Reinhart Koselleck is one of the most important theorists of history and historiography of the last half century. He is the foremost exponent and practitioner of Begriffsgeschichte, a methodology of historical studies exemplified in these 18 essays, which focus on the invention and development of the fundamental concepts underlying and informing a distinctively historical manner of being in the world.

The essays compiled in this volume, written by distinguished experts, present a broad panorama of the most important methodological challenges faced by conceptual history today, as well as some more specific contributions regarding the temporal dimension of certain modern concepts. At a moment when time and concepts ,and political concepts in particular, are no longer obvious and taken for granted but have themselves become historical matter, this book does not limit itself to an updating of the state of the art; it also offers very useful lessons for the development of future research into this field.

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.

Hoewel enorm invloedrijk in Duitstalig Europa, heeft de conceptuele geschiedschrijving (Begriffsgeschichte) tot nu toe weinig aandacht in het Engels gekregen. Dit genre van intellectuele geschiedschrijving verschilt van zowel de Franse geschiedschrijving van mentalités als de Engelstalige geschiedschrijving van verhandelingen door het concept. Aan de hand van practische voorbeelden in de geschiedschrijving wordt deze vorm toegelicht door Bram Kempers, Eddy de Jongh en Rolf Reichardt.

Explores conceptions of politics in early modern France, and the controversies the word 'politique' attracted during the Wars of Religion.

The international expansion of conceptual historical research during last 20 years is a remarkable turn in the academia. The conceptual confrontation of different approaches, themes and forms of research has reached several academic fields in numerous countries. From the 1990s to the present Kari Palonen has shaped and supported this change with his emphasis on its role for the study of politics. The chapters of this volume offer a testimony of the changing awareness, new thematics and multiple research orientations of this story. Palonen discusses the works of Reinhart Koselleck and Quentin Skinner as partly competing, partly converging approaches to conceptual history. He applies both Koselleck's time-centred and Skinner's rhetorical perspectives in his own studies on theorising politics. Simultaneously he emphasises the heuristic impulse of both approaches for the study of political practices, for the reorientation of parliamentary studies in particular.

This book defends the claim that politics is a linguistically constituted activity and shows that the concepts which inform political beliefs and behaviour undergo changes related to real political events. Having set out and discussed this theme, the editors and contributors go on to analyse the evolution of thirteen particular concepts, all central to political discourse in the western world. They include revolution, rights, democracy, property, corruption, public interest, public opinion, and ideology. The volume will be illuminating to political theorists, intellectual historians, and philosophers.

Reinhart Koselleck (1923–2006) was one of most imposing and influential European intellectual historians in the twentieth century. Constantly probing and transgressing the boundaries of mainstream historical writing, he created numerous highly innovative approaches, absorbing influences from other academic disciplines as represented in the work of philosophers and political thinkers like Hans Georg Gadamer and Carl Schmitt and that of internationally renowned scholars such as Hayden White, Michel Foucault, and Quentin Skinner. An advocate of “grand theory,” Koselleck was an inspiration to many scholars and helped move the discipline into new directions (such as conceptual history, theories of historical times and memory) and across disciplinary and national boundaries. He thus achieved a degree of international fame that was unusual for a German historian after 1945. This book not only presents the life and work of a “great thinker” and European intellectual, it also contributes to our understanding of complex theoretical and methodological issues in the cultural sciences and to our knowledge of the history of political, historical, and cultural thought in Germany from the 1950s to the present.

As one of the most influential ideas in modern European history, democracy has fundamentally reshaped not only the landscape of governance, but also social and political thought throughout the world. Democracy in Modern Europe surveys the conceptual history of democracy in modern Europe, from the Industrial Revolutions of the nineteenth century through both world wars and the rise of welfare states to the present era of the European Union. Exploring individual countries as well as regional dynamics, this volume comprises a tightly organized, comprehensive, and thoroughly up-to-date exploration of a foundational issue in European political and intellectual history.