ABSTRACT
The historical reconstruction illustrated how the concept of Bildung has been and still is being deployed as a slogan for the empowerment of various political and educational interests. Recently, the term Bildung has been frequently leveraged to combat the quantification of the world, the putative goal of empirical educational research. The fact that Bildung as a term is unique in German just signifies that the German language as a particular style of reasoning created a particular parole, Bildung, to express a particular aspect of the overall concept of education. Conceptual histories provide only distorted perceptions of historical meanings, as concepts in the sense of paroles are closely linked to linguistic traditions. Conceptual history needs therefore to be extended on two sides: on the one side, in the direction of a linguistic contextualization of terms and, on the other, in the direction of a comparative contextualization.
