This article addresses the limited attention the concept of historical thinking has received in professional historiography, particularly amid the current crisis of the modern regime of historicity. It aims to define historical thinking by examining recent developments in global historiography and historical theory. The text is structured into three sections: the first summarizes postcolonial critiques of modern historiography, the second explores premodern conceptualizations of historical thought beyond the Global North, and the third discusses global reapproaches to historiography. The article concludes (...) by suggesting that conceptual history provides essential tools for developing a multilingual and transnational understanding of global historical thought, thereby expanding the boundaries of historiographical research beyond Western-centric frameworks. (shrink)

The article explores the historico-conceptual paradox of nation-building through the eyes of some collectives of artisans and craftsmen in Mexico during the 1840s. Analyzing some contributions to the history of the concept in nineteenth-century Mexico unveils some of its semantic and political paradoxes. By briefly discussing some contestations that emerged from different groups to the concept forged by centralists and industrialists, the article analyzes the importance a national-economic project had for the formation of the concept of nation. The industrialization agenda (...) advocated by certain groups was contested by artisan collectives who developed new conceptions of political and economic relations among national subjects through the organization and cooperation of work. The article finally discusses whether the “working nation” disclosed by these associations can be considered a form of alternative nationalism or an alternative form of nation altogether. (shrink)

This article probes the meanings of and distinctions between the concepts of the state, sovereignty, and government, as elaborated by Jean Bodin. There is tendency for one of these three terms to disappear in modern analyses of his work. I argue that Bodin makes the state the name of an insubstantial substantive: the condition of a civil condition that must always be qualified by an adjective stating the location of sovereignty as opposed to government. The article then considers the concept (...) of la police in Bodin's work. Although the term is normally understood to mean “government,” I maintain that one of the ways Bodin uses the term is to designate something like “polish.” Bodin provides further textual support for a classical sociological theory about the pacification of society that proceeded alongside the rise of the modern sovereign state. (shrink)

Fascism has returned—not necessarily as a regime type, but as a central concept in political discourse. This editorial examines how the term “fascism” has been used to characterize Trumpism. While some historians have cautioned against simplistic analogies, other commentators and scholars insist that Trump embodies core fascist traits. Conceptual history provides a lens to analyze how fascism functions not only as an analytical category but also as a Kampfbegriff—a weaponized term in political struggle. The question emerges, however, whether the concept (...) of fascism, even when justified as a necessary weapon in the current situation, does not ultimately risk preventing an appreciation of what is novel about Trumpism, and of its entanglement with a contemporary “postmodern” moment, arguably very different from the modern seedbed of mid-twentieth-century fascism. (shrink)

On 12 December 2023, John Greville Agard Pocock passed away. Author of a prestigious body of work specialized in the history of British languages of politics during the early Modern period (1500–1830), his theoretical and methodological perspective played a crucial role in the renovation of the history of political thought and discourse in the English-speaking world and, eventually, further afield. Less well-known outside specialist circles than Quentin Skinner, his contribution to the reconfiguration of the historical study of political thought was (...) equally significant. In his capacity as a theorist of the notion of contextualized languages of politics, he would engage late in his career in a fruitful series of discussions with Reinhart Koselleck on the relevance of the begriffsgeschichtlich program to his own work. (shrink)

At the opening of the twentieth century, some believed that there was a lack of political consciousness among the Chinese people. They introduced foreign political theories, attempting to engage Chinese citizenry with the political. Yet what the political entails remains an unresolved issue even in China today. This article traces the history of Chinese translation of the political through a dynamic process of language adaptation and cultural appropriation. It argues that two competing legacies, one that promises the politicization as a (...) way to liberate individual subjectivity in a modernizing society and another that calls for the order and organization that subject individual will to the collective power of the state, have exerted combined influences on shaping the modern Chinese conception of the political. As a result, to many Chinese today, politics is not just about the daily business of people's affairs but also an orderly society with a centralized authority. (shrink)

Efforts to trace the concept of the political in India and South Asia have looked for equivalent terms in the languages of the subcontinent and have traced textual influences of ideas both globally and within South Asian literary traditions. While not diminishing the importance of textual approaches, this article traces the historical emergence of associations between the concept of the political and the joint actions and collective practices of amplification frequently used to communicate with rulers. It argues that under British (...) rule many of the accepted methods and moral economies condoned for communicating with rulers were explicitly criminalized and came to be recognized as political only in response to this criminalization. By attending to a history of practices and their associations with wider “semantic nets,” the article also offers methodological reflections on the relationships between histories of doing, histories of concepts, and the lexicons through which these can be traced. (shrink)

Taking its starting point from Dipesh Chakravarty's Provincializing Europe and in particular European analytical concepts, this article argues that it is time to move beyond the diagnosis of “inadequate, but indispensable.” I discuss three approaches that have been suggested for the development of analytical concepts for global history: the creation of equivalents across languages by the historical subjects; the identification of problems as a starting point to trace the language that has been developed to discuss them; and comparison. I then (...) propose a strategy, based on Rolf Reichardt's semantic nets, but taking it beyond its reliance on words, and words in one language only. I argue that these revised semantic nets have the potential to allow us to both trace connections between languages and generate concepts for our analyses, if and when needed, which are not necessarily universal in claim, but transcend source concepts in individual languages. (shrink)

The notions of “concepts of the political” and that of “political concepts” refer to different but intertwined phenomena. As I will argue in this article, the concepts of the political refer to the self-institution of societies, while political concepts are those that emerge in the realm of politics, a field some societies institute as precisely the site in which the reversibility of the political takes place. This article will argue that the concepts of the political and the political concepts coming (...) out of South America in its contemporary history spring from the main events and processes—the political and social history—that dominated the period. The events and concepts first discussed will be those related to the conquest and its legacy, only to later move fully to the past fifty years of dictatorships, transitions to democracy, and the emergence of the neopopulist political form. (shrink)

In this article, we trace the diversification of Ottoman political vocabulary from the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth in a time of dynastic restoration and administrative modernization. We focus particularly on the transformation of the concept siyâset (rule, politics) which had been in use in Muslim polities for centuries, and the emergence, in the late eighteenth century, of the word politika which has come to be used alongside siyâset since then. In making sense of this bifurcation, we demonstrate that the (...) Ottoman elite conceptions of politics were not simply replaced by the European conceptions. Rather, the equivalence of siyâset and politika was clearly contested by Ottoman statesmen, and the political terminology of rule and administration evolved in tandem with the material transformation of the Ottoman dynasty and state. (shrink)

Most people are familiar with claims concerning entire generations. Whether used to praise the legacy of past generations or to protect posterity, the emphasis on generational aspects is common in the realm of politics. Regardless of their prevalence, generations are rarely studied from a conceptual perspective. This article both demonstrates the need to place more emphasis on generational concepts and proposes a theoretical approach for doing so. By discussing mid-eighteenth-century British petitions, it demonstrates how historical actors operationalized generational concepts (generation, (...) ancestor, forefather, posterity, and descendant) in practice. As a conclusion, the article suggests that their uses are best understood through Michael Saward's notion of representative claim-making. (shrink)

This explorative article conceptualizes the myth as a cultural locus where different concepts are ordered forming semantic networks and as a social narrative reflecting emotional predispositions toward the social significance of an episode in the past. The article analyzes the semantic network formed within the Arthurian myth by the concepts Britain and imperium. It identifies a persistent semilogical dynamic between both concepts but shifting emotional responses and temporalities: loss and longing among the Welsh (sixth century to eleventh century), fixing the (...) memory in the past; joy among the English (twelfth century to fifteenth century), bringing the memory into the present; and anxiety and desire among Welsh and English (sixteenth century) projecting the memory to the future. During the seventeenth century, the semantic network left the Arthurian myth, which fell into a relative oblivion. (shrink)

Conspiracy theories are widespread across the world, including in the Arab Middle East and North Africa. The term “conspiracy” (muˀāmara) itself is also frequently used in contemporary Arabic. However, we know little about when and how the term emerged and how it was used originally. Based on a digital corpus of Arab newspapers from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as plain text versions of classical Arabic literature, this article finds that muˀāmara appears and rises to prominence (...) in the late nineteenth century in the emerging Arabic-speaking public sphere. The term was probably coined in response to influence from European public discourse at the same time, which included conspiracy theories. Unlike that European discourse and today's Arabic conspiracy talk, the early usage of muˀāmara had little to do with either conspiracy theories or religion. The word was used in a more sober way than in Europe. (shrink)

In 2023, Margrit Pernau stepped down as editor of Contributions to the History of Concepts. She first took up the position as editor in 2009, and, with her fifteen years on the editorial team, she has been by far our longest serving editor. Over the years, Margrit Pernau has played an invaluable role for the journal and for international conceptual history. I guess it would be correct to say that she was born international. She followed her family when her father (...) got a job in New Delhi and lived in the city for part of her childhood. Her international journey continued to Paris where she spent almost ten years of her youth. After longer detours around Erfurt and Heidelberg where she did her PhD in 1991, she stayed another six years in New Delhi with her spouse and children. After defending her habilitation in Bielefeld in 2007, she took up the position of Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin in 2008. Many of us who have been involved in her several projects through the years know the renowned expressionist style building at Lentzeallee. (shrink)