Herrschaft und Staat

The subject matter of the symposium extant is the formation of a specific intellectual vocabulary referring to government and state as it appears in South-East European newspapers and other political publications in the period of 1840-1870 in order to show how these language communities were being integrated into the European political discourse as it was at that time. The political and cultural contacts of the South-East European languages not being necessarily related to one another influence the development of the vocabulary referring to "Government" and "State". On the basis of lexical items gathered from the worked upon sources it is observed how the relevant notions are expressed by loan-words, loan translations and semantic innovations in the traditional vocabulary. Special attention is paid to characteristic contexts and their implications for the way in which things are seen, so that the history of vocabulary is correlated to the history of ideas. Broader connexions appear as well as specific differences. The history of words is systematized according to semantic fields. They are put into the frame of the prevailing currents of thought in the wake of the revolutionary events of 1848 and under the impact of their lasting consequences which laid the foundations of modern times in that part of Europe.