Reaction and Restoration

TL;DR — A rough English translation of Kondylis’s encyclopedia entry tracing how the political concepts ‘reaction’ and ‘restoration’ arose and changed in Germany up to the 1860s.

Kondylis’s entry “Reaktion, Restauration” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe (vol. 5, 1984), the multi-volume lexicon of German political and social concepts edited by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck. This copy is a Wayback Machine print of a blog post on Carlsbad 1819 (April 2, 2022), whose author describes it as a “somewhat rough machine-assisted translation,” omits the original’s roughly 296 footnotes and skips the brief eighth chapter.

The entry traces the origins of “reaction” and “restoration” in the French revolutionary period, their historical-philosophical background, early German usage, the hardening of “reaction” into a polemical label around 1840, its use in 1848 — including the split between liberals and radical democrats in the Frankfurt National Assembly — and its social and constitutional meaning through 1866. The translator’s preface highlights the argument that nineteenth-century liberalism should be distinguished from later loose uses of the word.

What it is: an unofficial machine-assisted translation, posted by a pseudonymous blogger, of a scholarly reference entry by a respected historian of ideas. The underlying German text is in copyright.

Where this came from

• A copy saved in October 2026.
• Carlsbad 1819 blog post: https://carlsbad1819.wordpress.com/2022/04/02/reaction-and-restoration-panagiotis-kondylis-geschichtliche-grundbegriffe-bd-5/

26 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.