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)

In March 2020, Melvin Richter, one of the founders of international, conceptual history passed away. This sad occasion makes it timely in our journal to reflect on the process that turned national projects within conceptual and intellectual history into an international and transnational enterprise. The text that follows—published in two parts, here and in the next issue—takes a closer look at the intellectual processes that led up to the founding meeting of the association behind our journal, the History of Concepts (...) Group. It follows in the footsteps of Melvin Richter to examine the different encounters, debates and protagonists in the story of international, conceptual history. The text traces the different approaches that were brought to the fore and particularly looks at Melvin Richter’s efforts to bridge between an Anglophone tradition of intellectual history and a German tradition of Begriffsgeschichte. (shrink)

In 2023, Margrit Pernau stepped down as editor of Contributions to the History of Concepts. She first took up the position as editor in 2009, and, with her fifteen years on the editorial team, she has been by far our longest serving editor. Over the years, Margrit Pernau has played an invaluable role for the journal and for international conceptual history. I guess it would be correct to say that she was born international. She followed her family when her father (...) got a job in New Delhi and lived in the city for part of her childhood. Her international journey continued to Paris where she spent almost ten years of her youth. After longer detours around Erfurt and Heidelberg where she did her PhD in 1991, she stayed another six years in New Delhi with her spouse and children. After defending her habilitation in Bielefeld in 2007, she took up the position of Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin in 2008. Many of us who have been involved in her several projects through the years know the renowned expressionist style building at Lentzeallee. (shrink)