Renewal in the History of Political Thought

The reception in the Spanish and Latin American world of conceptual history

Abstract

The influence and application of some of the main postulates of what is known as the "linguistic turn" led, beginning in the 1970s, to a deep renewal in the field of intellectual history. Among the currents that broke with the traditional history of ideas are the "historical contextualism" (history of languages and political discourses) of the so-called Cambridge School and the history of political and social concepts (Begriffsgeschichte) of the German historian Reinhart Koselleck. Throughout convergences and controversies, both schools have returned ideas and texts to their historicity in the form of language. German conceptual history, with its research on political-conceptual change in modernity, its relationship with social history and its theoretical dimension in the study of historical temporalities, has had fruitful roots in Spain since the late twentieth century, up to the point of becoming, both in the field of philosophy and historiography, the main current in the history of political and social ideas. The thrust of Hispanic historiography has even reached a transnational dimension, crystallizing in various Ibero-American projects, dictionaries, and publications. After twenty-five years of results, the possibilities offered by the theory and methodology of conceptual history are far from being exhausted.