck was determined not to fall into a kind
of panlinguistic idealism and he stressed the presence of non-linguistic primary
