Contributions to the History of Concepts

King Ferdinand VII of Spain was often compared to the Ottoman sultan. It was a rhetorical operation that continued a tradition in Western Christendom by which Christian rulers were compared to oriental despots not because they were considered to be equal to them, but to show how far astray from the ideal of good government they were. This article examines the multiple dimensions of this comparison. To what extent was it a reaffirmation of the construction of the Turk as a radical other? Or were there new essential elements, and therefore the metaphor of the Turk can also be interpreted within a new universalistic discourse that opposed tyrants to oppressed peoples across cultural and religious barriers? Our examination leads to a reflection on the transnational character of the discursive frameworks in which the metaphor of the Turk was built and rebuilt, on its circulation and limits, and on its specific uses.

Focusing on examples related to the concept of scripture, I highlight certain moments of indecisiveness in the context of larger processes of possible conceptual change. In these moments, agents involved in the process frequently employ language that in one way or another expresses a conceptual tertium datur. This article sets out to distinguish some of those ways, such as analogy, assertions of resemblance, quasi-status or partial scripturality, oxymoronic adjectival qualification, and exclusivity by selection. The examples draw on four cases, the publication of the Sacred Books of the East series, Petrus Venerabilis's discussion of the Koran, a taxonomy by al-Shahrastānī with regard to the “People of the Book”, and the canonization of the Five Classics in ancient China. Finally, I issue a rallying cry for an entangled and transnational conceptual history. Such an approach is likely to foreground interlingual situations where conceptual indecisiveness is the rule rather than the exception.

For centuries, innovation was a political and contested concept and linguistic weapon used against one's enemy. To support their case, opponents of innovation made use of arguments from ethos and pathos to give power and sustenance to their criticisms and to challenge the innovators. However, since the nineteenth century the arguments have changed completely. Innovation gradually got rehabilitated. This article looks at one type of rehabilitation: the semantic rehabilitation. People started to reread history and to redescribe what innovation is. What was bad innovation became good innovation because of long-lasting and beneficial effects, so it was believed.

The widespread opinion among conceptual historians is that political concepts are always contested in their actual usage. Religious concepts in modernity are also not only contested; they are constructed on an ontological contradiction. They imply that the object to which they refer exists, and at the same time that it does not. I demonstrate this idea using four religious concepts: religion, God, the beyond, and spirit. I conclude with discussion on the reality status of religious concepts in modern historiography and religious studies.

This article aims to investigate, from an interdisciplinary point of view, the concept of parliamentary immunity. The main objective of this inquiry is to identify the historical premises and the political, linguistic, and legal instruments that determined the conceptualization of parliamentary immunity in light of the main intellectual events in Romania and France. Embracing Reinhart Koselleck's working methods, this research will develop in extenso a comparative conceptual analysis based on methodological rigor, emphasizing not only the importance of the concept after its entry into national languages, but also the political usages of the concept and the present understandings of it.

Stefan Willer, Sigrid Weigel, and Bernhard Jussen, eds., Erbe: Übertragungskonzepte zwischen Natur und Kultur [Heritage/inheritance between nature and culture] (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013), 274 pp.

Ana María Stuven and Gabriel Cid, Debates republicanos en Chile: Siglo XIX [Republican debates in Chile: Nineteenth century], Vol. 1 (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2012), 627 pp.

Tobias Weidner, Die unpolitische Profession: Deutsche Mediziner im langen 19. Jahrhundert [The unpolitical profession: German medical doctors in the long 19th century] (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2012), 447 pp.

Hubert Locher and Adriana Markantonatos, eds., Reinhart Koselleck und die politische Ikonologie [Reinhart Koselleck and political iconology], Transformationen des Visuellen 1 (Marburg: Deutsches Dokumentationszentrum für Kunstgeschichte, 2012), 312 pp.