ABSTRACT
What this chapter shows is that the conceptualization was only very gradually politicized. Terror in the sense of an emotional reaction was, for a long time, the primary of the concepts, whereas terrorism since the 1960s has increasingly become the dominant one. Whereas the previous two chapters mainly drew on elite writings, the transition from premodernity to modernity is a simultaneous politicization and democratization of activity. New terms loaded with the expectation of the future and new actors claiming a voice means that one must expand the investigated literature. The democratization of political debate also results in a dizzying enormity of literature, meaning that we now only scratch the surface of the conceptual development. This gives a more erratic or incoherent picture than the somewhat schematically coherent narratives in the previous chapters. Equally problematic is it that, although the French Revolution instantiated the decisive conceptual transformation, it is the period after which truly develops the meanings used by us today. With these caveats, it is still possible to sketch a development, taking the terror concepts from a quasipoliticization and vague coherent meaning in the nineteenth century into truly politically loaded and fortified terms in the twentieth. The terror concepts
became ‘fighting words’,3 the center of legitimacy disputes in a way and extent previously unknown.
