Abstract

The result of extensive collaboration among leading scholars from across Europe, Conceptual History in the European Space represents a landmark intervention in the historiography of concepts. It brings together ambitious thematic studies that combine the pioneering methods of historian Reinhart Koselleck with contemporary insights and debates, each one illuminating a key feature of the European conceptual landscape. With clarifying overviews of such contested theoretical terrain as translatability, spatiality, and center-periphery dynamics, it also provides indispensable contextualization for an era of widespread disenchantment with and misunderstanding of the European project.

“Taken together, these essays represent a landmark in conceptual history's theoretical and methodological development. They are a testament to its practitioners' creative and fruitful engagement with methods and approaches forged beyond the field of intellectual history. By adding layers of depth to our understanding of both concepts and the semantic fields in which they have operated, their authors go some way towards establishing a post-Koselleckian research agenda that can allow conceptual history to flourish as it expands its own horizons of possibility.” • Sehepunkte

Willibald Steinmetz is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at Bielefeld University. He has published widely on conceptual history and is co-editor of the book series Historische Semantik with Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Among his publications are the edited volumes “Politik”: Situationen eines Wortgebrauchs im Europa der Neuzeit (2007), Political Languages in the Age of Extremes (2011) and Historische Semantik des Politischen: Vom Mittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert, with Ulrich Meier and Martin Papenheim (2012).

Michael Freeden is Emeritus Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford and Professorial Research Associate, SOAS, University of London. His main interests are the nature of political thinking, the analysis of ideologies, and the study of liberal thought from the 19th century onwards. His books include Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (1996), Liberal Languages (2005), The Political Theory of Political Thinking: The Anatomy of a Practice (2013) and Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction (2015). He is the founding editor of the Journal of Political Ideologies.

Javier Fernández-Sebastián is Professor of History of Political Thought at the University of the Basque Country. He has published extensively on modern intellectual and conceptual history, with a particular focus on Spain and the Iberian world. He serves on the editorial board of various journals as well as the series International Archives of the History of Ideas with Springer Verlag. He has recently edited the volumes Political Concepts and Time: New Approaches to Conceptual History (2011) and La Aurora de la Libertad. Los primeros liberalismos en el mundo iberoamerican (2012).