«A new casting of political sects». Los orígenes de «liberal» en el discurso político inglés y europeo: una comparación

Abstract

This article examines the origins and transformations of the political concept liberal in different European contexts. By comparing the concept's use in contemporary political discourse in Britain, Germany and France between the late 18th century and the early 19th century, the semantic analysis is designed to contribute to a comparative understanding of European liberalisms. Within the mainstream analyses of the European variations of bourgeois society, approaches developed by social historians have dominated the field of research. Yet in recent years one can observe a shift towards the cultural aspects of bourgeois societies in 19th-century Europe, part of which is the analysis of ideological language and political discourse. As a comparative history of concepts the article examines the transformations, value and validity, coherence and connections of liberal as a basic concept in order to reconstruct the long-term transition of the old European social order into modern bourgeois societies on the level of political language.