Concepts function as psychological reassurance against historical rupture.

Evidence

Increasingly, I think one of the main functions of concepts is that they give us a good night’s rest. Because what they tell us is that there is a kind of stable, only very slowly changing ground inside the hectic upsets, discontinuities, and ruptures of history. Around us history is constantly breaking in unpredictable ways but we, somehow, go on being the same. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 180

Categorization

• APHORISMS: The idea that concepts give us a good night’s rest is a striking formulation about why we cling to stable self-conceptions.
• XREF: connects to: Nostalgia is an adjustment mechanism during crises — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 540; Naming the present as a completed historical instant masks a fear of change — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 660