Contributions to the History of Concepts

Taking its starting point from Dipesh Chakravarty's Provincializing Europe and in particular European analytical concepts, this article argues that it is time to move beyond the diagnosis of “inadequate, but indispensable.” I discuss three approaches that have been suggested for the development of analytical concepts for global history: the creation of equivalents across languages by the historical subjects; the identification of problems as a starting point to trace the language that has been developed to discuss them; and comparison. I then propose a strategy, based on Rolf Reichardt's semantic nets, but taking it beyond its reliance on words, and words in one language only. I argue that these revised semantic nets have the potential to allow us to both trace connections between languages and generate concepts for our analyses, if and when needed, which are not necessarily universal in claim, but transcend source concepts in individual languages.

The notions of “concepts of the political” and that of “political concepts” refer to different but intertwined phenomena. As I will argue in this article, the concepts of the political refer to the self-institution of societies, while political concepts are those that emerge in the realm of politics, a field some societies institute as precisely the site in which the reversibility of the political takes place. This article will argue that the concepts of the political and the political concepts coming out of South America in its contemporary history spring from the main events and processes—the political and social history—that dominated the period. The events and concepts first discussed will be those related to the conquest and its legacy, only to later move fully to the past fifty years of dictatorships, transitions to democracy, and the emergence of the neopopulist political form.

At the opening of the twentieth century, some believed that there was a lack of political consciousness among the Chinese people. They introduced foreign political theories, attempting to engage Chinese citizenry with the political. Yet what the political entails remains an unresolved issue even in China today. This article traces the history of Chinese translation of the political through a dynamic process of language adaptation and cultural appropriation. It argues that two competing legacies, one that promises the politicization as a way to liberate individual subjectivity in a modernizing society and another that calls for the order and organization that subject individual will to the collective power of the state, have exerted combined influences on shaping the modern Chinese conception of the political. As a result, to many Chinese today, politics is not just about the daily business of people's affairs but also an orderly society with a centralized authority.

In this article, we trace the diversification of Ottoman political vocabulary from the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth in a time of dynastic restoration and administrative modernization. We focus particularly on the transformation of the concept siyâset (rule, politics) which had been in use in Muslim polities for centuries, and the emergence, in the late eighteenth century, of the word politika which has come to be used alongside siyâset since then. In making sense of this bifurcation, we demonstrate that the Ottoman elite conceptions of politics were not simply replaced by the European conceptions. Rather, the equivalence of siyâset and politika was clearly contested by Ottoman statesmen, and the political terminology of rule and administration evolved in tandem with the material transformation of the Ottoman dynasty and state.

Efforts to trace the concept of the political in India and South Asia have looked for equivalent terms in the languages of the subcontinent and have traced textual influences of ideas both globally and within South Asian literary traditions. While not diminishing the importance of textual approaches, this article traces the historical emergence of associations between the concept of the political and the joint actions and collective practices of amplification frequently used to communicate with rulers. It argues that under British rule many of the accepted methods and moral economies condoned for communicating with rulers were explicitly criminalized and came to be recognized as political only in response to this criminalization. By attending to a history of practices and their associations with wider “semantic nets,” the article also offers methodological reflections on the relationships between histories of doing, histories of concepts, and the lexicons through which these can be traced.