Helge Jordheim

Civilizing emotions: Concepts in nineteenth-century Asia and Europe

This work is a contribution to the growing Oxford University Press series, Emotions in History. Emotions are clearly involved in how civility and civilization are constructed in late nineteenthto early twentieth-century world cultures during the age of high imperialism in the investigations produced by these authors. However, the scholarship that informs these essays in the main stems not from the history of emotions so much as the history of concepts, a form of intellectual history particularly strong in the German academic tradition. This takes concepts – in this case civility and civilization – as the subject of investigation, explored through language and semantic fields in texts that, here, primarily concern the genres of dictionaries, encyclopedias, media debates and literature. As Jan Ifverson emphasizes in his Afterword, a key contribution of this collaborative project is its interest in going beyond national-level investigations to the transnational and its global entanglements. This is a particular challenge in a field that is grounded in linguistic specificities but which is handled here through attention to transfers, transmissions and translations of concepts between cultures.

Conceptual Synchronisation: From Progress to Crisis

International order is also temporal order, based on the alignment, more precisely, the synchronisation of the multiple times at work on a global scale. Synchronicity between cultures, languages, and polities does not emerge by itself. To create temporal orderings on a global scale requires work: political, social, and linguistic. Some work of synchronisation is performed by technological innovations such as clocks, trains, telegraph lines, phones, satellites etc. Another set of tools, however, is linguistic, made up by concepts used to make historical and political time understandable and workable. Concepts are used to order events, objects and polities temporally, thus making both them and their temporality aspects of international order. By drawing together experiences, events, and meanings from different knowledge fields or cultures, they synchronise them, aligning their speeds, rhythms, and durations. One of the most central concepts that have been used in synchronisation over the past two centuries is progress. In this article we map out how it has synchronised temporalities on a global scale, and ask whether progress is in the process of being replaced by the concept of crisis as the main tool for synchronising temporalities in international society – using examples from political and administrative rhetoric as well as anthropological studies.

Keeping the ‘Ism’ in ‘cosmopolitanism’ – Wieland and the origins of cosmopolitan discourse

ABSTRACT After having been dormant for much of the 20th century, the concept of cosmopolitanism has regained some of its former rhetorical power in current academic and political debates. Taking Kwame Anthony Appiah and Robert Fine as key interlocutors, the article argues that a historically informed analysis of the linguistic context, in which the language of cosmopolitanism first emerged, can help us understand better the political and ideological underpinnings of the concept. In the first part of the article, I discuss the emergence of cosmopolitanism in the context of what I shall refer to as the ‘ismatization’ of political language in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the second part, I turn to what I consider to be a key text for understanding the paradoxes of cosmopolitanism: the essay Das Geheimnis des Kosmopolitenordens (‘The Secret of the Order of the Cosmopolitans’), published by the German novelist, poet and publicist Christoph Martin Wieland in the journal Teutscher Merkur in 1788. At the end of the 18th century, I argue, Wieland makes a similar observation to Fine, namely that the ‘ism’ connotes something doctrinal, even sectarian, and steeped in secrecy and conspiracy.