Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: Global Conceptual History: Promises and Pitfalls of a New Research Agenda
- 1 How Concepts Met History in Korea's Complex Modernization: New Concepts of Economy and Society and their Impact
- 2 Differing Translations, Contested Meanings: A Motor for the 1911 Revolution in China?
- 3 Notions of Society in Early Twentieth-Century China, 1900–25
- 4 Sabhā-Samāj Society: Some Linguistic Considerations
- 5 The Conceptualization of the Social in Late Nineteenth-and Early Twentieth-Century Arabic Thought and Language
- 6 From Kerajaan (Kingship) to Masyarakat (The People): Malay Articulations of Nationhood through Concepts of the ‘Social’ and the ‘Economic’, 1920–40
- 7 Building Nation and Society in the 1920s Dutch East Indies
- 8 Discordant Localizations of Modernity: Reflections on Concepts of the Economic and the Social in Siam during the Early Twentieth Century
- Notes
- Index
5 - The Conceptualization of the Social in Late Nineteenth-and Early Twentieth-Century Arabic Thought and Language
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction: Global Conceptual History: Promises and Pitfalls of a New Research Agenda
- 1 How Concepts Met History in Korea's Complex Modernization: New Concepts of Economy and Society and their Impact
- 2 Differing Translations, Contested Meanings: A Motor for the 1911 Revolution in China?
- 3 Notions of Society in Early Twentieth-Century China, 1900–25
- 4 Sabhā-Samāj Society: Some Linguistic Considerations
- 5 The Conceptualization of the Social in Late Nineteenth-and Early Twentieth-Century Arabic Thought and Language
- 6 From Kerajaan (Kingship) to Masyarakat (The People): Malay Articulations of Nationhood through Concepts of the ‘Social’ and the ‘Economic’, 1920–40
- 7 Building Nation and Society in the 1920s Dutch East Indies
- 8 Discordant Localizations of Modernity: Reflections on Concepts of the Economic and the Social in Siam during the Early Twentieth Century
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Between 1860 and 1914, the Ottoman Arab world underwent tumultuous change in the political, social, economic and cultural realms. For intellectuals, political and material change was accompanied by a heightened perception that their world was changing in profound ways, but also that they had a part to play in reconfiguring and strengthening it. For thinkers based in Beirut and Cairo (two of the major cities of the Ottoman Arab world in the period under study), this was the moment to rethink, and to think anew, the relationship between state and society. Specifically, it was the moment to conceptualize society – what it is that constitutes it, what kind of future society is envisioned, the steps needed to reach this ideal society, the relationship between the social and natural resources, the relationship between the various categories within society and, finally, the connection between society, civilization and the nation. This is not to suggest that political and material change linearly triggered (or forced) the emergence of new categories of investigation, or led unquestionably to new conceptualizations and conceptual ruptures that merely reflected ‘tangible’ changes; indeed, the point is to follow Reinhart Koselleck's approach to Begriffsgeschichte, which
does not assume that the concepts it tracks are epiphenomenal, mere reflections of more profound political, social, and economic transformations. Language … changes at a different speed than do events, forms of government, or social structure, all of which language sometimes shapes and directs, and sometimes only registers.
[…]
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- Information
- A Global Conceptual History of Asia, 1860–1940 , pp. 91 - 110Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014