Chapter 5 begins by analyzing the transition from Neo-Kantian Ideensgeschichte to Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte. The latter intended to break the ahistorical assumptions behind the former tradition. It was closely associated to the postulate of the radical indefinability of concepts, given the contextual transposition they undergo. For Koselleck, the capacity of concepts to transcend their contexts of origin make of them to serve as the articulators of the structural connections in history. It permits conceptual history transcending social history. Yet, conversely, social history would transcend conceptual history because only the former could explain how structural connections eventually become broken. The postulate was at the basis of his polemic with Gadamer. However, as the chapter shows, Koselleck’s argument is founded on a fallacy. Lastly, the reintroduction of the opposition between “conceptual history” and “social history” breaks the tenets of his own historical-conceptual theory.

Waseem Yaqoob examines how four prominent German political philosophers responded to the ‘crisis of historicism’ by re-thinking the relation between ethics, politics and history. The trigger for the crisis was Germany’s defeat in World War I, when the presumed convergence of the monarchical nation state with ethical fulfilment and historical destiny dissolved in defeat and political upheaval. Among the first to respond was Friedrich Meinecke, whose earlier confidence in that convergence was replaced by an awareness of historical contingency, and of the difficulty of aligning ethics with reason of state. Notoriously harder line was Carl Schmitt, for whom an appreciation of contingency in a ‘world of enemies’ entailed the assertion of sovereignty at the expense of ethics. With the collapse of Nazism and advent of the Cold War, Reinhart Koselleck renewed Schmitt’s critique of moralising historical philosophy (identified with the Enlightenment), before turning to ‘conceptual history’ to suggest that the state would best adapt to the accelerating temporality of modernity by avoiding all normative choices. By contrast, Hannah Arendt would seek in the contingency of history the space to make such choices, and the opportunity to revive the ancient ideal of active citizenship. In conclusion, Yaqoob sets German post-Historicist thinking off against the anti-historical tendency of Anglo-American political philosophy associated with John Rawls, suggesting that the former may offer a more sophisticated historical ‘realism’ than that current among Rawls’ critics.

Charlotte Johann explores the relationship between law and history articulated in a fierce debate between two of the most prominent legal scholars of nineteenth-century Germany: Friedrich Carl von Savigny, the leading exponent of historical jurisprudence, and Eduard Gans, the foremost advocate of Hegelian legal philosophy. Situating their confrontation in the aftermath of the Napoleonic occupation of German Europe, the chapter argues that the two thinkers used concepts of history to counter the rupturing effects of revolution and empire on the German legal system, albeit in radically different ways. Savigny proposed to re-build the German legal system based on the hermeneutically rigorous academic study of pre-revolutionary legal orders, especially classical Roman Law. Gans, by contrast, defended the primacy of legislation as a vehicle of legal continuity by grounding it in an origin story of the modern state. Johann challenges interpretations of the debate as simply a clash between liberal and conservative versions of law’s history. Rather, she suggests that the issue at stake was whether, or to what extent, politics and law share the same temporality – an issue that continues to preoccupy legal theorists and historians alike.

The introduction establishes a framework for the volume as a whole. It explains why questions of temporality are at the heart of political thinking, and points to the several ways in which many (but not all) political thinkers have invoked history. It asks what historians of political thought can learn from the wider ‘temporal turn’ in historical studies inspired by Reinhart Koselleck, while also arguing that the understanding of political thought in terms of plural ‘languages’ of politics, advocated by John Pocock and Quentin Skinner, already offers powerful resources for addressing the issues associated with time and history. Six such linguistic contexts for thinking about politics in time and history are identified – the legal, the sacred, the contingent, the social, the revolutionary and the global – and the individual chapters of the volume are then introduced in relation to these contexts. Particular attention is given to recent developments in global intellectual history. Approaching political thought in these contexts will show that the roles of time and history have amounted to much more than the cliché that ‘a week is a long time in politics’.

The Coda to this book examines the latest edition of Dak’Art, Senegal’s biennial art exhibition, which – while operating in a neoliberal art market – has retained a Pan-African agenda. In Dak’Art 2016, the organizers used various colonial buildings to exhibit contemporary art and thus appropriated the colonial cityscape for its decolonizing agenda. More than 50 years after Senegal acquired its political independence, a nostalgia for Pan-African politics remains on the utopian horizon. In the Coda, this decolonial utopia is situated in a wider temporal landscape of lost and reclaimed futures. In Reinhart Koselleck’s understanding of historical time, the imagination of political alternatives in the historical present assumes an untimely quality. Indeed, as we have seen throughout the book, the process of decolonization is not a linear historical process; rather, it is refracted by ‘uncanny returns, repetitions, and re-enchantments’. The Coda explores how such untimely temporalities are embodied in the African Renaissance Monument, inaugurated in 2010 to celebrate Senegal’s independence amidst widespread dissatisfaction with government politics. It posits that the imagination of African futures is as untimely as it ever was.

This chapter begins by summarising the development of the history of ideas out of which conceptual history emerged. It discusses in detail the founding figure of conceptual history, Reinhart Koselleck, and compares his approach to that of the influential Cambridge school, in particular Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, and their ‘contextualism’. The bulk of the chapter is then dedicated to a discussion of a range of examples of how conceptual histories have helped to deconstruct a rainge of collective identities, including class, religious, racial and gender identities. In all of these areas we have seen an intense interest in linking the history of conceps with the study of emotions, social practices and the problematisation of the national container for historical studies. In particular the move to a transnational history of concepts has contributed in a major way to de-essentialising collective national identities but also transnational, i.e. European ones. Furthermore, conceptual history has been emphasising the importance of studying the translation of concepts into different languages and cultural spheres.