Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change

This study reassesses the main concepts of Intellectual History, offering a new framework for understanding past systems of knowledge.

Elías J. Palti (Author)

9781009461214, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 9 May 2024

296 pages
21.6 x 13.8 x 1.7 cm, 0.38 kg

How does long-term intellectual change occur? Can we develop a theoretical framework for understanding past systems of knowledge? In this ambitious study, Elías José Palti seeks to reassess the main concepts in the field of intellectual history. Evaluating modes of thought from the seventeenth century to the present, this book aims to prevent an anachronistic understanding of the texts of the past. Palti rejects the idea of conceptual change as a coherent process deriving from one single source. Instead, he offers a convincing explanation of converging developments emanating from three different sources: namely, the Cambridge school, the German school of conceptual history, or Begriffsgeschichte, and French politico-conceptual history. Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change also closely examines the temporality of concepts, questioning how and why political languages mutate.

Introduction: From the 'history of ideas' to the 'new intellectual history,' and beyond
1. Pocock, Skinner and the 'historiographical revolution'
2. The Republican genealogy and the normative temptation
3. The problem of conceptual change
4. Conceptual history: its philosophical foundations
5. Koselleck's Begriffsgechichte: between social and conceptual history
6. Hans Blumenberg and the theory of nonconceptuality
7. From structuralism to poststructuralism: Pierre Rosanvallon and the 'conceptual history of the political'
8. Foucault's archaeology of knowledge
9. The archaeological project and the ignored epistemic mutation
10. Behind the structures and the subject: the 'event'
Conclusion: the 'new intellectual history' and the dynamics of de-substantialization of concepts.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX]