ABSTRACT
Early nineteenth-century conservative thinkers placed a particular emphasis on the study of Enlightenment reform language for understanding the causes and dynamics that led to the revolution and subsequent fall of the Old Regime. In recent decades, both the Begriffsgeschichte and the more Anglo-American variants of Conceptual History have provided much insight into the semantic field of the reform language of the Enlightenment. However, little attention so far has been given to what can arguably be called the earliest practitioners of a conceptual history of the Enlightenment. This chapter focuses on perhaps the most influential writer of the German Restoration, Karl Ludwig von Haller, author of the famous Restoration of Political Science, published in six volumes from 1816 onwards. Unlike Barruel, Bonald, and de Maistre, who attributed much of the blame for the revolution to the influence of the masonic language of universal friendship, Haller was primarily interested in identifying the traces of Roman legal language within eighteenth-century reform thinking. Haller believed that language was particularly ill fitted for describing the reality of pre-revolutionary Europe’s social and political institutions. As a consequence, by relying on the terminology of Roman law Enlightenment thinkers lacked the conceptual framework needed for developing a coherent theory of reform.
