Contributions to the History of Concepts

Arguing that the conceptual history of ethics is vital to our understanding of the modernization of Arab societies, this article explores important shifts in early twentieth-century Arabic ethical discourse by analyzing The Book of Ethics by Aḥmad Amīn. Focusing on the moral-psychological underpinnings of this work, it shows how Amīn's self-proclaimed “scientific” approach causes a “leveling of the moral landscape,” meaning a reduction of all behavior to a singular physiological system that leaves little space for distinguishing different moral faculties. It argues that this reductionism, typical of modern ethical discourses, exemplifies the reform of an older moral framework focused on virtue and achieving practical wisdom into one focused on national progress in which duty and service to the public good attain prominence. In this process the meanings of older, ostensibly different moral concepts and powers become isomorphous, while the primary goal of ethics becomes the training of the will.

Why did the genocide of European Jewry in the 1940s require a new entry in the Hebrew lexicon? How did this shape the singularization of the Holocaust among Hebrew speakers? This article traces the linguistic process through which Shoah shifted from a general term for disaster to the exclusive name for the Nazi genocide. Using big-data analysis of grammatical forms alongside content analysis, it identifies two stages: first, by the 1950s, the definite form ha-Shoah became the primary reference to the annihilation of European Jewry in commemorative discourse; second, by the 1990s, Shoah no longer denoted other disasters, losing its modifiers, construct state, and plural or verbal forms. Without public reflection, the term and the event it named were singularized, sacralized, and universalized as the ultimate calamity and metaphysical evil. The article situates this transformation within emerging 1990s exceptionalist and victimhood discourses.

The text analyses how the use of certain expressions linked to Spanish Transition in political debate has served to demonstrate the extent to which confrontation over the legacies of that historical process forms part of an ideological conflict to this day. Two conceptual expressions, employed for different ends, serve to channel and concretize these proposals: the first is the regime of 78, while the other expression examined is the second transition. Analysis of the two expressions serves to confirm how the different ways of viewing the Transition have been pushing back the possibility in Spain of considering this process as one of those interpretations of the past on which nations are secured, providing citizens with a shared explanation of their present.

Scholars have argued that following 1968, the idea of democracy was extended into new domains in Europe. To assess this, we focus on how MPs qualified phenomena as “democratic” in Britain and Sweden. We use word embeddings to automatically locate words whose contextual similarity to “democratic” decreased or increased. We combine this with bigram analysis, manually classifying word pairs including “democratic.” Our results partly lend credence to the “extension thesis” but also detect an “expansion of democracy” regarding democratic principles, as well as procedures and practices. This nuances the importance of the 1970s as a turning point and highlights larger shifts in the concept of democracy, namely its increased abstractness and proceduralization.

Two main problems arise when we try to understand the relationship between populism and democracy. First, the over-extension of the category of populism leads to a conflation of movements and political parties with opposing democratic values. Second, the way populist actors represent democracy is often under-analyzed. This article tests the sociohistorical hypothesis that populism revolves around a singularly neglected concept in academic literature: constituent democracy. It constitutes its true political core. Populists understand democracy as being achieved by the people's constituent power, advancing both toward national-popular representation and the expression of popular autonomy in society. The article highlights this idea thanks to intellectual and militant productions from the three founding experiences of populism: Russian narodnichestvo, the US People's Party, and Latin American national-popular regimes.

Hugo Bonin, “At the Sound of the New Word Spoken”: Le mot “démocratie” en Grande-Bretagne, 1770–1920 [“At the sound of the new word spoken”: The word “democracy” in Great Britain, 1770–1920] (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Collection Histoire, 2024), 256 pp.

Javier Fernández Sebastián, Key Metaphors for History: Mirrors of Time (Abingdon: Routledge, 2024), 350 pp.

Elías J. Palti, Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 284 pp.