Contributions to the History of Concepts

Few concepts in the medical history of China have been more entangled with modernization and nation-building than weisheng. Originally a concept inextricably bound up with traditional Chinese medicine, it underwent drastic changes and became a near equivalent of modern hygiene. Drawing on the notion of traveling concepts, this article traces the travel and transformation it experienced in journal articles between 1880 and 1930, focusing on how the new concept gradually took shape and became established in public discourse, the enabling and resisting agents, as well as their agendas.

This article examines the concept and metaphor of fragmentation and its underlying assumptions in international law and global governance. After engaging with fragmentation historically, we analyze current debates through five conceptual perspectives. Fragmentation is often perceived as a process, a gradation, a process with a single direction, a prognosis, and normatively as either loss or liberation. These interlinked tendencies carry conceptual implications, such as making fragmentation apparently inevitable or provoking positive revaluations of fragmentation in terms of differentiation. Furthermore, the conceptual coupling of fragmentation with modernity enhances these effects with an historical thesis. Consequently,fragmentation appears as a ubiquitous and necessary, rather than contingent, feature of modern law—a conceptual implication that may hinder empirical work, and that merits critical analysis.

The special section “Knowledge Quests in the European Periphery” attempts to explore the different ways in which conceptual history’s methodologies could be applied to disciplines with which traditional conceptual historians have not previously engaged, such as the history of science, political economy, Enlightenment studies, postcolonial history, and transnational history. This special section, when read as a whole, opens up a multidisciplinary space in which center-periphery tensions are examined in the context of conceptual transnational exchange. Coming from different geographical places and cultural spaces within the European periphery, the three case studies draw their methodological background from conceptual history and aim to reflect on the center-periphery dichotomy by asking how historians from different historiographical traditions could take advantage of the methods and theories of conceptual history, as well as how conceptual history could take advantage of the coming together of disciplines that traditionally do not communicate with each other.

Why are some intellectual milieus more prone to universalism than others? Ultimately, it is about power and who can afford to ignore whom. While the international status and recognition of a specific intellectual community—linguistic, urban, national, or regional—are obvious factors, they do not fully account for why the step from local experience to universal claim is shorter for some and longer for others. By combining an actor-oriented discussion of the processes through which intellectuals claim universal validity and applicability for concepts with a discussion of center-periphery tensions in transnational exchange, this article explores the logic of conceptual universalization from the perspective of the European margins.

The Philosophical Grammar: Being a View of the Present State of Experimented Physiology, or Natural Philosophy, In Four Parts (1735) by Benjamin Martin was translated into Greek by Anthimos Gazis in 1799. According to the history of concepts, no political, social, or intellectual activity can occur without the establishment of a common vocabulary of basic concepts. By interfering in the linguistic structure, the act of translation may affect crucially the encounter of different cultures. By bringing together the history of science and the history of concepts, this article treats the transfer of the concept of experiment from the seventeenth-century British philosophical context to the eighteenth-century Greek-speaking intellectual context. The article focuses mainly on the different ways Gazis’s translation contributed to the construction of a particular conceptual framework for the appropriation of new knowledge.

Eighteenth-century Spain was haunted by a sense of decadence. Consequently, intellectual innovation developed in its attempt to recover its lost grandeur while keeping its Catholic culture. In such a context, political-economic reflection focused in a remarkable way on a scientific approach to social habits. Reception of foreign developments was adapted to a framework that fostered the enhancement of individualism but not of individual selfdetermination. The first part of the article shows that the approach to customs initially elaborated on the concept of emulation as a moral sentiment for overcoming collective passions that precluded cooperation. The second part shifts the focus to a discussion of education as an antidote against traditional prejudices but also as a bulwark to both modern moral hazards derived from commercial society and republicanism.