Contributions to the History of Concepts

Since the 1990s, the Dutch equivalent for “heritage,” erfgoed, has become a buzzword in the Netherlands. Often presented as a neologism, little attention is paid to the term’s longer history. Th is article traces the history through a survey of digitized newspapers from 1700 to 1975, revealing elements of erfgoed’s current meaning well before the twentieth-century heritage mania. In the eighteenth century a synonym of “freedom,” in the latter nineteenth century frequently carrying the prefix nationaal, and in the 1930s associated with genetics and folk culture, erfgoed can be regarded as a speculum vitae, taking on different meanings depending on the era. As elsewhere in Europe, the second half of the nineteenth century was the most decisive moment in the evolution of the term.

Our present understanding of innovation is closely linked to science and research on the one hand and economy and industry on the other. It has not always been so. Back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the concept was mainly used in religious and political discourses. In these contexts, actors used it in a pejorative sense. Innovation, imagined as a radical transformation, was considered a peril to the established social order. Such was natural philosophers’ understanding. Th is article documents Francis Bacon’s work as an eminent example of such a representation. To Bacon, natural philosophy and innovation are two distinct spheres of activity. It is documented that Bacon’s uses of the concept of innovation are found mainly in political, legal, and moral writings, not natural philosophy, because to Bacon and all others of his time, innovation is political.

In this introductory article, the authors argue that major changes in the way we conceive of time and temporality that are taking place today justify the increase of studies, both theoretical and empirical, on shift s in cultural constructions of time. In this context, the authors present four articles written by members of the network Iberconceptos, where a number of time experiences in the Ibero-American world (Latin America, Spain, and Portugal) during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are discussed from a conceptual perspective.

The article analyzes the concept of political regeneration as related to temporal experiences in the processes of political emancipation and the forming of the Brazilian nation. The authors analyze selected texts written by José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, a leading politician and intellectual involved in these processes. Such texts supply indications and symptoms that help us to understand how two different historical experiences, designated respectively by this author as the “political regeneration of the Portuguese Empire” and the “political regeneration of the Brazilian nation,” became possible. The uses of the concept of political regeneration in Bonifácio’s discourses may be grasped as symptomatic of the very complex temporal experiences in the context of the Portuguese language during the first decades of the nineteenth century in Brazil.

This article investigates how the perception of living in novel times influenced Spanish intellectuals from the late eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth century when they wrote or thought about history. The perception of time would influence the way in which history was written, and in turn this would reflect the model of society that Spanish intellectuals aspired to when they turned to the past for the political and social features they wanted for their present and future. At that time, different time perceptions coexisted and combined in a very complex fashion; the present article, however, is focused on the perception of time mainly as an opportunity, with its advances and retreats, doubts and problems. The article will show how those intellectuals thought about history and the various solutions they put forward for society’s problems.

Spanish American countries exhibited during the nineteenth century many of the features Koselleck associated with the Sattelzeit, the transitioning period into our contemporaneity. However, the region’s history was marked by social instability and political upheaval, and contemporaries referred to such experiences of time as precarious. In this article I explore the connection between this precarious time and the emergence of the sociopolitical concept of morality in New Granada (present-day Colombia) during the first thirty-five years of the republic (1818–1853). I focus on two conceptual moments as exemplified by the reflections put forth by Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), military and political leader of the independence period, and José Eusebio Caro (1817–1853), publicist, poet, and political ideologue of the Conservative Party.

This article provides an outline of the crystallization of the concept of future in the Iberian worlds in a period extending from the end of the eighteenth century until the second half of the nineteenth century. By tracking and analyzing the vocabularies referring to the three dimensions of time—past, present, and future—in a broad corpus of documentary sources (books, journals, memoirs, pamphlets, parliamentary minutes, and so on), and particularly in the debates and speculation with regard to el porvenir, the article shows that, not only in Spain and Portugal, but in much of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America, the profound impact of progressive philosophies of history on political and social discourse resulted in a clear politicization of time, parallel to the temporalization of political concepts.