His­tory of Con­cepts Group

In June, 1998, two em­i­nent po­lit­i­cal sci­en­tists, Melvin Richter, of the City Uni­ver­sity of New York, and Kari Palo­nen, of the Uni­ver­sity of Jyväskylä, or­ga­nized a con­fer­ence on “Con­cep­tual Changes in Eu­ro­pean Po­lit­i­cal Cul­tures” at the Finnish In­sti­tute in Lon­don. Hen­rik Ste­nius, the di­rec­tor of the In­sti­tute, served as the host. That meet­ing brought to­gether schol­ars from four­teen na­tions to dis­cuss on­go­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive projects on so­cial and po­lit­i­cal con­cepts in such places as the Nether­lands, Fin­land, France, Den­mark, and the So­viet Union, and to lis­ten to a va­ri­ety of em­pir­i­cal and method­olog­i­cal pre­sen­ta­tions on re­lated mat­ters. In­form­ing many of the re­ports and ex­changes were the rel­a­tively re­cently com­pleted vol­umes of the Geschichtliche Grund­be­griffe—or GG for short—edited by Otto Brun­ner, Werner Conze and Rein­hart Kosel­leck. Un­der­ly­ing the con­fer­ence were ar­gu­ments made by Richter and Palo­nen about the pos­si­ble con­ver­gence of Ger­man Be­griff­s­geschichte and the so-​called “Cam­bridge School” ap­proach(es) to the his­tor­i­cal study of po­lit­i­cal thought. Both Kosel­leck and Quentin Skin­ner at­tended and took part in the con­fer­ence’s var­ied di­a­logues. At its close, the par­tic­i­pants agreed to form an in­ter­na­tional net­work which would meet reg­u­larly, pub­lish a newslet­ter, and de­velop an archive of projects and pro­pos­als, as well as in­ter­views with, and crit­i­cal re­flec­tions by, schol­ars en­gaged in them. Thus emerged the His­tory of Po­lit­i­cal and So­cial Con­cepts Group.

Since its ini­tial gath­er­ing in Lon­don, the Group has met an­nu­ally some nine­teen times, and on four con­ti­nents, in con­fer­ences which have ranged in scale from a small work­ing sem­i­nar (Copen­hagen, 2000), to mid-​sized meet­ings (Rio de Janiero, 2004; Aarhus, 2016), to quite large aca­d­e­mic con­gresses (Bil­bao, 2003 and 2013; Moscow, 2010; Buenos Aires, 2011; Biele­feld 2014; Timişora, 2015). Among their themes have been “The Use and Abuse of Words” (Paris, 1999), “Rhetoric and Con­cep­tual Change” (Tam­pere, 2001), “Trans­la­tion and the His­tory of Con­cepts” (New York, 2005), “Transna­tional Con­cepts and Trans­fers” (Is­tan­bul, 2007), and “The Dif­fu­sion of West­ern Con­cepts in Asia” (Seoul, 2008). At the Helsinki meet­ing in 2012, the mem­ber­ship agreed to change the name to the His­tory of Con­cepts Group in recog­ni­tion of grow­ing in­ter­est in con­cepts from such realms as re­li­gion, the nat­ural sci­ences and phi­los­o­phy. Nev­er­the­less, re­search on the so­cial and po­lit­i­cal— how­ever broadly or nar­rowly de­fined—still tends to dom­i­nate. The themes of the most re­cent con­fer­ences have been "Con­cepts in the World: Pol­i­tics, Knowl­edge and Time" (Oslo, 2017) and "In­ter­dis­ci­pli­nar­ity: Con­cep­tual Ex­plo­rations" (Málaga, 2018).

Mem­ber­ship in the His­tory of Con­cepts Group is open to emerg­ing and es­tab­lished schol­ars alike; par­tic­i­pa­tion by grad­u­ate stu­dents is par­tic­u­larly en­cour­aged. Mem­ber­ship in­cludes the op­por­tu­nity to par­tic­i­pate in the an­nual con­fer­ences and in­cludes a sub­scrip­tion to HCG’s peer-​reviewed jour­nal Con­tri­bu­tions to the His­tory of Con­cepts.

All other en­quiries about the His­tory of Con­cepts Group should be di­rected to the Ex­ec­u­tive Sec­re­tary:MBurke1@gc.cuny.edu