Kondylis's Formative Years in Heidelberg: Social History, Conceptual History, and the History of Problems

This paper aims to reconstruct the origins and development of Begriffsgeschichte in post-war Germany and to situate Kondylis's approach within this framework. The influence of figures such as Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck on Kondylis's formation as a historian will thus be examined. Three methodological insights will be emphasized: first, the unity of historical and sociological methods in research practice; second, the reevaluation of the relationship between the Social and the Political; and third, the search for structural correspondences between social and conceptual history. Kondylis's methodological objections to the conceptual historical method will then be outlined. The appropriation of methodological insights from the tradition of Problemgeschichte and Weber's methodology in the social sciences (particularly the use of ideal types) will illuminate how Kondylis developed his own approach to the history of ideas.