This article maps the conceptual history of global inequality from its marginal status in the 1980s, its minute mainstreaming within research and globalization discourse from the mid-1990s to the late 2000s, until its popularization, politicization, and “economization” in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, recession, and the publication of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century in 2014. Asking when, why, and how global inequality became a key concept, it draws upon quantitative and qualitative analysis of global inequality in (...) scientific articles, books, and public media. It traces transformations in the term's temporal and spatial meanings and situates these in the contexts of rising within-nation and declining between-nation inequality, inequality research, inequality in public media, and broader discursive fields. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to investigate the concept of minority up to the temporary stabilization of its meaning in Polish concluded in the adoption of the March constitution of 1921. The history of the concept of national minority bore an imprint on the accommodation to the new political, territorial, and discursive circumstances after transition from empire to nation-state. The idea itself was well anchored in the liberal tradition, but the nationalist right also took it on board to protect (...) the cultural hegemony of the Poles in the areas where they were a minority. Tackling the nexus of the emerging nation-state and the ensuing logic of minoritization sheds light on tiered visions of citizenship essential for understanding the 1921 debate. For this purpose, I use various available sub-corpora of texts—political leaflets, press, and parliamentary debates from the period 1788–1922. (shrink)

Christina Morina, The Invention of Marxism: How an Idea Changed Everything (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023) 557 pp.

This article analyzes how the concept of desencanto (disenchantment) was framed within the political discourse of the Spanish democratic transition as a way of delegitimizing radical political actors and normalizing the realpolitik of elite consensus. Through an analysis of the ubiquitous mainstream press usage of the term between 1977 and 1982, I argue that the combination of emotional and temporal meanings assigned to the concept worked to reinforce the moderation exhibited by government positions. Desencanto represented the disappointment or sadness felt (...) by those hoping for a revolutionary rupture with Franco's dictatorship, which was associated to nostalgia or pathological relationships of the past. With the “revolution,” or “utopia” of the past, critics made clear that the radical Left was nostalgic or unrealistic for political projects that did not belong in a modern democracy, exclusively understood from the single and present-oriented politics of moderation and the possible. (shrink)

Using a special issue of the Chinese journal Gaizao published in 1921 as a starting point, this article intends to trace some conceptual articulations of federalism (lianbang) and self-government (zizhi) promoted by intellectuals and activists in early twentieth-century China. The analysis will show how Chinese federalists shaped their arguments through a series of historical and philosophical references, translating a prevalently “Western” concept into Chinese discourse, at the same time transplanting it into the traditional political debate and traditional historical narrative. Part (...) of the argument will also be concerned with the identification of the conceptual reasons behind the failure of federal projects in China especially at the turning point of the mid-1920s, as the “modern” federal blueprint eventually fell under the category of “feudalism” and “warlordism,” thus deteriorating into an “anti-modern” nemesis. (shrink)

In 2008, Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng published the result of a decade-long work on conceptual transformation in late imperial and early Republican China. Their Studies in the History of Concepts (Guannian shi yanjiu) marked an important step in the development of conceptual history in China, after the timid tendencies of the early 1980s and the growing attention of the following two decades.

One of the characteristics of conceptual history as developed by Reinhart Koselleck is its relation with social history. This connection refers to a constitutive dichotomy of conceptual history between reality and language. In this article, I argue that in Koselleck's works, the meanings of conceptual history/social history and reality/language dichotomies are not evident, and I propose to explore them through an analysis of his methodological texts on historical writing from the 1980s. Furthermore, I suggest that these dichotomies function as a (...) limit for thinking about the problem of the symbolic, which I seek to account for by drawing on Claude Lefort's notion of the political and an examination of the concept of Jewish people. (shrink)

In China, antiquarianism or jinshixue, literally the “study of bronze and stone,” is first used to describe the activity of studying historical artifacts in texts of the eleventh century. The modern Chinese term for archaeology—kaoguxue, “investigating antiquity”—on the other hand, is a term borrowed from the title of a catalog of collectibles by Song scholar Lü Dalin (1046–1092). The aim of this article is to retrace the formation of the concept of archaeology that developed from antiquarian traditions to its reintroduction (...) to China from Japan as an approximation to the phenomenon of modern field archaeology at the beginning of the twentieth century. (shrink)

The relationship between economic activity and environmental protection was hotly debated in Finland in the 1980s. Contemporaries conceived of themselves as existing on the verge of a knowledge society, and when rhetorically presenting contesting economic and ecological futures for this novel society, they used new, short-lived concepts. This article argues that one such concept, soft values, highlights a clash between futures. In one possible future, environmental equilibrium was a new model for economic activity, while in another, environmental protection would take (...) place as a result of the current economic model. The former was quickly synchronized into the latter. Soft values were thus used to harmonize environmental protection with notions of efficiency and national competitiveness under a linear temporality based on a belief in the necessity of economic growth. (shrink)

Building upon the extended notion of conceptual history as a diachronic study of conceptual interactions, the article begins with deconstructing the paradoxical semantic core of incomparability statements that, it is claimed, endows them with a capacity of stabilizing social semantics. By declaring certain foundational values—positive (Shoah) or negative (God)—“incomparable” and thus immune to the challenges of cross-evaluation, the users of discourse uphold the boundaries of civilized society. On a smaller scale, this exclusion of competitive valuation is undergirded by the ascription (...) of “incomparability” to the small pool of political and cultural figures, literary artifacts, social events, and representative allegories. The conclusion outlines the social contingency of conventions regulating the ascriptions of “incomparability” against the backdrop of their discursive stability across genres, epochs, and languages. (shrink)

In this article, I contribute to the understanding of conceptual boundaries in the Chinese context by discussing the rift between “old” and “new” concepts as well as “inside” and “outside” perspectives on these concepts. To address these problems, I analyze one aspect in the field of literature, the concept of riddle. My article shows that riddle is conceptually linked to folklore, orality, and play in modernity. It juxtaposes these observations with two different literary phenomena, yinyu and mi, and their conceptual (...) development in the imperial Chinese tradition. Finally, my article proves that “modern” observers often struggle with defining yinyu and mi, because of the way riddle is conceptualized in modernity. (shrink)

While Reinhart Koselleck articulated the limits of conceptual history in relation to social history, and the limits of historiographical understanding in his discussion of the event, his thinking about the limits of the conceptual as such is harder to trace. However, a close reading of key texts where he discusses situations or events marked as “meaningless” or absurd, allows us to uncover both his ethics and analytics of the limit of meaning, of what we call “the ungraspable.” It is further (...) argued that Koselleck's conceptual mapping of European modernity can be fruitfully extended by bringing it into contact with the ideas of thinkers such as Michel De Certeau, Edourd Glissant, and Francis Affergan who have contemplated how especially “the colonial” both represents the outside to and is the site from which the limit of European modernity and its conceptual universe might be (re)thought. (shrink)

With the emergence of large digitized collections of historical texts, scholarship in the humanities has increasingly turned to studying texts as data. This article argues that seeing text as data is particularly apt for the study of conceptual history. The quantitative perspective allows for rethinking the analytical terminology used to study the transformation of political and social terminology. Further, quantitative conceptual history requires re-evaluation on four levels. First, it forces scholars of conceptual history to reconsider the role of reception in (...) the spread and lexicalization of linguistic innovations. Second, it forces them to assess how to interpret quantitative analyses of linguistic change. Third, the use of quantitative methods calls for clarity in describing what is being measured and what is being interpreted based on quantitative analyses. Fourth, the use of machine-learning methods for conceptual history should remain careful. They can be very useful for exploration, but should be combined with count-based methods to provide concrete proof. (shrink)

The methodology and theory developed by Koselleck has been successfully spread globally. Less attention has been devoted to reflections on the conditions and possibilities of universalizing his approach beyond the geographical area on the basis of which it was developed. This article proposes to reread Koselleck's three core contributions to the theory of history—the anthropological constants, the contemporaneity of the non-contemporaneous, and the Sattelzeit—from a postcolonial viewpoint. Empirically it is based on the history of the South Asian Muslims, exploring how (...) Koselleck can help raise new questions, but also how the change in the geographical viewpoint may lead to a reconsideration of some of his assumptions. (shrink)

This article explores the (contested) concept of political representation in Urdu during the colonial period to address “deceptive familiarities” and highlight multilingual and transnational influences on contemporary Indian Muslim claims. Drawing on official documents, letters, speeches, and newspapers from the late 1850s to 1919, it argues that the “politics of presence”—or descriptive representation—of “Old Party” leaders stemmed from their aristocratic concept of representation as trusteeship (wakālat). Despite changes in terminology, the concept was only challenged in the 1910s by the “Young (...) Party” and by the embracing of democratic values. Conceptual change was then materialized by the appropriation of the Persian numā’indagī in Urdu—a term that might have consecutively accredited descriptive claims and the use of religious symbols in election campaigns. (shrink)

When the language-dialect dichotomy first emerged in the early modern period, several scholars devised terminological alternatives, particularly for the subordinate lower half of the dichotomy. This article examines a series of terminological alternatives in their social and linguistic contexts, considering terms from the Romance, Germanic, and Slavic linguistic zones. Our case studies suggest that there were two main reasons for coining neologisms, or for devising new meanings for existing words. Some scholars sought terms with stronger pejorative connotations, others acted from (...) language purism. Pejorative neologisms generally proved unsuccessful, but several purist neologisms endured. (shrink)