Answering the call: the history of political and social concepts in English

The "rst editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), James Murray, delighted to tell the story of a dream in which he had overheard his great lexicographical predecessor, Samuel Johnson, in conversation with James Boswell, his biographer: &Johnson was speaking of his Dictionary and Boswell, in an impish mood asked, `What would you say, Sir, if you were told that in a hundred years' time a bigger and better dictionary than yours would be compiled by a Whig?a Johnson grunted. `A Dissenter?a Johnson stirred in his chair. `A Scotsman?a Johnson began, `Sir2a but Boswell persisted * `and that the University of Oxford would publish ita. `Sira, thundered Johnson, `in order to be facetious it is not necessary to be indecenta [1]. One wonders what James Murray would have said if he were told that a hundred years after the beginning of his own monumental enterprise, a dictionary of political and social concepts would have been compiled by a team of social historians, most of them Germans, and that when published it would comprise almost half as many volumes as the OED itself. The question is not facetious, nor is it impertinent. As Melvin Richter has pointed out, in the concluding chapter of his History of Political and Social Concepts, &`By the Su!erance of Wise Mena: A Call for a History of Political and Social Concepts in English', the very existence of the OED is often given as one of the reasons why the anglophone world does not need its own Geschichtliche Grundbegriwe (GG) [2,3]; its proponents argue that the OED's coverage is so complete, and that its lexicographical principles are so congenial to historians, that it will do duty as an English GG for all foreseeable purposes. Murray would no doubt have been pleased by these plaudits, as he would surely have been intrigued by the GG. Like the OED, the GG has been a collective and collaborative enterprise, superintended by scholars with a commanding historical research programme; each was based on &historical principles', and each relied heavily on the use of quotations as the basis for its entries. However, both were products of their times and places, and of the particular research agendas on which they were