One of the four criteria of the Koselleckian Sattelzeit that structure the heuristic approach to the analysis of modern political and social concepts
is that of their Democratization [
Demokratisierung ]. According to
Koselleck, during the Enlightenment, the political language, and therefore its constitutive concepts, spread itself in a way in which social sectors that had been formerly alien to it, gradually joined this linguistic political space. In the current essay, my intention is to suggest a category that allow us to think the ways in which the phenomenon of the democratization of the political languages and concepts operated in the very level of its textuality –as well in the written dimension as in the oral one–. In this sense, the Derridean concept of dissemination will be proposed as a theoretical tool extremely useful to think and understand that phenomenon. The theoretical analysis will be accompanied with particular examples taken from the different conceptions of freedom offered by Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie.
