CONCEPTA

Objectives

A dramatic shift in the academic study of political and social thought has taken place in recent decades. In particular, the position that concepts are timeless has been replaced by an emphasis on their historicity and temporality. The so-called linguistic turn has played an important role in this process. Central concepts function as sites of action around which vocabularies, rhetorics and discourses of political language turn. New methodologies pay attention to not only the stable and the conventional character of language, but to disorder and change as well. The changing and contested nature of concepts provides scholars with a point of departure for analysis. Concepta aims to employ recent linguistically orientated methods – primarily the conceptual history associated with Reinhart Koselleck and contextual intellectual history associated with Quentin Skinner – to the analysis of key issues in humanities and social sciences.

Concepta takes an open approach to methodological questions. First, Concepta focuses on the purposeful use of concepts and ideas by actors to pursue and realise goals in political and social life. It takes an interest in the migration, translation, diffusion, and employment of concepts, and in the actors involved in such processes. Second, although the starting point of Concepta lays in the analysis of ideas and concepts, such analysis aims to account for social and political change. That is to say, the linkages between conceptual and institutional developments through processes of legitimisation and institutionalisation are always central to Concepta. Third, Concepta proceeds by means of comparative studies of concepts and ideas in both time and space. Only through comparisons between cultural and linguistic spheres on the one hand, and between different time periods on the other, is it possible to establish the specificities of a nation’s and polity’s political and social trajectory. In this way, it can be shown how such trajectories were governed by contingency rather than necessity, and how alternative paths of development were often possible at specific points of time.

Studies grounded in these basic methodological assumptions contribute to research in the humanities and the social sciences in two major ways. On the one hand, the focus on contingency and political alternatives will both further our understanding of modern political concepts and ideas, and restore concepts and ideas that have disappeared from contemporary political discourse. On the other, the focus on change in the languages of politics will further our understanding of agency as a problem, especially on the linkages between the use of concepts and the achievement of political and social change.