Global Spaces / Global Times: Reconsidering the History of Political Concepts

This paper aims to develop new theoretical frameworks for the rigorous practice of a history of political concepts in global times. By further elaborating on Reinhart Koselleck’s construction of the methodological foundations of conceptual history, which imply the historian’s awareness of the situated character of the standpoint whereby the very notion of “history” has been established as the self-reflective effect of the modern experience of temporality, this essay aspires to radicalize the scopes of Begriffgeschichte vis-à-vis the definitive transformations of the conceptual arrangements that have determined the boundaries of European modernity. The category of “boundary” is indeed crucial as to the comprehension of the stakes of a global conceptual history: as far as temporal, geopolitical, economic as well as linguistic borders are increasingly inhabited by reciprocal tensions that are always liable to be politicized or de-politicized, it is the task of the historian of concepts to cross or challenge them in order to trace them back to the conflictual nature of their global genealogy. Such a practice requires first and foremost problematizing the Atlantic privilege that continues to characterize the historiographic scrutiny of political concepts and de-colonizing them from the theoretical bias of the modern European state.