History Of Concept Research Articles

Debunking the Myth of Sexual Freedom and Secularism

Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory is an international refereed open access journal, which publishes contributions on the transdisciplinary study of concepts. In classical rhetoric, ‘redescription’ refers to a rhetorical move that alters the use of a concept in one respect or another. The journal draws attention to conceptual moves within political theory, conceptual history and feminist thought, and highlights political agency within these moves. Political and feminist thought in various forms, whether in philosophical, historical or contemporary terms, is published by the journal. Unique in its focus in political and conceptual contingency, Redescriptions has been published since 1997. Redescriptions welcomes original scholarly contributions on any aspect of political and feminist thought, especially studies that take the changing and contested character of concepts seriously.All our previously published issues are freely available in our issue archive.

Farewell to Anarchy: The Myth of International Anarchy and Birth of Anarcophilia in International Relations

This article scrutinizes the conceptual history of international anarchy. The argument purported here is that even though the idea of international anarchy is often seen as very central for the academic discipline of international relations, the concept is in fact not found from the forerunners or classics of the discipline. The assumption of international anarchy is commonly seen as a defining feature of a Realist school of international relations. Yet, the concept and especially its “Realist” implications are not to be found in the classics of Realism, from Thucydides, Machiavelli or Hobbes. The idea of “international anarchy” emerges quite tentatively during the First World War, in the writings of theoreticians like Dickinson and Spiller. But even then it does not carry the neo-Realist overtones of international anarchy as permanent condition of international relations. It is only in the 1980’s that the discipline starts to huddle around this concept.

The population, its health and social sciences.

This commentary provides a glimpse into a conceptual history approach to the topic of public health. I focus primarily on the history of public health during the first half of the 20th century. I will also reflect on its entanglement with the social sciences in later times. The first two sections discuss three core elements of the concept of public health: the “public” or collective that the term refers to, “health”, and finally, “public health” as “health of a collective”. These elements are historical and political concepts, which means that they do not have a fixed definition, but need to be placed in their historical and political contexts. In the final section, I discuss some connections between social science and public health during the 20th century.

At genplacere den moderne stat - Guvernementalitet og de politiske idéers historie

Michel Foucault never wrote very comprehensively about his method in regards to his approach to the history of political ideas and the emergence of the modern state, something he most explicitly tried to do in the two lectures which he himself termed ’a history of governmentality’, Security, Territory, Population (1977-78) and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-79). This article treats these reflections as a ’methodological promise’ and seeks to reconstruct a Foucauldianapproach to the history of political ideas from the role Foucault himself believed the ’history of governmentality’ should play. Foucault’s approach proves to be a distinct way of studying the history of political ideas as an alternative to, and in some ways superior to, both the more traditional ways of doing the history of political ideas as well as newer attempts such as intellectual history and conceptual history. In the special way it looks at the history of political thought, Foucault’s approach can go much further than the other alternatives.

Folkhemmets demokrati - En analys av den svenska socialdemokratins språkbruk kring demokratiska deltagandeformer

This article investigates the role that civic participation played for the formation of the concept of democracy, by surveying the language of The Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) in the 1920s. During the first half of the decade, the SAP outlined various forms of participation for the citizens. Having adopted the traditionally conservative concept of the People’s Home, the party increasingly used it as a metaphor for the fully democratized society. This, however, created a tension between the Social Democrats’ arguments about the importance of civil participation in a democratic society, and the idea of the state building the People’s Home for the citizens. Using theoretical insights from conceptual history as the point of departure, this article addresses this tension by showing that according to the SAP, the fully democratic society could be realized at two levels: both by the state and by the citizens themselves.

Mediterranean diasporas: politics and ideas in the long 19th century

ABSTRACTThis round table discusses a collection that explores the circulation of ideas across and beyond the Mediterranean in the long nineteenth century, a space normally consigned to the margins of historiographical concerns and studied in discrete geographical areas. The commentators agree that the diasporic approach centred on biography taken by the collection demonstrates the existence of a plurality of liberal strands and political projects, highlights the importance of exchanges between European peripheries like Russia, the Adriatic and Greece, and challenges the notion of the derivative nature of eastern and oriental political culture. At the same time, the round table suggests new paths for future research, pointing to the desirability of producing a transnational conceptual history of liberalism that connects and compares East and West, and of applying the same transnational methodological approach to other seas.

Psychiatry in Portugal: Key actors and conceptual history (1884-1924).

The aim of this article is the study of psychiatry in Portugal between 1884 and 1924, the period when it became institutionalized, and when works that marked its scientific evolution were published. This paper summarizes the various historiographical approaches, and its approach to the subject is closest to the conceptual history carried out by German Berrios in Cambridge. The study attempts to correlate the key actors and their works with the history of different scientific ideas, its differences, and the influences of foreign authors. The diseases, syndromes, symptoms and pathologizations in this historical period were also studied, justifying a constructionist perspective. Finally, the various therapies are discussed, from institutional to pharmacological and psychotherapeutical.

La reconceptualización católica de la revolución: el pensamiento cristiano frente al cambio histórico, Chile (1960-1964)

El siguiente artículo busca, a partir de un conjunto de fuentes documentales destinadas a la esfera pública chilena, reconstituir históricamente e interpretar a partir del enfoque de la Historia Conceptual el uso dado por distintos agentes del pensamiento católico al concepto de revolución en Chile entre 1960 y 1964, subrayando los debates generados, los argumentos utilizados y su eficacia para la comprensión católica del cambio histórico en el periodo.

Time to tear down the pyramids? A critique of cascading hierarchies as a policy tool

Cascading, or cascade use, is concept that has many different definitions, but a common theme is a sequential use of resources for different purposes. The cascading concept was first presented in the early 1990s but has become an intensively debated topic primarily in the most recent decade. In the available literature on cascading of wood, there are few studies that discuss policy implementation. As this is currently heavily debated, there is an important gap here that we aim to fill. In this paper, we (a) critically review the conceptual history of cascading and (b) highlight the complexities involved in its implementation in policy frameworks. Originally, cascading was discussed as a broad framework for how society better should manage natural resource flows. In more recent debates on woody biomass however, cascading is often presented as simply a hierarchy, wherein material use of wood should hold priority over energy use of wood. This is partly based on an idea that certain forms of wood utilization are inherently more valuable than others, an assumption that becomes problematic when implemented in policy. In reality, how and for what a certain wood resource is used varies with time and place and historical examples of implementation of hierarchical policy frameworks indicate a high risk of unwanted consequences, such as unstable policy structures and tendencies toward a negotiation economy. Cascading of woody biomass can have benefits from both an economical and environmental perspective. However, cascading systems should emerge bottom‐up, not be imposed top‐down through politically determined hierarchies. WIREs Energy Environ 2018, 7:e279. doi: 10.1002/wene.279This article is categorized under: Energy and Climate > Economics and Policy Energy Policy and Planning > Economics and Policy

Inciteful language: knowing and naming technology in south central Africa

ABSTRACTThe word busongo names a kind of technological ‘know-how’ across a large number of languages in south central Africa, a distribution that is a testament to the word’s age. This essay reconstructs the history of the invention and changing meanings of busongo from its first millennium origins and tracks its use to the present using the methods of comparative historical linguistics. The resulting history illustrates the interplay of affective and sensory dimensions of technology in the creation of new understandings of technological practices in medieval central Africa. As a form of conceptual history, the story of busongo also raises new questions about the relationship between tacit knowledge, explicit knowledge and speech: is speech a form of tacit knowledge? If so, what are the implications for the distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge?

Discovering William of Malmesbury ed. by Rodney M. Thomson, Emily Dolmans, and Emily A. Winkler

Reviewed by: Discovering William of Malmesbury ed. by Rodney M. Thomson, Emily Dolmans, and Emily A. Winkler Matthew Firth Thomson, Rodney M., Emily Dolmans, and Emily A. Winkler, eds, Discovering William of Malmesbury, Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2017; hardback; pp. 244; R.R.P. £70.00; ISBN 9781783271368. Over the past forty years, Rodney Thomson has established himself as the authority on the life and works of William of Malmesbury. It is reassuring then for scholars of England’s foremost twelfth-century historian to find Thomson’s name attached to a project such as Discovering William of Malmesbury. What is perhaps even more reassuring is that this edited volume of eighteen chapters gives ample evidence that interest in William of Malmesbury remains strong among a new generation of scholars, and that the future study of his legacy is in good hands. The contributions to this volume display the impressive breadth of scholarship on William and his works currently being undertaken—from William’s conceptualization of history and his place in the historiography of twelfth-century England, through to his portrayal of the Jews, his perception of the Britons, and his understanding of kingship. However, considering that there are eighteen individual contributions and the book is only 224 pages in length, it is of note that each study is brief. This is not in itself problematic, and the tight focus and contained argument of each chapter is a credit to both the editors and the authors. Yet, with so many contributions, the reader may reasonably expect to be guided by the thematic division of chapters that has become the norm of edited volumes. However, this is lacking. The net effect is to create the impression of a compilation of independent studies, rather than an integrated collection in which the contributions are in conversation. But this is a small criticism. It is an excellent book, to be thoroughly recommended. [End Page 236] William gives scholars not only a glimpse of history as a record of events, but in the very process of writing provides a lens through which to understand the social, political, and cultural milieu in which he lived and operated. It is a duality that editors Emily Dolmans and Emily A. Winkler highlight in their introduction, asserting the aim of the volume is ‘to present an image of William as subject and object’ (p. 3). They thus identify two thematic concerns to the studies in the volume. First, ‘William the man’ (pp. 5–7), the ambitious historian and scholar, more interested in learning than the pursuit of direct political agency. Second, ‘William’s works’ (pp. 8–10), writings that catered to a wide range of audiences, to his own thirst for knowledge and its preservation, incorporating elements of historiography, hagiography, and philosophy. This proposed demarcation of the man and his works is not quite as clear as the introduction implies (our knowledge of William’s life comes entirely from his own writings), yet it does hold broadly true of the studies that follow. Granted the breadth and number of contributions to Discovering William of Malmesbury, we must content ourselves with an overview of a few especially noteworthy chapters of each type. In Chapter 2 Anne E. Bailey assesses the utility of notions of genre in Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, examining the blend of historical and hagiographical characteristics of the work. Bailey’s study can be applied across all of William’s works (and even more broadly across twelfth-century English histories) for, as she notes, history mixes with hagiography throughout William’s entire corpus, though it is simply more evident in Gesta Pontificum Anglorum. Bailey ably demonstrates William’s skilled synthesis of multiple sources to augment his narratives, both historical and hagiographical, and that in the resultant biographies William himself consciously shifted between history and hagiography. Suggesting that William’s intent was to relate ‘heritage’ rather than ‘history’ (p. 25), Bailey concludes that William was deliberate in constructing narratives that preserved regional traditions. In Chapter 4, John Gillingham looks at William’s portrayals of William II and Henry I, arguing that William preserves a far more nuanced view of both kings than that offered by his contemporaries and successors. Moreover, Gillingham proposes...

Huella de Hans-Georg Gadamer en Reinhart Koselleck. Aportes a la historia conceptual

Este artículo analiza la influencia de la hermenéutica de Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900-2002) sobre la historia conceptual de Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006), así como la relación intelectual entre ambos. En este sentido, se hace una revisión de los principales rasgos biográficos de ambos académicos, y un reexamen de las ideas —de temporalidad y lenguaje—, que inspiraron y contribuyeron en su formación y obras, para analizar las premisas primordiales de sus trabajos, en Verdad y método, Futuro Pasado e Historia y Hermenéutica. En suma, se reflexionan las concepciones centrales de ambos autores y sus vínculos, además de la vigencia de sus aportes en la ciencia histórica del siglo XXI.

Preface: Transcultural Turn of Conceptual History Research

Abstract If we do not shrink from making rough generalizations and adopt a broad, conventional approach, then what we call modernity refers to the process whereby a state of heterogeneity progresses toward homogeneity in time, space, human collectives, social order, and other areas. In his book The Cheese and the Worms, Carlo Ginzburg discusses a late-16th century incident of heterodoxy that cannot be classified into previously existing standard categories. As new knowledge was disseminated thanks to the invention of the Gutenberg printing press, old and new knowledge came into conflict in the mind of a heterodox figure by the name of Menocchio. He attacked the church, saying that it was more important to love one’s neighbor than to love God (Ginzburg, 1992: 38). Through these small, humble manifestations of change, Ginzburg was able to reveal the juncture when European modern knowledge first emerged from a muddled, undifferentiated state into one of clarity, whereby over the course of about a century of fermentation, its contours eventually became clearly evident around the year 1800. This process has been termed by the pioneer of conceptual history Otto Brunner as the “threshold era” (Schwellenzeit) (Blänkner, 2012: 107), and by Reinhart Koselleck as the beginning of the “saddle era” (Sattelzeit) (Koselleck and Richter, 2011: 9).

Research in entropy wonterland: A review of the entropy concept

The entropy concept was introduced in the mid-nineteenth century by Clausius and has been continually enriched, developed, and interpreted by researchers in many scientific disciplines. The use of entropy in a wide range of fields has led to inconsistencies in its application and interpretation, as summarized by von Neuman ?No one knows what entropy really is.? To resolve this problem, thermodynamics and other scientific disciplines face several crucial questions concerning the entropy concept: (1) What is the physical meaning of entropy? (2) Is entropy a subjective or an objective property? (3) How to apply entropy to living organisms? To answer these questions, this paper describes the roots, the conceptual history of this important concept, as well as the path of development and application in various scientific disciplines, including classical thermodynamics, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and life sciences. <br><br><font color="red"><b> This article has been retracted. Link to the retraction <u><a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/TSCI180730231E">10.2298/TSCI180730231E</a><u></b></font>

The Enlightenment Turns to China: The International Flow of Concepts and Their Geographic Dispersion

Abstract This article attempts to strip away the Eurocentrism of the Enlightenment, to reconsider how this concept that originated in Europe was transmitted to China. This is thus an attempt to treat the Enlightenment in terms of its global, worldwide significance. Coming from this perspective, the Enlightenment can be viewed as a history of the exchange and interweaving of concepts, a history of translation and quotation, and thus a history of the joint production of knowledge. We must reconsider the dimensions of both time and space in examining the global Enlightenment project. As a concept, the Enlightenment for the most part has been molded by historical actors acting in local circumstances. It is not a concept shaped and brought into being solely from textual sources originating in Europe. As a concept, the Enlightenment enabled historical actors in specific localities to begin to engage in globalized thinking, and to find a place for their individual circumstances within the global setting. This article follows such a line of thought, to discuss the conceptual history of the Enlightenment in China, giving special emphasis to the processes of formation and translation of this concept within the overall flow of modern Chinese history.

Conceptual history of “capitalism”

This article presents the philosophical reconstruction of the concept of «capitalism». The key thesis is that K. Marx was not the creator of the concept «capitalism», he used the term «capitalist mode of production». This text introduces the consistent philosophical reflection on the emergence and formation the concept of «capitalism» from the very beginning of its first references in the political literature in Germany and France and completing the introduction of the concept into the academic discourse as a stable term. The article shows the significance of Shaeffle’s work as earlier and important for the development of the concept «capitalism» in contrast to steady concept that Sombart was the first popularizer of the concept and introduced it into the academic use. Shaeffle’s work has been shown to be important in receiving a neutral meaning of the concept of «capitalism» through it convergences with the concept of «liberalism», having lost its negative political connotations, that prepared the ground for the start of its academic history. In this text, Sombart and Weber are represented not only as the pioneers of the concept of «capitalism» as the part of academic discourse, but also as the scholars who made the capitalism one type of ideology connecting it with the concept of «spirit», embodying the specific type of capitalist rationality. The particular philosophical reconstruction of the generation of the concept of «capitalism» shown how the dynamic, developing, unstable concept of «capitalism» became firstly the ideological concept and then the main basis for the formation of rational/calculative New Time subject.

The Question of Sensibility

There is, of course, more than one question posed by the elusive notion of sensibility, especially if we consider it both in its contemporary deployment and in its rich conceptual history. The question I pose here is occasioned by the recent renewal of interest in aesthetic education and, more precisely, in efforts to renew criticism itself by returning to the psychological paradigm of sensibility-formation in the work of I. A. Richards. What might history have to do with such a paradigm and its present utility? And what might Romanticism in particular have to do with it? My answer is that Richards’s modernist project cannot be fully grasped without seeing its deep continuity with a Romantic transformation that posed the question of sensibility in the early Industrial Revolution as naming not only a general cultural crisis, though this was itself a Romantic innovation, but also a crisis that poetry alone could hope to address. Such a recognition has implications, I try to show, for how we approach what might be called the poetics of “achieved sensibility” both then and now.

Slavery and the Conceptual History of the Early U.S. State

Slavery and the Conceptual History of the Early U.S. State

The Conceptual History of Independence and the Colonial Question in Spanish America.

The idea that Spanish American countries experienced colonialism was well accepted for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The independence movements in the early nineteenth century were viewed as the result of struggles by oppressed nations against the metropole's tyranny. Recent historiography views the collapse of the monarchy as the result of the political and legal crisis brought about by the Napoleonic invasion and the illegal abdications in Bayonne in March 1808. Colonial and post-colonial theories and categories have been brought under scrutiny. The following pages sketch the historiographical and theoretical grounds and consequences of this paradigm shift.

Political Culture in Spanish America, 1500–1830 by Jaime E. Rodríguez O.

Reviewed by: Political Culture in Spanish America, 1500–1830 by Jaime E. Rodríguez O. Abisai Pérez Political Culture in Spanish America, 1500–1830. By Jaime E. Rodríguez O. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. Pp. 228. Tables, notes, bibliography, index.) Over the past three decades, the "new political history" has produced a rich scholarship about the emergence and development of the nation-state in Latin America. That historiographical turn, enriched by the postulates of the French linguistic turn and the Cambridge school of conceptual history, has explained in detail the origins and formation of the representative political system in Latin America. One of the major proponents of the new political history is Jaime Rodríguez O., and this book offers a synthesis of his prolific academic trajectory. In this work, Rodríguez explains some fundamental concepts and arguments about Hispanic political culture that are not well acknowledged among Anglophone scholars. The book's eight essays, previously published in Spanish as a single collection, argue that the Hispanic world possessed a common political culture based on the profession of Catholicism and on an imagined social compact between subjects and their king. Rodríguez traced the origins of the Hispanic political culture to Spanish neo-scholastic theorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, who developed the idea that the Spanish monarchy was a conglomerate of realms with rights and political representation and viewed Spanish American territories as kingdoms, not colonies. When Napoleon Bonaparte invaded the Iberian Peninsula and captured the Spanish royal family in 1808, Spanish subjects appealed to the traditional Hispanic political culture by founding juntas—autonomous governments—in the name of the king. The author makes clear that insurgent movements in Spanish America initially did not seek independence from the Spanish crown but sought more political autonomy according to the traditional discourse of rights and privileges. Amid political turmoil, Spanish subjects on both sides of the Atlantic decided to form a national assembly—the Cortes of Cádiz—that in 1812 created the Cádiz Constitution. Rodríguez states that the Spanish charter gave birth to political representation and mass politics in the Hispanic political culture by creating a representative system based on popular elections. Given that the charter enfranchised the majority of the male population in the Hispanic world, Rodríguez considers it "the most radical charter of the nineteenth century" (9). These essays, based on case studies concerning Mexico and Quito, Ecuador, explain how the Cádiz charter and Spanish political culture shaped Latin American independence and its early national period. The author addresses not only the participation of prominent politicians but also of clerics and indigenous people. Thus, Rodríguez demonstrates how different social groups referred to the traditional political culture [End Page 225] to defend their interests and improve their social position once the Spanish monarchy evolved from an absolutist regime to a constitutional one. Furthermore, Rodríguez emphasizes that the United States' early political system and its independence from monarchy did not influence the actions of Spanish Americans, and that the caudillos—military politicians—emerged not because Hispanic societies inherited an authoritarian culture of dominion, but because they strived to represent a variety of interests, including ordinary people. Rodríguez also reflects on the evolution of Anglophone historiography. He appreciates that in the 1980s and 1990s U.S. scholars abandoned the study of politics because of the rise of subaltern studies and cultural history. The author praises Nettie Lee Benson, who founded one of the most important Latin American studies libraries in the United States and was one of the first historians to identify key aspects of the Hispanic political culture, all much before the advent of the new political history. Hopefully this book will revive interest in the political history of nineteenth-century Spanish America, continuing the work that Benson initiated. Abisai Pérez University of Texas at Austin Copyright © 2018 The Texas State Historical Association