History Of Concept Research Articles

From the Concept to the Practice of Parliamentary Immunity1

Abstract Scholars have long debated the normative rationality, the temporal and legal aspects, and finally the limits and modern practices of parliamentary immunity. Therefore, this study does not insist on these classical interpretations anymore, but seeks to contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the conceptual history of parliamentary immunity. Embracing two schools of thought, the Koselleckian interpretation and the Skinnerian variant, this paper aims to establish and clarify in detail the story of the concept of parliamentary immunity in order to elucidate, in a Socratic fashion, what we really mean when we say that a senator or a deputy benefits from legislative immunity. This inquiry will help us emphasise how this concept leaves behind its abstract notion and becomes an institution with strict rules and practices. In addition, considering the importance of this concept in the modern legislative and rhetoric histories and the frequency with which it is used, this study will question the meanings of parliamentary immunity in the light of different historical settings and will eventually trace out a single, coherent, and unified conceptual matrix. My contention is that once parliamentary immunity – seen as a conceptual construct only adjusting the balance of power between the executive and the legislative powers – becomes an institution with strong practices, it enforces the parliament as a unified and independent body and creates the prerequisite conditions for the democratic development.

Racial conceptions in the global south.

What happens to twentieth-century race science when we relocate it to the Global South? North Atlantic debates have dominated the conceptual history of race. Yet there is suggestive evidence of a "southern" or antipodean racial distinctiveness. We can find across the Southern Hemisphere greater interest in racial plasticity, environmental adaptation, mixing or miscegenation, and blurring of racial boundaries; endorsement of biological absorption of indigenous populations; and consent to the formation of new or blended races. Once we recognize the Global South as a site of knowledge making, and not just data extraction, the picture of race science in the twentieth century changes. Once situated, or displaced, the conventional North Atlantic history of race science in the twentieth century comes to seem exceptional--and no longer normative.

Nostalgia: a conceptual history.

The term nostalgia was first proposed in 1688 by Johannes Hofer as equivalent to the German term Heimweh. It referred to a state of moral pain associated with the forced separation from family and social environment. Consecutive clinical descriptions from the seventeenth century up to the present day have been subjected to the aetiopathogenic and clinical paradigms of each period. Golden-age descriptions of nostalgia that are of particular interest were derived from the observation of conscript soldiers in Napoleonic campaigns by authors such as Gerbois and Larrey. In 1909 Jaspers devoted his doctoral thesis to this topic (Nostalgia und Verbrechen). From a cultural history point of view, it could be considered today as an example of 'transient illness'. The nosological relay has taken place through clinical pictures such as the pathology associated with exile, forced displacements and psychosis of captivity.

Conceptual History, Cultural History, Social History

V. M. Zhivov’s introduction to Studies in Historical Semantics of the Russian Language in the Early Modern Period (2009), translated here for the first time, offers a critical survey of the historiography on Begriffsgeschichte, the German school of conceptual history associated with the work of Reinhart Koselleck, as well as of its application to the study of Russian culture. By situating Begriffsgeschichte in the context of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century European philosophy, particularly hermeneutics and phenomenology, the author points out the important, and as yet unacknowledged, role that Russian linguists have played in the development of a native school of conceptual history. In the process of outlining this alternative history of the discipline, Zhivov provides some specific examples of the way in which the study of “historical semantics” can be used to analyze the development of Russian modernity.

The Birth of Territory: Should political geographers do conceptual history?

<i>The Birth of Territory</i>: Should political geographers do conceptual history?

Necessary, but not sufficient

This response to John Agnew agrees that the history of ideas is never enough for the project of understanding the world but argues that it is a crucial part of that work. The commentary begins by contesting the claim that there is a turn towards this perspective in geography and suggests that much more needs to be done. I engage with Agnew’s article, especially with regard to the question of territory, by clarifying the project undertaken in The Birth of Territory. The inquiry there, I suggest, examined the complicated relation between words, concepts and practices; and many of the texts examined were not detached works of theory but practical texts – either written by or for political actors, or constitutions, treaties, papal bulls, handbooks of land surveying or law. This commentary closes by suggesting that the history of ideas, genealogy and conceptual history can, as part of what Foucault called ‘the history of the present’, offer valuable tools for critical geography. They are one element within such a project, necessary, but not sufficient.

Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought: From Charisma to Canonization by Joshua Derman (review)

Reviewed by: Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought: From Charisma to Canonization by Joshua Derman Lawrence A. Scaff Joshua Derman, Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought: From Charisma to Canonization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Pp. 271. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 978-1107025882. The reputation of a thinker and writer is often difficult to fathom. There are those like Goethe whose eminence grew in his own time and increased long after his death. There are others like the theologian Adolf von Harnack, prominent in his own day [End Page 675] but largely forgotten in ours. And then there are figures like Max Weber, known if at all only in small circles during his lifetime, but growing dramatically in stature and recognition well after his death in 1920. Weber offers a striking case of posthumous fame, a lengthy journey from relative obscurity to international prominence and the invention of a distinctive “Weberian” approach to knowledge about society and history. How and why this development occurred is an engaging intellectual and historical question. The answer tells us something important not only about Weber’s ideas, but also about the cultural and political crises and the intellectual history of the last hundred years. There are many reasons, an unusual “combination of circumstances” to speak with Weber, that account for the growth of engagement with Weberian ideas, concepts, and perspectives. Drawing upon the tradition of scholarship in Rezeptionsgeschichte and Begriffsgeschichte, Joshua Derman has written an important study that explores many of these reasons. Presented in its first version as a history dissertation at Princeton, Max Weber in Politics and Social Thought investigates the transatlantic reception of Weber’s ideas primarily in Germany and the United States. The author emphasizes that the narrative of Weber’s ascendancy is filled with surprises. The study is concerned not with something as opaque as “influence,” but rather with the uses of Weber’s thought in the twentieth century. To use a major thinker’s ideas is to engage with them in dialogue, or as the author points out, to think with Weber and to extend, elaborate, and apply his questions and concepts in novel ways or in unanticipated contexts. To be sure, authors have intentions and try to control the way in which their ideas are borrowed, interpreted, and applied. But control has limits. Most complex ideas have elasticity, depth, and reach, as Weber’s writings illustrate. Weberian analysis has gained currency, shown resilience, and become an identifiable approach in the human sciences in important measure because of its conceptual richness and capacity for extension into uncharted terrain. Derman explores the theme of reception and conceptual history in six well-considered chapters, beginning with a sketch of the circles of scholars and intellectuals associated with Max Weber and knowledgeable about his ideas, and ending with a chapter on the concept of “charisma” and its introduction into the language of social science and public discourse. Along the way he discusses some of the major features of Weber’s contribution: the well-known dispute over “values” and “value freedom”; the famous debate about modern capitalism and its origins and significance; the problem of belief and conviction in a “disenchanted” world; and the nature of “sociology” itself as Weber came to understand the subject. These are not new topics, of course. But there are two significant advantages to the author’s approach: first, it is resolutely historicist in the most constructive sense. That is, unlike discussions that decontextualize and abstract Weber’s positions, ignoring his actual targets and the rhetorical and polemical aims of those who used his arguments, Derman’s account [End Page 676] pays close attention to the intellectual and political contexts in which the ideas were appropriated and the arguments advanced. The result is both a fresh perspective on familiar topics and an expansion of the field of Weberian Rezeptionsgeschichte. The chapter on charisma is a case in point, as the discussion shows clearly how interwar social scientists began to borrow and rework Weber’s ideas in response to the emergence of fascist leaders like Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. In the era of postwar decolonization, the same concept was transposed to address the politics of...

Enlightenment as Concept and Context.

Enlightenment as Concept and Context James Schmidt Enlightenment, Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock, Ian Hunter, John Robertson, conceptual history, history of ideas, historiography of the Enlightenment The Ideas in Context series has served the Enlightenment well. Roughly a quarter of the first hundred books in the series deal (at least in part) with the period, including studies of Locke (Tully, Carey, Dawson), Rousseau (Rosenblatt), Smith (Forman-Barzilai), Mandeville (Goldsmith and Hundert), Thomasius (Hunter), the reception of Hobbes (Parkin), and a now-classic account of the ideological origins of the French Revolution (Baker).1 Of no less significance are broader-gauged examinations of the “common good” (Miller), “luxury” (Berry), and “empire” (Brown, Armitage), as well [End Page 677] as explorations of the Enlightenment’s relationship to Rational Dissenters (Haakonssen) and Judaism (Sutcliffe) and its debts to theories of natural law (Hochstrasser and Hunter).2 The nexus of commerce, politics, and history has also been a major concern of the series (Pocock, Tribe, Winch, Force, Robertson).3 But a tally of this sort only begins to register the significance of Ideas in Context for studies of the Enlightenment. As might be expected from a series ably shepherded by Quentin Skinner, significant methodological questions have also come to the fore. According to the statement that stands at the front of each volume, the goal of the series is to trace “the emergence of intellectual traditions and of related new disciplines” by setting the “procedures, aims, and vocabularies” generated by these traditions and disciplines in the context of the “ideas and institutions” in which they developed. If the way in which this setting of ideas in contexts was to be effected might not have been entirely clear from the programmatic essay in the inaugural volume (though jointly signed by Skinner, Jerome Schneewind, and Richard Rorty, it was, as Richard Fisher has recently explained, “largely written” by Rorty and “tonally rather different to much of what has followed”),4 such matters would be [End Page 678] clarified considerably by the second volume in the series, J. G. A. Pocock’s Virtue, Commerce, and History. Reviewing recent developments in the history of political thought, Pocock observed that the “history of thought (and even more sharply ‘of ideas’)” was being supplanted by a “history of speech” or a “history of discourse.”5 An overview of what such a history might look like quickly followed: The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, a volume tracing the various discourses in which political thought had been conducted from the Renaissance to the dawn of the nineteenth century.6 In his contribution to the volume, Pocock observed that the ability to say anything presupposed “a language to say it in,” which suggested that the relationship of ideas to contexts might be conceived along the lines of that between parole and langue.7 While the volumes that followed were not limited to products of what came to be called the “Cambridge School” (and while not all of those associated with the “Cambridge School” embraced the analogy Pocock was proposing), a concern with the discursive context in which arguments were conducted has implications for accounts of the Enlightenment. “Enlightenment” can be used both to designate a particular historical period (i.e., “the Enlightenment”) and to refer to a process (i.e., “enlightenment”) that, though associated with certain historical periods, is captive to none of them. Drawing out the implications of the “history of discourse” that Pocock, Skinner, and their colleagues were developing, “the Enlightenment”—as a discursive context in which things could be said (and, hence, done)—might be seen as a sort of langue, while “enlightenment” might be understood as encompassing a variety of activities, the bulk of them presumably occurring within the discursive context known as “the Enlightenment.” Thinking about the Enlightenment in this way stands in sharp contrast both to Ernst Cassirer’s attempt to grasp “its conceptual origins” and “underlying principle” and to Peter Gay’s identification of it with the “little flock of philosophes” who, though adhering to no single party line, nevertheless constituted the “party of humanity.”8 Against Cassirer (and, momentarily, in company with Gay), an attention to texts and discursive [End Page...

THE “THEORETICAL REVOLUTION” IN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY: FROM THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL IDEAS TO THE HISTORY OF POLITICAL LANGUAGES

ABSTRACTThis article intends to clarify what distinguishes the so‐called new “politico‐intellectual history” from the old “history of political ideas.” What differentiates the two has not been fully perceived even by some of the authors who initiated this transformation. One fundamental reason for this is that the transformation has not been a consistent process deriving from one single source, but is rather the result of converging developments emanating from three different sources (the Cambridge School, the German school of conceptual history or Begriffsgeschichte, and French politico‐conceptual history). This article proposes that the development of a new theoretical horizon that effectively leads us beyond the frameworks of the old history of political ideas demands that we overcome the insularity of these traditions and combine their respective contributions. The result of this combination is an approach to politico‐intellectual history that is not completely coincident with any of the three schools. What I will call a history of political languages entails a specific perspective on the temporality of discourses; this involves a view of why the meaning of concepts changes over time, and is the source of the contingency that stains political languages.

Innledning: Det danske imperium og 1814

Denmark has not traditionally been categorized as an empire for three major reasons. First, ‘empire’ was not a self-referencing term historically. Second, Copenhagen lost its overseas colonies in Asia and Africa before the second wave of European imperial expansion in the 19th century. Third, ‘empire’ has been a politically loaded term ever since the end of that century. In this article the Danish case is seen through the lens of conceptual history and politics, with the conclusion that, analytically, Denmark was an empire on a par with other European empires not just around 1814, but from the very beginnings up until the present.

From an Empire to a Nation State: Importing the Concept of Nation into Ottoman/Turkish Thinking

During importation processes of concepts, the target context and the agents involved in these processes are central and shape the imported ideas. Hereby, translation, both in its narrow and broader senses, plays an important role. The aim of this article is to present preliminary research results on the importation process of the concept ofnationinto the Ottoman/Turkish culture as the target culture. The article provides research results gained from the analysis of dictionaries as well as of texts written by important figures of Turkish nationalism during the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. The research covers first-hand analysis of key texts by Yusuf Akçura and Ziya Gökalp whereby the use of the concept of ‘nation’ by other key figures are discussed on the basis of secondary sources. The analysis also includes translations. This study, which is linked to a study on the concept of ‘culture,’ was based on an interdisciplinary approach relying on the perspectives and notions of translation studies and on methodology developed in conceptual history. The theoretical framework and methodology adopted in this study are exposed in the first part, whilst the second part presents and discusses the research results.

Introduction to Otto Kirchheimer, ‘Elite – Consent – Control in the Western Political System’

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.

Sociaaldemocratische jazz en roomse kruideniers

Abstract The phenomenon of pillarization is a process of social division according to party-political lines that developed at the end of the nineteenth and in the first half of the twentieth century in Belgium and the Netherlands. Parties created networks to provide for their supporters from the cradle to the grave. The literature on this subject does not show whether contemporaries were conscious of the so-called pillars. By making a conceptual history of pillarization between 1899 and 1950 for Belgium and the Netherlands, this article tries to give an insight into the experience and thoughts of contemporaries witnessing the development of this social separation. Because the concept of pillarization is problematic, the actual subject of this research will not be the concept, but the semantic field of pillarization. The history of this field shows dynamics of consciousness and sheds a new light on the relationship between the Belgian and Dutch experiences.

Conceptualisation of history in V. Sharov's novel "before and at the time"

Conceptualisation of history in V. Sharov's novel "before and at the time"

From Hunger to Food Security: A Conceptual History

Hunger afflicts hundreds of millions of people around the world. However, the very concept of hunger is difficult to define, and in fact the whole issue of hunger has been subsumed under the more comprehensive concept of food security.This paper retraces the history of this concept, from its original appearance in international usage at the 1974 World Food Conference, to more modern versions like the definition adopted in the First and subsequent World Food Summits. Originally framed in terms of sufficient world supply of food, the concept of food security initially morphed into the aim of national self-sufficiency in the production of food, but later evolved into its current meaning centred on access to food by individuals and households. Under its more recent incarna­tion, and quite unlike its former meaning, it is recognised that international food trade is a key element for achieving food security. This and other conceptual transformations are revised through this paper.

The organism as ontological go-between: Hybridity, boundaries and degrees of reality in its conceptual history

The organism is neither a discovery like the circulation of the blood or the glycogenic function of the liver, nor a particular biological theory like epigenesis or preformationism. It is rather a concept which plays a series of roles—sometimes overt, sometimes masked—throughout the history of biology, and frequently in very normative ways, also shifting between the biological and the social. Indeed, it has often been presented as a key-concept in life science and the ‘theorization’ of Life, but conversely has also been the target of influential rejections: as just an instrument of transmission for the selfish gene, but also, historiographically, as part of an outdated ‘vitalism’. Indeed, the organism, perhaps because it is experientially closer to the ‘body’ than to the ‘molecule’, is often the object of quasi-affective theoretical investments presenting it as essential, sometimes even as the pivot of a science or a particular approach to nature, while other approaches reject or attack it with equal force, assimilating it to a mysterious ‘vitalist’ ontology of extra-causal forces, or other pseudo-scientific doctrines. This paper does not seek to adjudicate between these debates, either in terms of scientific validity or historical coherence; nor does it return to the well-studied issue of the organism–mechanism tension in biology. Recent scholarship has begun to focus on the emergence and transformation of the concept of organism, but has not emphasized so much the way in which organism is a shifting, ‘go-between’ concept—invoked as ‘natural’ by some thinkers to justify their metaphysics, but then presented as value-laden by others, over and against the natural world. The organism as go-between concept is also a hybrid, a boundary concept or an epistemic limit case, all of which partly overlap with the idea of ‘nomadic concepts’. Thereby the concept of organism continues to function in different contexts—as a heuristic, an explanatory challenge, a model of order, of regulation, etc.—despite having frequently been pronounced irrelevant and reduced to molecules or genes. Yet this perpetuation is far removed from any ‘metaphysics of organism’, or organismic biology.

The emergence of “jingo” and “jingoism” as political terms in public debate in Great Britain (1878–1880)

Content analysis is the most common approach to exploring the use of specific words within media studies. This approach has significant limitations that can be addressed through the application of other related approaches to understanding mediated content, including sociolinguistics and conceptual history. The emergence of large databases of digitized newspapers opens the possibility of an integrated approach that draws on elements of each of those related paradigms. An analysis of the rise and fall of the terms “jingo” and “jingoism” in the British press from 1878 to 1900 demonstrates how this integrated research paradigm can be productively applied to gain insight into how newspapers serve to broadly distribute words attached to specific concepts.

The Nigeria–Biafra war: postcolonial conflict and the question of genocide

The Nigeria–Biafra war that raged between 1967 and 1970 made headlines around the world, above all for the major famine in the secessionist enclave of Biafra, and prompted a major international relief. It was a genuinely global event. Yet by the late 1970s, it was seldom talked about outside Nigeria. Since then, it barely features in scholarly and popular accounts of the period. The conflict is also virtually entirely absent from the field of genocide studies, which began to form in the closing decades of the twentieth century. However, in recent years, scholarly interest in the conflict is increasing. Alongside with a renewed literary interest in the war and its legacy, the international history of the war and the humanitarian operation in particular has attracted the attention of historians and academics of other disciplines. On the basis of a brief account of the conflict and the issues it raised, this contribution argues that the conflict should be considered by students of genocide, since its implications challenge some of the field's founding assumptions and premises. First, the Nigeria–Biafra war evinces the importance of conceptual history for the study of genocides. The article shows how concepts of genocide influence the perceptions and thus, in effect, the politics of conflicts, in particular in cases where representations of genocide are tied to the Holocaust, understood as a state-sponsored, ideology-driven racial hate crime. Second, and following from this point, scholars of genocide studies need to reflect on the impact of this understanding of the Holocaust on their discipline. As we argue, this model determines their (mis-)apprehension of other cases they discuss or—exactly because of this model—fail to discuss.

Differentiation and displacement: Unpicking the relationship between accounts of illness and social structure.

This article seeks to unpack the relationship between social structure and accounts of illness. Taking dentine hypersensitivity as an example, this article explores the perspective that accounts of illness are sense-making processes that draw on a readily available pool of meaning. This pool of meaning is composed of a series of distinctions that make available a range of different lines of communication and action about such conditions. Such lines of communication are condensed and preserved over time and are often formed around a concept and its counter concept. The study of such processes is referred to as semantic analysis and involves drawing on the tools and techniques of conceptual history. This article goes on to explore how the semantics of dentine hypersensitivity developed. It illustrates how processes of social differentiation led to the concept being separated from the more dominant concept of dentine sensitivity and how it was medicalised, scientised and economised. In short, this study seeks to present the story of how society has developed a specific language for communicating about sensitivity and hypersensitivity in teeth. In doing so, it proposes that accounts of dentine hypersensitivity draw on lines of communication that society has preserved over time.

International Relations and Conceptual History in Korea — Methodological Reconstruction of Civilization as a Medium —

International Relations and Conceptual History in Korea — Methodological Reconstruction of Civilization as a Medium —