Journal of Political Ideologies

ISSN: 1356-9317 (Print) 1469-9613 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjpi20

Ideology and history

Bo Stråth

To cite this article: Bo Stråth (2006) Ideology and history, Journal of Political Ideologies, 11:1,
23-42, DOI: 10.1080/13569310500395859
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13569310500395859

Published online: 08 Aug 2006.

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Journal of Political Ideologies (February 2006),
11(1), 23–42

Ideology and history

BO STRÅTH

European University Institute

ABSTRACT Ideologies can be seen as cognitive structures with legitimizing

functions. There is no principled or very clear demarcation between them and
other knowledge structures, although there clearly are differences. In the old
understanding ideology was seen in terms of some kind of representation. There
was something behind the ideology, and the ideology made this ‘something’
reappear. The erosion of the concept of representation during last decades has
concurred with the erosion of the concept of ideology. This is not to say that
ideologies have disappeared. The language of globalization and the ideas of
clashes of civilizations are sufficient evidence of the role of ideologies, in the form
of master narratives, with totalizing ambitions or pretensions of being the
explanation of the world. However, the analysis of ideologies has become much
more complex. Instead of taking ideologies as pre-given they must be critically
deconstructed and contextualized. Their emergence must be historicized and their
appearance must be understood much more in terms of opposition, discontinuities
and contradictions, internally as well as externally, than in terms of cohesion and
continuity.

Trends in historiography: A few methodological points of departure

Ideologies can be seen as cognitive structures with legitimizing functions. There is
no principle or very clear demarcation from other knowledge structures, although
there clearly are differences. Ideologies escape definition in the Nietzscheian sense
when Nietzsche argued that what is definable has no history. There is no external
point ex post from whence the historian can analyse ideologies as intellectual
historians used to believe when they studied the diachronic flow of ideas through
history. Historians as well as all other social scientists are necessarily part of the
language game they investigate under the name of ideology.

Correspondence Address: Bo Stråth, European University Institute, Florence, Italy.

ISSN 1356-9317 print; ISSN 1469-9613 online/06/010023–42 q 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13569310500395859
bo stråth

This chapter will begin with a discussion of some trends in academic

historiography which bear on the question of ideologies, and then continue with
the question of the analytical implications of these trends.
In recent decades there has been a shift in the methodology of academic
historiography from a focus on the quality of the sources towards the narrative
framework of (the) history. At the crux of the new approach is the interpretation of
sources and their assembly as narratives. The earlier approach was characterized
by a myopic source criticism, which stopped at the sources and never really
questioned the ways in which they were assembled into narratives. The ways in
which this composition is rendered are as biased as the sources on which the
narratives are based. For this reason critical scrutiny must shift to another level
instead of ending with the sources.
Hayden White’s path-breaking Metahistory 1973 demonstrated the ambiguity
and the multi-interpretative dimension in narrative structures in a provocative
ironic trope.1 He moved the focus from the sources as such towards their
emplotment. He connected not only to Nietzsche but also to the philosophy of
Spinoza and, in particular, Vico. When the book was first published it was
generally rejected and marginalized by academic history. Today one can say that,
if not generally, it is at least widely, accepted. Metahistory alluded, of course, to
metaphysics. History is basically ideology, was White’s conclusion. History is not
the past per se, or, as Leopold von Ranke formulated his task in his history of the
Romance and Germanic peoples in 1824, wie es eigentlich gewesen, but a
reflection on the past from the present (see later).
After a decade of silence historians began to connect to and develop Hayden
White’s perspective. In one specific sense—that of White’s emphasis on the
(biased) role of language—Quentin Skinner’s seminal work The Foundations of
Modern Political Thought in 1978 can be seen in this vein of contextualizing and
breaking down grand narratives and ideologies.2 However, his point of departure
was rather Anglo-American philosophy of language, in particular speech act
theory (see later). Together with J. G. A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn and others he had
begun to rewrite the history of Western political thought by reconstructing the
precise context and meaning of words and ideas in the past, and showing how they
have changed their shape and colour over time, like chameleons, so as to adapt to
new circumstances and new deeds.3
The influential social historian Lawrence Stone was one of the first to comment
on the development towards a growing interest in the narrative as a construction.
In 1981 he published his The Past and the Present Revisited where, in a long
historiographic perspective, he noticed the growing attention to the role of the
narrative in history writing.4 The idea of ‘scientific history’ as formulated by
Ranke was based on the study of new source materials. It was assumed that close
textual criticism of the hitherto undisclosed records buried in state archives would
once and for all establish the facts of political history. Ranke’s idea became
a dogma during the period from the 1870s to the 1930s through the
professionalization of academic history writing, by means of the development
of precise rules for source criticism. The long-term outcome of this

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professionalization process was an ever more myopic practice in the selection of

research problems. Larger contexts got lost in the quest for details in the name of
critique. This trend profoundly influenced academic historians well into the 1960s.
However, Stone paid less attention to the simultaneous development where
historians themselves were the main constructors of national master narratives. In
a contradictory way myopic source criticism went together with macro designs of
national mythology. Such designs were outlined in close connection to Darwinian
evolution theories. History as the evolution of the fittest was mobilized in the
service of the nation. History took on the proportion of cultural morphology
where, in the wake of Hegel (Nietzsche: ‘Without Hegel no Darwin’),5 the nation
became the evolution of reason. History as evolving reason out of pre-given
structures was a key dimension of the national master narratives. Nineteenth-
century Enlightenment discourse meant the slow transformation of moral
philosophy into a range of separate discourses, the social sciences, which became
increasingly distinct relative both to natural science and to literary discourse. In
this process of radical epistemic change, historical reasoning, which had formed a
central dimension of moral philosophy, came to form a discursive realm of its
own, separate from philosophy and separate from the social sciences. History
emerged as an academic discipline with its focus on the European experience of
the formation of a range of nation states. Universalistic commitments inherent in
the Enlightenment were abandoned. European historians narrowed their focus and
wrote narratives about the trajectories of individual nations. History largely came
to be a scholarly exercise that confirmed the emergence of the European nation
states.6
Moreover, the myopic approach as described by Stone was challenged in the
1930s through attempts to develop macro perspectives on historical processes
connected to theories in sociology, economy, anthropology, psychology and other
social sciences. In particular the French academic school around the journal of
Annales established in 1929 was influential, but there was also a growing attention
to Marxist theories. The first challenge in that respect came already around 1900
with the first German Methodenstreit about the agenda of Karl Lamprecht to
develop a universal cultural history with generalizing ambitions where a sequence
of mental periods succeeded each other in German history (Deutsche Geschichte
1 – 12, 1891 – 1909). The bitter quarrel surrounding his work ended with the
rejection of Lamprecht’s approach, but he became a source of inspiration for the
French Annales School.
This social science orientation of academic historiography broke through in the
1960s and the 1970s. An important battle in this break-through dealt with
positivism and the issue of objectivity. Ironically, rather than critically confronting
master narratives of national greatness, the social theory connection had the
unforeseen effect of confirming such histories about the emergence of the
European welfare states as national communities of destiny, and they did it just
before or when the welfare state began to crumble.
More or less concurrent with that breakthrough, the perspective implicit in the
connection to social science theories was challenged and undermined. Although

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Hayden White began as a historian the challenge was formulated in other

disciplines such as literature and philosophy. In particular French philosophy
emphasized the role of language and hermeneutics in opposition to socio-
economic determinism. From this opposition the concept of post-modernism
emerged in distinction to the modernization theories which underpinned
mainstream social science.7 In the 1980s historians began to connect to the
critique of modernization theories. They drew on a growing disillusionment with
economic, demographic and ecological determinist models of historical
explanation, ‘cliometrics’, i.e. history through quantification, with ambitions to
demonstrate the general in the unique, and ideas of prime movers in historical
processes. The growing distance from social science theories and the new interest
in language and narrative structures was concurrent with a growing disconnection
from the historical dimensions in social sciences.
An influential work quickly following Lawrence Stone’s analysis of the trends
in academic historiography, in which he discerned the contours of the linguistic
turn, was written by Lynn Hunt, who described in her study of the French
revolution how words came ‘in torrents’. Words have a unique, magical quality,
she argued. Revolutionary language during the French revolution was charismatic.
Wherever names were identified with Old Regime values, they were supplanted by
new revolutionary appellations. Language did not simply reflect the reality of
revolutionary changes, ‘but rather was itself transformed in the process of making
a revolution’. Language, so to speak, participated in the very transition.
Revolutionary rhetoric opened the field of politics to its broadest possible limits.
One of the initial accomplishments of the new revolutionary rhetoric was its
invention of the Ancient Regime. Once French society was rhetorically divided
into a new nation and an ancient or former regime, the revolution had been put in
motion. The revolutionary discourse was not fashioned by a class in the Marxist
sense, but a ‘language of class struggle’ emerged nevertheless. In comparison, in
the American revolutionary rhetoric the conservative or reactionary (British)
forces were experienced as much more distant and less palpable. Therefore, the
American Revolution did not foster the development of a revolutionary tradition;
instead it fed into constitutionalism and liberal politics. The difference in France
was the emphasis on rejecting all models from the national past. The specific
French rhetoric of revolution made the Revolution revolutionary. Without the
conviction and ability to act on their will to be new, the revolutionaries would not
have been able to found modern politics. The revolutionary rhetoric broke through
the confines of past politics by positing the existence of a new community rather
than the revival of a purer, former one.8
In the new perspective language and its key component, concepts, were seen as
developed by social actors to establish interpretative frameworks and identify
important problems, and propose resolutions to these problems, in order to come to
terms with modernity and the future. The outcome of these processes was
increasingly seen as an open issue which could not be predetermined. The
outcome was emergent not causative. The concepts which emerged in such
processes produced interests and meaning. Meaning was seen as multidimensional

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and relationally formed in an existing discursive field, at the same time as new
fields are created. Meaning is contingent. Positive definitions are dependent on
negative ones and vice versa.
One important conclusion of contributions to the debate by Gareth Stedman
Jones and Joan Scott was that a concept such as ‘class’ was established through
distinction and exclusion as much as through inclusion. ‘Class’ and other similar
identification categories were seen as politically constructed. Therefore, they had
to be relativized and historicized instead of being reified. Instead of being seen as
objective structures an sich, they were seen as potential, which could be mobilized
through language. Only in that way did a concept such as class become a useful
analytical tool. Class should not be found in ‘objective’ material structures but in
the language of political struggle. The language determined the conditions for
political coalitions and produced comparability between different social groups.
Language in this sense was not seen as enumeration of words but as the production
of meaning through distinction and separation. Political movements develop
tactically, not logically, through improvisation in the search for support and
through incorporation and adjustment of different ideas to their specific goals.
They are a mixture of interpretations and programmes, rather than being uniform
intellectual orders free from contradiction.9
If a concept like ‘class’ is treated as a discursive rather than an ontological
reality, the implication is that languages of class are explained through the nature
of politics. Gareth Stedman Jones argued that concepts like ‘experience’ and
‘consciousness’, as their usage had developed among historians, concealed
the problematical nature of language itself.10 (In particular E P Thompson,
in his influential book on the English working class emphasized the role of
experience, where class emerged in a huge learning process.)11 Language seemed,
in the usage of historians, to be a simple medium through which ‘experience’—
and cumulatively derived from ‘experience’, ‘class consciousness’—found
expression, referring to some primary interior reality. The starting point of the
analysis as a rule was the concept of class, where different expressions of class
were measured against socio-economically derived conceptions of class positions.
The implicit assumption was that opposing and pre-existing interests found their
rational expression in the political arena. From this point of departure various
ideologies, in particular the big three: socialism, liberalism and conservatism,
were seen in their transfigured light. Stedman Jones no doubt had a point when he
argued that historians should look at changes in the political discursive struggle
itself to explain changes in political practice.
The main conclusion of some, but far from all, historians around 1990, 15– 20
years after Metahistory, was that interests and their ideological expressions are
constructed and established in the discursive field, in the political struggle about
concepts, and through the introduction of new concepts and metaphors. Interests
and ideologies were thus seen as linguistically constructed. The persuasive
capacity of concepts determines how and which interests are expressed and how
they are mediated. Historians should pay much more immediate attention to the
nature of the discursive struggles themselves, to the cultural practices, and to

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the developments of concepts and semantic fields. Social change was a matter of
groups and classes possessing different and sometimes incompatible political
languages with widely varying provenance. This perspective entailed an analysis
of the conditions in which groups and discourses of very different points of
departure enter into relationships of stable coexistence or even mutual
reinforcement at particular moments, while elsewhere, under similar conditions,
they lead to conflict and polarization.
This methodological shift towards a focus on language and narrative does not
deny the continued importance of a critical approach to the sources and does not
reject the existence of events and facts. Methodological rules of how to critically
evaluate sources are still valid. The events and the facts based on the events can be
documented. No serious historian basing his or her work on sources would deny
the fact that, for instance, the Holocaust really happened.
On the other side, the fact that history is interpretation and translation means
that there is no zero point of absolute security. However, this does not mean a
collapse into the other extreme of total relativity and that anything goes. The
growing plurality of views of the past does not mean that there is no possibility to
discern what is more or less credible. The emancipation from the straitjacket of the
quest for the ultimate and absolute truth, through a growing role for the critique of
how narratives are constructed, allows for a pluralist and vital debate.
Deconstruction of old myths is tantamount to the reconstruction of new
perspectives, in which, in an ongoing process, the past is seen from an ever
changing present. The new perspectives sooner or later become the targets of new
deconstruction. This is a view on historical construction, which is more realistic
and less naı̈ve than those preceding it. Its proponents did not believe that history
was little more than a matter of translation and construction rather than past
authenticity, and therefore ended with source criticism. History is not the past but
about the past. History is a translation of the past into our time, an act of
interpretation. This translation necessitates a critical approach not only to the
sources but also to their narrative embedding, and to the act of interpretation.
The slowly emerging shift of the methodological focus that followed in the
1980s with a distinct break-through in the 1990s meant a growing attention to
history as construction. History as translation and construction, in turn, was seen as
a key dimension of meaning-producing processes of the cultural construction of
community. Collective memory became an academic and political buzz-word
closely related to another buzz-word: identity. Both concepts had a pronounced
historical dimension. At the core of the methodological shift was a growing
attention to the role of language in social transformation. This approach
emphasized that social cohesion and community are invented rather than
discovered, that they are constructed rather than existing ‘out there’ and derivable,
for instance, from real economic structures.
The linguistic or rhetorical turn, which argues that it is language that sets the
limits when realities are constructed, brought the insight that there is a connection
between myth and historiography through the form of narration, through the very
way in which the story is told. Historiography is much more dependent upon its

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 ideology and history

literary-textual organization than was recognized in more conventional views.

Historiography cannot, as a matter of fact, be easily separated from myths and
myth building. In the most radical versions of the linguistic/rhetorical
methodological approach, historiography and mythography become more or less
identical. Such views, however, are much older than the rhetorical turn. The idea
that truth is contextual, rather than immutable and absolute, and that foundation
myths are expressions of power, was clearly present in the works of Vico,
Nietzsche, Croce and Weber, long before Hayden White and Michel Foucault.12 In
fact, Vico was an important source of inspiration for White.
Myths (and ideologies) assume the dimensions of reality in the sense, and to the
extent, that people believe in them. From this perspective, they cannot be
separated or distinguished from reality and truth, but rather they constitute this
reality and truth through language. On this point there is a clear connection
between myths and ideologies as cognitive structures. This means that reality and
truth are contested and contextual entities. Grounding myths, the myths upon
which societies ultimately rest, draw their power to legitimate from some specific
connection to God, history or the truths of the social and economic sciences. It is
within this context of legitimation or doxa of everyday life that right and wrong are
defined and laws which separate the proclaimed communities of destiny from the
arbitrary and capricious are promulgated.
Myth (and ideology) is not only the object of historiographic science; it is also
its product in the form of constructed memory (which, at the same time, also
means constructed oblivion). Processes of producing meaning are processes of
selection. The Holocaust and its preliminary stages took place before and during
World War II, but it only became a theme in the 1960s, begging the question of
why these events were more or less ignored in the late 1940s and throughout the
1950s. When, in the name of science, figures like Kennedy and Clinton, Hitler and
Churchill, Catherine II and Voltaire, Atatürk and Atilla, or abstractions like
Europe, nation, democracy and dictatorship, liberty and equality are described and
discussed, the point of departure is the myths created by history. This does not
mean that these descriptions and discussions are all lies, but rather that the truths
they convey are truths constructed from the ex post position. This idea of
contextual truth was also present in the thinking of Spinoza, who considered that
historical myths are not a false kind of historical knowledge, but rather that they
reflect, in an imaginary manner, the relation of a society to itself.13 Constructed
memories are continuously subject to critical scrutiny and revision in the
framework of a history that is constantly written and rewritten from an ever-
changing present. History is in flux; it is, like the present, in a permanent state of
transformation. The past does not exist ‘out there’, waiting to be discovered, but
history is permanently invented in order to give meaning to the present—and to the
future—through the past.
Myth, in this sense of constructed memory and oblivion, is emancipated from its
pejorative connotation and assumes the role of the provider of meaning, becoming
a constituent element of politics and social cohesion. In this context, emancipation
takes a different meaning from that in the self-understanding of positivist

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historiography, where activity in the name of science and source criticism is seen
as an emancipation or liberation of the sources from the myths which enshroud
them. This approach was embodied by Ranke and his followers, who believed that
they stood outside and above the processes they studied. They believed that they
were the judges or referees who were capable of disclosing the truth, wie es
eigentlich gewesen, and failed to realize that they too were party to the production
of the past.
His statement has often been misunderstood, and Ranke has been attributed with
a rather naı̈ve viewpoint on the historian’s task. However, in the preface of the
history of the Romance and Germanic peoples Ranke demonstrates, in
contradistinction to what is argued about him, that he was well aware of the
bias in history writing. He reflected on the connection between the intention,
subject-matter and form of his book. The intention of a historian is dependent on
his opinion and perspective (‘Ansicht’). Out of intention and subject-matter
emerges the form. History is thus not free evolution but the creative ordering of the
past, or, in the language of today, construction. History has been given the task to
judge the past in order to teach for the future. However, such great tasks were
beyond Ranke’s ambition in his 1824 book. He just wanted to show wie es
eigentlich gewesen.14 This self-imposed limitation in the specific case has been
mistaken for his general view on history.
In the European Mythosforschung of the 19th and 20th centuries, myth implied
irrationality and was thus separated from rationality in the form of logos and
reason. The key theoretical question which this dichotomy produced was whether
mythical thought was prior to or parallel to scientific thought. It was through this
debate that the myth of rational science emerged.
This was the point of view promoted by Lévi-Strauss when he described myths as
something which order and give meaning to the universe, that is, they give us the
illusion that we understand the universe. To create myth is to create ‘order,
an intellectual, cognitive order principally, an order that has as its focus the always
problematic relations between man and nature’.15 Barthes defines myth as a
semiological system (form) and an ideology (content) consisting of three elements;
form (signifier), concept (signified) and signification (sign). A myth hides nothing,
but it distorts, that is, it functions in such a way as to give historical intention a
natural justification.16
This does not mean, of course, that events as such, on which the past is
constructed, are also invented. Rather the facts, and based on them, the narratives
are constructed by reflection upon the documents that attest to the occurrence of
the events. The construction of history means that images and myths emerge from
the transformation of existing inventories of historical heritage and culture.
Successful construction appeals to certain cultural chords and conceptual tropes,
to narrative plots or discursive frames. Such tropes and plots are, of course, not
primordial; they too are the products of human creation. In these processes of
history construction, the idea of a collective memory and a specific history is a
tool that bridges the gap between high political and intellectual levels and the
levels of everyday life. What constitutes collective memory and what is

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consigned to collective oblivion, that is, taboos and what we do not talk about, is
a highly disputed question, reflecting power relations in the definition of social
problems.
The break-through of the new epistemological view should be seen not least in
the framework of the end of the Cold War, which provoked an intense search for
new meaning and interpretation. The break-through has meant new challenges for
professional historiography and has given a concept like history new perspectives,
not least with the growing insight that there is no reality which can be
conceptualized and analysed beyond the limits that language sets upon its
meaning. The constraints of language when coping with reality mean, among other
things, that the discourse creates its own interests. One might choose to see this
‘linguisticism’ as a burden, but it also justifies a certain optimism as a result of the
interpretative freedom that it gives. Language is multivocal and constitutes a huge
semantic field with vast ranges, and for this reason it offers greater freedom in the
selection of perspective.

Implications: Ideology and culture as methodology

Ideology is closely connected to culture. There is considerable overlapping
between the two concepts. However, the more precise connection and the degree
of overlapping and separation have not been a subject of deeper reflection. Quite
often both concepts are understood in terms of cohesion and clear demarcation.
The perspective developed is often teleological—a Western civilization on march
towards ever higher stages of perfection: Marx’ three step rocket towards the end
of history, Hegel’s Weltgeist of reason, or, most recently, the neoliberal
prognostication of the end of the Cold War as the end of history, in the spirit of
Marx but one step earlier.
There are in this understanding of ideology and culture as cohesive entities not
only teleological but also totalizing dimensions. We live today amidst ideas of
clashes of civilizations or holy wars between Evil and Good. They both belong to
old tropes, which often in history have been connected to feelings of a specific
destiny of a selected people.
Other well-known tropes deal with the New Man. Visions of work were the
foundation of the chiliastic ideas of ‘the New Man’ in Soviet Russia. With
socialism as a basis the emergence of a new type of man was anticipated:
solidaristic instead of egoistic, collective-minded instead of individually oriented.
The icon of this New Man was a male and muscular manufacturing worker with a
powerful faith in future progress.17
Today’s language of flexibility has its own liberal counterpart to this Soviet
model New Man, a figure as strong but also as utopian as the older one. The
‘Flexible Man’ in the new labour market language is an all-rounder, highly
adaptable to new challenges, creative and innovative; he is independent and
emancipated from all restraining social bounds. From the self-realization of the
Flexible Man is postulated the emergence of a new and better society; the tension
between adaptability and creativity is not addressed.18

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The New Man ideology, in its Soviet as well as liberal version, is a good
illustration of the totalizing dimension and the quest for perfectionism in many
ideological outlines. A parallel was the neoliberal market rhetoric, which after
1990 had very clear prescriptions for a universally thought remedy for the
collapsing Soviet Empire. The language of globalization is yet another variation
on the same theme.
As opposed to the view of ideology and culture as cohesive and well demarcated
entities, a view emerged over the last decades in the framework of the general
methodological shift in historiography which emphasizes context, entanglement
and contention among ideologies and cultures. Ideologies compete with other
ideologies and where they meet they overlap and merge and demarcate themselves
from each other; cultures are not fixed entities; they are intertwined with other
cultures. In social practice and in processes of social work and bargaining
ideologies and cultures are given their precise meanings dependent on the context.
Ideologies as well as cultures are emerging discursive creations, which should not
be given essentialist proportions. With this new understanding of ideologies and
cultures, an important task becomes, in deconstructivist approaches, to confront
universal and totalizing pretensions critically.
The difference between ideology and culture could perhaps be formulated in the
following way: culture is a social arena for the construction of community and
cohesion. Culture has an economic as well as political dimension. The separation
of economy, politics and culture in separate distinct spheres of social activity,
which has had such a great influence on our conceptualization of the social, was
made by the Enlightenment philosophers. This separation is problematic, to say
the least, for any comprehensive understanding of modern societies.
In a more integrative view on the concept of culture as a social arena of
communication, competing ideologies emerge as key instruments in the definition
of the content and the borders of that arena. Culture provides a kind of repertoire
on which ideologies draw and to which they contribute. Both culture and ideology
interact mutually and change each other. Culture becomes the operative system
and ideologies the programmes. Cognitive structures are a constitutive dimension
of both culture and ideologies.

Ideologies as grand narratives

Competition, plurality and diversity among ideologies go hand in hand with
totalizing ambitions. The critical emphasis on context and the ‘post-modern’
argument about the impossibility of comprehensive interpretative models of the
modern world has not destroyed the continuous reconstruction of meaning
and comprehension. Deconstruction goes hand in hand with reconstruction.19 The
rhetoric of post-modernity has not prevented the emergence of the rhetoric of
globalization, which is the most recent example of a grand narrative providing
interpretation. The permanent tension between deconstruction and reconstruction
is nothing new. What today is called post modern comes very close to what
Nietzsche and others propagated in the late 19th century, and the scepticism of

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Nietzsche had older precursors in Montaigne, Spinoza (with his interest in mythos)
and the whole humanist tradition since the 16th century, in opposition to other
philosophers who emphasized rationality and logos.20
Before 1789 totalizing ideological ambitions aimed as a rule at the recreation of
an idealized Arcadian past. Revolution meant rolling back to that past. The
Renaissance is a case in point. With the French Revolution this world view
changed and history received orientation and an aim. The 19th century was
Europe’s, with the three competing ideologies of liberalism, socialism and
conservatism, all of which in various combinations—depending on context—
provided arguments for nationalism. They were all interpretative outcomes of the
Enlightenment philosophy and the French revolution. Conservatism with
connections to Romanticism can be seen as a set of narrative defence alternatives
to the revolutionary claims of freedom and equality. Equality and freedom which
at the moment of the French revolution were kept together in one cohesive
theoretical figure in the 19th century split into two competing totalizing
ideologies, socialism and liberalism. This split began during the revolution itself
with the division between active and passive citizens. The Scottish moral
philosophers contributed to the ideological debate with arguments for free trade as
a means of wealth for nations in a globally perceived world whose centre was
Europe. Europe had a missionary role to play. Darwin’s theory on the evolution of
the species was translated into interpretations of societies and cultures. Social
Darwinism underpinned nationalism, which eclectically drew on the other
ideologies in various ways. This European ideological mix exploded in 1914.
The outcome of World War I was a decisive shift of global power from Europe
to the US, although this insight was not immediately clear in the 1920s. The
emergence of Fascism and National Socialism can be seen as attempts to
reconstruct the pre 1914 ideological arsenal through the intensification of future
orientation and the horizons of expectations. The alternative grand narrative
outlined in the US was about rationalization. Images of the end of mythical
thinking and the final victory of reason provided the core of the rationalization
discourse. Human relations in industrial society were seen as peaceful and
rational. Through positive and objective measurements of work-place achieve-
ments a fair distribution between labour and capital could be guaranteed without
conflicts. The rationalization discourse imploded with the Great Depression and
the emergence of mass unemployment. This implosion made space for the
European mass ideologies constructed in the 1920s. Yet another European War
involving the whole world emphasized even more the shift of power towards the
US. The modernization narrative of the 1950s and 1960s was the American-
inspired continuation of the language of rationalization from before the war.
A Western developmental standard was proclaimed which guaranteed peace and
wealth if the backward nations followed their forerunners. The modernization
rhetoric floundered in the 1970s with the collapse of the international order
established in Bretton Woods in 1945 and the recurrence of mass unemployment.
The neo-liberal market language that emerged in the 1980s provided the ground
for the globalization theory since the 1990s. Globalization can be seen as the third

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American master narrative of the 20th century. The 20th century was America’s,
and the three great narratives that emerged to describe this power situation had the
pretension to transcend nationalism and fulfil the promises inherent in liberalism.
However, the irony of history was that the globalizing language went hand in hand
with the reinforcement of national communities. The question for the future is to
what extent the globalization framework of interpretation has been damaged by
the images of a War against Evil and of a Clash of Civilizations that emerged in the
1990s in a kind of compensatory search for diametrically opposed alternatives
following the Cold War. The world after the current Iraq War is not easily
connected with the globalization theory.
This necessarily very brief and sketchy outline of a few of the ideological
master narratives of the 19th and 20th centuries, with continuities and
discontinuities, entanglements and separations, demonstrates that they have not
disappeared with the methodological shift in historiography discussed earlier. A
major argument in this methodological shift was that master narratives were no
longer possible. The new focus on the role of language meant an emphasis on
contexts, conflicts and contradictions, on the micro rather than the macro level of
analysis. Comprehension was said to collapse into contradiction. Nevertheless, the
triumph of globalization language after the modernization rhetoric had collapsed
demonstrates that power structures defy such intellectual prognoses. Or better
formulated, the intellectual critique of the master narratives developed out of
social theory did not deny their existence but unmasked them as expressions of
power. This was the aim and the implication of the deconstructivist approach by
the French philosophers as well as Hayden White.
The construction of the master narratives occurred in an entanglement between
academic, economic and political elites. In 19th century Europe the historians
were very much involved in this ideology production. In their growing connection
to social theories in the 1960s and 1970s they were very much inspired by the
modernization narrative which, however, they confirmed but did not develop
through empirical investigations. They have been much less influenced by the
break-through of the globalization language if one does not see the growing
theoretical and methodological interest in world history as an expression of
globalization. Neither have they been very actively involved in a critical
deconstruction of the grand narrative. This might appear astonishing since such
deconstruction would seemingly fit well with the historians’ traditional interest in
context. A critical question is whether mainstream historiography has retreated
back to the more limited and myopic empirical perspectives of the period up to the
1950s instead of getting massively involved in the social debate as was the case in
the 1960s and the 1970s.
However, there are signs of a more active engagement from two converging
intellectual trends, which have connected to and developed the new
methodological linguistic perspective: the speech act tradition and the conceptual
history approach. Both provide alternatives to earlier historiography, which,
particularly in the sub-discipline of history of ideas, preferred to see ideologies as
long chains of continuity, where alternative ideological master narratives existed

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in parallel. In the perspective of the speech act theory and conceptual history,
ideologies are not guidelines with prescriptions for the future, even if this is what
they argue, but a semantic repertoire or an arsenal at the disposal of actors. The
semantic field is at the same time a social field of communication and contention
about alternatives. Selection of arguments from the ideological vocabularies is
always dependent on the context and the outcome is always contingent. Path
dependencies emerge only in the retrospection of historical construction of the
past. Such retrospectively constructed dependencies have no prognostic values
and must be continuously adjusted to the changing present, which provides ever
new viewpoints from which the past may be viewed.
The growing emphasis on contextuality, which has obtained theoretical punch
through the speech act theory and conceptual history, has brought about a
perspective where ideologies are much more entangled: both overlapping and
delineating. Rather than constructing a history of ideas that serves as a background
for other types of history, or gives primacy to the logical structure of arguments
treated only contingently as being located in the past, the informing aspiration of
speech act theory and conceptual history is to recover the thought of the past in its
full complexity and from there to embark on a critical reflection of ideological
master narratives. Within their own historiographical contexts the speech act and
the conceptual history schools have been at the forefront of recent developments in
intellectual history. Both schools have developed their approaches in very distinct
and different cultures of historical research, the speech act school within an English
culture where the emphasis has been on history as scholarship, belonging mainly,
although not exclusively, to the humanities, Begriffsgeschichte within a German
culture where history is seen as Wissenschaft, and, more recently since the 1960s, as
a social science. The creative tension between the study of social reality and
language, or rather, the study of social reality through language, has constituted the
core of conceptual history. Language as agent and indicator of structural change is
the defining moment of conceptual history. Like Begriffsgeschichte the speech act
school began with the rejection of prevailing orthodoxies in the history of ideas.
Conceptual history was developed within the horizons of German traditions of
social history and philosophical hermeneutics. The speech act school, which
through its academic concentration also is called the Cambridge school, originates
in the traditions of Collingwood and the Anglo-American philosophy of language,
most notably Austin’s theory of speech acts.21 Focussing on How to Do Things with
Words—the title of Austin’s seminal work—the Cambridge school highlights the
‘moves’ agents make within political languages, how they endorse, refute, elaborate
or ignore ‘the prevailing assumptions and conventions of political debate’.22 This
programmatic approach quite obviously exhibits similarities with Wittgenstein’s
philosophy of language and his theory of language games where language and
action are seen as intertwined.23 Thus whilst the primary focus of conceptual history
is on structures and processes, the emphasis within the speech act school has been on
human agency as the prime mover of intellectual history.24 The most prominent
exponents of the Cambridge speech act school are Quentin Skinner and J. G. A.
Pocock.25

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The speech act theory has thus moved the focus from the earlier approach in
intellectual history and in the history of political thought where ideologies were
seen and analysed as more or less cohesive discourses with high continuity
towards a new focus on the intersection between rhetoric and action. Political
thought became political action, while in the established tradition of intellectual
history the focus was on how supra-political ideas were adjusted to and employed
in politics.26 The point of departure and the aim of the analysis were the ideas.
In the same vein one can also locate Michael Freeden’s theory of ideological
morphology developed in his impressive record on liberalism confronting the
social issue and emerging welfare theories in the 20th century. In his study of the
British new liberalism he investigated how specific conceptual arrangements
created determinate fields of meaning from the raw materials available to the
formulators of liberalism. His questions focused on how sense and meaning were
produced and which options were opened and which foreclosed. In such meaning-
producing processes cultural maps are superimposed on a virtual infinity of logical
conceptual possibilities. Through the compound conceptual morphology of
liberalism he accounts for the dual possibility of state intervention and non
intervention in the liberal tradition as permanent and parallel features. Instead
of understanding liberalism as a monolith in its postulates, assumptions and
values, he sees it as a cluster of concepts and goods.27
It goes without saying that a corresponding approach could be used for
socialism as a movement and a semantic field between revolution and reform
where ideas are implemented in political practices.
In analytical terms ideology as a concept collapses, in the speech act as well as
in the morphology approach, into the question of how political actors established
power positions on semantic fields. This analytical shift put the question of
language itself, rhetoric, and its connection to political action, in its specific
context, in focus. The theoretical developments began to concentrate on acts as
much as thoughts in policy-making, and the key question became how language
was used when politics were made. Where earlier the point of departure in the
wake of Marx was the connection between the ideological superstructure and the
imagined socioeconomic base (‘were the social democrats reformist or
revolutionary, and why?’), the political struggle itself became the key to explain
changes in political allegiances. An ideological key concept such as class was not,
in the new approach, seen as something which pre-existed its expressions but as
something produced and given existence through their very expressions.28
The historian who most systematically put conceptual analysis in focus is
Reinhart Koselleck. As his point of departure he took the constant state of political
crisis, by which he attempts to characterize ‘modernity’. Instead of seeing
socialism or liberalism in terms of triumphal procession and historical
progression, he emphasized the repeated break-downs of the liberal idea since
the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment made social critique possible and social
critique resulted in recurring states of crisis. What in the ideas of the French
Revolution was still kept together in one Denkfigur under the motto of liberté and
égalité had by 1959, when Koselleck published his doctoral dissertation and

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seminal work Kritik und Krise, brought the world to the brink of nuclear self-
destruction in the name of two clashing ideologies.29
In Koselleck’s perspective the term ‘modernization’ was considered anew in
opposition to the usual connotation of a rationally calculated, general evolutionary
development process. Koselleck argues that since the French Revolution the
relation between past, present and future has undergone fundamental changes. As
the organizing basis for action in the present, experiences have been supplemented
with horizons of expectations with the implication that history was given a
direction that it did not have prior to the Enlightenment. In an age of accelerating
time, characterized by an unceasing accumulation of new problems, experiences
have become a category of limited capacity. The acceleration of time meant that
the action capacity based on experiences shrank and failed to make ‘modernity’
comprehensible. Instead, ‘horizons of expectations’ became the guide for attempts
to cope with modernity. Because this horizon itself was constructed out of
politically pregnant concepts, the study of how these concepts were formed
becomes central.30
The construction of new concepts, loaded with values and significance, or the
reinterpretation of old ones, involved the anticipation of a possible future at the
same time as it was an expression of an agonizing inability to understand
developments in the present on the basis of past experience. The same concepts
were used by different agents in the political arena, but with varying meanings.
Consequently, disputes arose over the correct interpretations, attempts were made
to exclude one’s political opponents from using the same words to say and wish for
that which might differ from one’s own conception.
Koselleck’s focus is on the borderland where various ideological constructs
meet or confront each other. Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte goes, like the
Cambridge speech act theory and Michael Freeden’s ideological morphology
theory, beyond ideology as history of ideas.31 The linguistic transformation is
mapped out empirically in the context of socio-political struggles. Koselleck
explicitly sees conceptual history as a methodologically independent aid to social
history, not as a kind of disembodied intellectual history.
The shift in perspective provoked by the speech act and the conceptual history
schools called for analyses of the struggle for discursive power focussing on how
categories of, for instance, class, freedom, solidarity or equality were formulated
through representation in discursive contests where the goal was the right to define
and identify problems and their solutions. In such contests patterns of affirmations,
negations and repressions emerged in social bargaining processes by which one
definition often came out as more or less dominant. The result was not a unitary
concept of ideology, not history as teleology, but a view on ideology as a field that
always contains multiple and contested meanings.
The outcomes of conceptual struggles are always uncertain. The outcome of the
battle among social forces about the interpretation of a concept is a highly
contingent affair that is emergent not causative. The ability to launch new
concepts with persuasive capacity, and the ability to infuse old concepts with new
meaning, to acquire the interpretative priority to key concepts, is of critical

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importance in historical processes. The language with its key concepts does not in
itself cause change but makes change possible through the establishment of
particular horizons for potential action. Concepts organized as discourses or
ideologies became in this way similar to what Max Weber called Weltbilder
(world views), which in his famous railway metaphor function as pointsmen,
Weichensteller, leading the development into new trajectories.
The substantial methodological shift, which began in the 1970s and accelerated
in the 1980s meant a fundamental deconstruction of the whole concept of ideology
and all the connotations that it stood for. The methodological focus of the new
perspective was concepts, action and context.
In recent years innovations have characterized both conceptual history and
speech act theory, as exemplified by attempts to develop Metaphergeschichte and
to bring intellectual and literary history closer together. Meanwhile critics have
continued to argue that for all the emphasis on contextualization the two
approaches have only developed limited perspectives on the cultural and social
contexts of political discourses and concepts. Another pertinent point of critique
has been that both schools have mainly focused on ‘national’ traditions and
thinkers, failing to develop comparative perspectives. Whilst social and political
historians are discussing trends such as histoire croisée, entangled histories, and
exploring the possibilities and pitfalls of transnational history, intellectual
historians have only just started to address the interconnectedness of ‘national’
political discourses and the importance of processes of intellectual and cultural
exchange.32
Another critical point has been that both approaches certainly see the actors as
tied to context, but they also see them as rationally calculating with clear
intentions and employing a kind of Machiavellian behaviour. The actions drawing
on the repertoires of ideas hardly refer to improvisation in the moments of decision
depending on uncertainty of the intentions of other, and often also of one’s own
intention. The aims of action are often much less clear and more contradictory than
rational choice theories assume. Means are confused with ends and actions are
motivated and rationalized ex post when one knows what has happened rather than
ex ante. One is often forced to act where ideologies do not give much guidance. It
is rather afterwards, during the contradictory adjustment of ideologies, that they
can help in the interpretation of action and provision of legitimacy.33

Perspectives
In the old understanding of ideology there was also an understanding of some kind
of representation. There was something behind the ideology, and the ideology
made this ‘something’ reappear. From a development dating to the iconoclasts of
the 16th century, who denied any form of representation, arguing that there was
nothing but the word, via the 19th- and 20th-century positivists, who in their
search for the true and final reality equalized representation and identity, to the
hyper symbolism of the 21st century, where hyperspace symbols create the real
world, the concept of representation has become problematic to say the least.34

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The erosion of the concept of representation has concurred with the erosion of the
concept of ideology.
As I have argued, this is not to say that ideologies have disappeared. The
language of globalization and the ideas of clashes of civilizations are sufficient
evidence of the role of ideologies, in the form of master narratives, with totalizing
ambitions or pretensions of being the explanation of the world. However, the
analysis of ideologies has become much more complex. My argument is that
instead of taking ideologies as pre-given they must be critically deconstructed and
contextualized. Their emergence must be historicized and their appearance must
be understood much more in terms of opposition, discontinuities and
contradictions, internally as well as externally, than in terms of cohesion and
continuity.
There is in this critical approach an Ideologiekritik of a different kind than that
of Marx, who tried to unmask the socioeconomic reality behind the ideology. In an
emerging perspective among historians there is nothing beyond the language of
ideology, and the focus of the analysis, therefore, becomes the language itself, and
how in various contexts it has been constructed to provide meaning. Having said
this, it should also be clear that there is no fixed position, from which the critique
can be exercised. The critique of ideologies becomes part of the ideological
debates and the deconstruction of myths becomes at the same time the
construction of new myths. In such processes of de- and re-construction there is no
final end and history has no direction but becomes contingent and open.
The predominating perspective on ideologies among historians today
emphasizes the importance of historicizing and contextualizing the languages
which constitute ideology. The general shift of focus from assumptions of pre-given
(social and economic) structures with causative effects on later developments
towards the issue of consequences and gradually emerging outcomes of social
construction and work with language as a tool, has also influenced the analytical
treatment of ideologies. In the wake of this methodological shift the research
problems deal not with a positivist mapping of a reality given once and for all and,
on principle, possible to grasp in a cumulative way, but with the construction of the
reality through self-reflection. In this vein the focus is on the contradictory
construction of ideologies in order to cope with past experiences and future
challenges, and how this construction feeds back on later moments of political
action.
Much of the analysis in the human and social sciences during the 19th and 20th
centuries has employed conceptualizations of culture and ideology as being based
on shared values and beliefs, which assumes the existence of well-defined and
bounded human communities with high cultural homogeneity.35 In contrast, the
emerging historiography sees the existence of such communities as the result of
work aiming at a ‘cultural construction of community’ that sought to produce
bounded-ness and internal coherence.36 The emergence of nation states in 19th
century Europe is a case in point. Nationalism as a strong ideology had many
different forms of expression and political action guidelines across the European
surface based on a great variety of ways to mix socialist, liberal and conservative

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ideological arguments.37 Class and nation can be seen as two competing categories
of community with clear impacts on ideologies, at a certain point in time, which in
the long run merged in various forms. A crucial moment was the outbreak of
World War I which nationalized class ideology.
The cultural construction of community and boundaries, with mobilization
through ideologies as a crucial instrument, is a matter of communication. The
public sphere is about communication constituting a society. The intense public
discourse that was part of the English and French revolutions was constitutive of
collective feelings of identity, and so was the public discourse on the social
question associated with the rise of the labour movement in the 19th century. The
same is true today with public debates on immigration, globalization and the
European Union. Contention and communication in democratic forms are
potentially promoters of social integration. In this perspective consensus becomes
a problematic concept. Rather than treating cultures and ideologies as holistic and
unitary entities, where one either agrees or disagrees, they should be seen as
shaped by a variety of contradictions, differences, overlaps, and partial
disengagements. It is misleading to treat European or national identifications as
simply matters of commonality, the thicker the more similarities they involve.
Cultures and ideologies also frame inequalities and social protests to the effect that
the cultural and ideological setting is gradually transformed in response to the
protests. The question of social solidarity, for instance, does not emerge out of
feelings of identity but of inequality.38
This perspective means the confining of ideas of ‘pre-existing’ identities and
ideologies. Instead of treating ideologies as more or less fixed, socially shared,
belief systems persistent over longer times and with more or less cohesive and
consistent groups of adherents, they should be historicized and contextualized
through an analytical focus on the speech act situations where power positions are
established through the appropriation of key concepts and their ensuing
interpretative power. This perspective on historians and ideologies contains an
ideology-critical deconstructivist dimension.

Notes and References

1. Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins U.P., 1973).
2. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge, Cambridge U.P., 1978).
3. Lawrence Stone, The Past and the Present Revisited (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 86 –87.
4. Ibid.
5. ‘. . . ohne Hegel kein Darwin’. Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Die fröhliche Wissenschaft. Fünftes Buch. 357, Zum
alten Problem: was ist deutsch?’ in Karl Schlechta (Hg.), Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke in sechs Bände. Bd III
(München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1980), p. 226.
6. Björn Wittrock, ‘The meaning of the axial age’, in Johann Arnason, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Björn
Wittrock (Eds), Axial Civilizations and World History (Leiden: Brill, 2004); Johan Heilbron, Lars
Magnusson and Björn Wittrock (Eds), The Rise of the Social Sciences and the Formation of Modernity.
Conceptual Change in Context, 1750–1850 (Dordrecht and London: Kluwer Academic, 1998); Norman
Geras and Robert Wokler (Eds), The Enlightenment and Modernity (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2000).

40
 ideology and history
7. Michel Foucault, L’archéologie du Savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1969); ibid., Surveiller et Punir: Naissance de
la Prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967);
ibid., La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972); ibid., Ésperons: les Styles de Nietzsche (Paris: Flammarion,
1978); Paul Ricoeur, Les Conflits des Interpretations: Essays d’Herméneutiques (Paris: Seuil, 1969); ibid.,
Exégèse et Herméneutique (Paris: Seuil, 1971); François Lyotard, La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le
Savoir (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979).
8. Lynn Hunt, ‘The rhetoric of revolution in France’, in History Workshop Journal (No. 15, Spring 1983), esp
pp. 79, 89–91. Cf. Bo Stråth (Ed.), Language and the Construction of Class Identities (Gothenburg
University, 1990).
9. Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class. Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982
(Cambridge, Cambridge U.P., 1983) and Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York:
Columbia U.P., 1988). Cf. Peter Schöttler, ‘Historians and discourse analysis’, History Workshop Journal
(No 27, Spring 1989).
10. Stedman Jones op. cit., Ref. 9, pp. 1–24.
11. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1968).
12. Giambattista Vico, La scienza nuova (Milan: Rizzoli, 1977 [1725]); Benedetto Croce, Il Carattere della
Filosophia Moderna (Bari: Laterza, 1963 [1941]); Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (‘la Gaya
Scienza’), in Karl Schlechta (Hg.), op. cit., Ref. 5; Foucault, op. cit., Ref. 7; Detlev Peukert, Max Webers
Diagnose der Moderne (Göttingen: V&R, 1989); Arpad Szakolszai, Max Weber and Michel Foucault:
Parallel Life-Works (London: Routledge, 1998).
13. Thomas Hippler, ‘Spinosa on historical myths’, in Bo Stråth (Ed.), Myth and Memory in the Construction of
Community. Historical Patterns in Europe and Beyond, Multiple Europes No. 9 (Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang,
2000).
14. Ranke wrote his famous formulation about history as it was, wie es gewesen, in the preface of his
Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1514 [1824], p. VII in the edition
published by Duncker und Humblot, Leipzig 1874. For a development of the view on history as translation of
the past into an ever changing present, see Reinhart Koselleck, ‘On the historical-political semantics of
asymmetric counter-concepts’, in Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
German original: Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp,
1979).
15. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
16. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), pp. 124–5.
17. Bo Stråth, ‘The concept of work in the construction of community’, in: Bo Stråth (Ed.), After Full
Employment. European Discourses on Work and Flexibility (Brussels: PIE-Peter Lang, 2000).
18. Peter Wagner, ‘The exit from organised modernity: “Flexibility” in social thought and in historical
perspective’ and Christina Garsten and Jan Turtinen, ‘“Angels” and “Chameleons”: The cultural
construction of the flexible temporary agency worker in Sweden and Britain’, in Bo Stråth (Ed.), op. cit.,
Ref. 17.
19. The prefix of the term reconstruction is here used in the same modern sense as in revolution after the French
Revolution, a future-oriented concept connoting something new as opposed to the meaning in renaissance
and revolution before 1789, i.e. going back to, making again. Re takes on the proportion of creating
something new. A critical shift in this respect appears to be discernible already during the later ‘renaissance’.
It was then that the hope to reproduce something approaching but inferior to antiquity ‘immitatio’ was
replaced by the prospect of ‘aemulatio’ matching even surpassing the cultural achievements of ancient
Greece and Rome as well as the possibility to correct what had gone wrong. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht,
‘Modern, modernität, moderne’, in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck (Eds),
Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Vol. 4
(Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978), p. 99. I am grateful to James Kaye for having drawn my attention to this
reference and also for other suggestions and language correction of this article.
20. Cf Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis. The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: The Free Press, 1990).
Cf. also Chiara Bottici, ‘A philosophy of political myth’, unpublished PhD Thesis, European University
Institute (Florence, 2004).
21. Martin van Gelderen and Bo Stråth, ‘Political order in medieval and modern Europe. Concepts and
languages’. Research project outline. European University Institute, October 2004.
22. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 [1955]).
23. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958).
24. Van Gelderen and Stråth, op. cit., Ref. 21.
25. Skinner, op. cit., Ref. 2, and ibid., Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, Cambridge U.P., 1998); J. G. A.
Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition

41
bo stråth
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. P., 2003 [1975]) and ibid., The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law:
a Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century: a Reissue with a Retrospect (Cambridge
U.P., 1987).
26. Skinner, op. cit., Ref. 2 and Ref. 25.
27. Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978);
ibid., Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought 1914–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1986); ibid., Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); and
ibid., Liberal Languages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 2005).
28. Cf. Bo Stråth, ‘Introduction. Production of meaning, construction of class identities, and social change’, in
op. cit., Ref. 8.
29. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford:
Berg, 1988). German original: Kritik und Krise: Eine Studie zur Pathogenesis der bürgerlichen Welt
(Frankfurt/Main, Suhrkamp, 1992 [1954]).
30. Reinhart Koselleck, ‘On the historical-political semantics of asymmetric counter-concepts’, in Reinhart
Koselleck, op. cit., Ref. 14.
31. Kari Palonen, Die Entzauberung der Begriffe. Das Umschreiben der politischen Begriffe bei Quentin Skinner
und Reinhart Koselleck (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2004).
32. Van Gelderen and Stråth, op. cit., Ref. 21.
33. Nils Brunsson and Johan P Olsen, Organizing Organizations (Bergen, Norway: Fagbokforlaget, 1998).
34. Callum Brown, Postmodernism for Historians (Harlow, England and New York: Pearson Education/
Longman, 2005). Cf. ibid., Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (London:
Routledge, 2001).
35. H. Friese and P. Wagner, ‘Not all that is solid melts into air. Modernity and contingency’, in M. Featherstone
and S. Lash (Eds) Spaces of Culture. City/Nation/World (Sage: London, 1999).
36. Bo Stråth (Ed.), op. cit., Ref. 13.
37. For a discussion of whether nationalism can be seen as an ideology or not, see Freeden, op. cit., Ref. 27,
2005, pp. 204–224.
38. C. Calhoun, ‘The democratic integration of Europe: Interests, identity and the public sphere’, in Mabel
Berezin and Martin Schain (Eds), Europe without Borders. Remapping Territory, Citizenship and Identity in
a Transnational Age (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins U. P., 2003).

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