We can now look back at what we have seen and raise the basic question implicit there: Why study the “new intellectual history”? One main reason is that it has represented a particularly productive moment, in terms of the development of new approaches, theoretical perspectives, and methodologies, a “golden age of methodological enquiry,” in Mark Bevir’s words.Footnote ¹ According to him, it came to an end in the 1990s. Yet, it has established the premises that still permeate the different perspectives in the field. In fact, the authors we have analyzed in the preceding chapters (particularly Skinner, Koselleck, and Foucault) remain the fundamental points of reference, even though their main theoretical works date from half a century ago, or indeed more.

The truth is that we cannot find in the field a subsequent theoretical effort that can compare to them. As Darrin McMahon and Samuel Moyn assert, “its star may have risen along with a decline in self-reflection.”Footnote ² The proliferation of perspectives and methodologies paved the way to a kind of eclectic mood. The most diverse and indeed opposite approaches coexist, all of them considered equally legitimate. Eclecticism then turned into the “spontaneous philosophy” in the field. This made theoretical debate recede. In this context, the attempt to impose or just to propose a methodology appears as exuding an authoritarian epistemology and is decried as a regress to the grands récits. Yet, this eclectic attitude, reactive against theoretical debate, has brought about negative consequences. According to McMahon and Moyn, it has generated a conformist and sterilizing climate for intellectual production:

At this juncture, a retrospective balance is in order. We should address the fundamental questions that the comprehension of the NIH raises: How to define it? How to distinguish it from the old “history of ideas”? What were its fundamental achievements and shortcomings? In sum, what is the sense of the “historiographical revolution” that Pocock talks about? And also, what were the reasons that led to theoretical debates receding in the following decades? A good starting point to unravel these issues and find some answers to these questions is the recent criticism of one of the fundamental tenets that distinguished the NIH: “discursive contextualism.”

From Contextualism to Eclecticism

Through different avenues, and from different perspectives, all of the authors we have analyzed converged in the project of referring ideas back to their historical–conceptual conditions of possibility, their “discursive contexts.” Yet, this premise has recently become under attack. In “Contextualism and Criticism in the History of Ideas,” Peter Gordon writes one of the most systematic critiques of it as a framework to understand the meaning of ideas. He states: “I propose to examine some of the underlying principles that support the idea of contextualism as the highest norm for intellectual–historical practice.”Footnote ⁴ His main target is, predictably, Skinner’s perspective.

Actually, most of his criticism of contextualism derives from the way Gordon defines it: “Perhaps the deepest premise in support of contextualism is the belief that, for every idea, principle, or ideology there is one and only one native context in which it is properly understood.” “By contextualism,” he continues, “I mean the epistemological and normative (and implicitly metaphysical) premise that ideas are properly understood only if they are studied within the context of their initial articulation.”Footnote ⁵

From this perspective, the “discursive context” appears as a “holistic sphere of self-contained and enclosed meanings that is (like a Leibnizian monad) ‘without windows’.”Footnote ⁶ Thus, for him, it prevents observing how an idea “travels outward beyond its initial context of articulation into other contexts where its intelligibility would remain intact.”Footnote ⁷ Such a “cordoning off” of the original context “has the unfortunate effect of inhibiting our appreciation of how ideas transform and ramify over the longue durée.”Footnote ⁸ Its underlying assumption is that the only legitimate meaning of an idea is its native meaning. Lastly, he affirms, this method rests on a fallacy, “much of the prestige of contextualism arises from the logical fallacy of collapsing validity into genesis.”Footnote ⁹

Now, we must say that it is not at all clear that this is really Skinner’s idea of discursive contextualism. It does not necessarily refer to or confer any privilege to the native context of an idea. What it seeks is to observe the different discursive contexts in which an idea has become inscribed while traveling (when, how, where, and so on, each utterance was produced), and eventually distinguish them from the initial one. It does not necessarily affirm that the native meaning of a concept is its true meaning, the only acceptable one, but simply that that is its native meaning, which is different from the subsequent meanings it would get in the different contexts in which it would eventually reappear. Thus, far from “inhibiting our appreciation of how ideas transform and ramify over the longue durée,” it is precisely what allows us to perceive their transformations; in fact, the only means for it. Affirming otherwise would be tantamount to asserting that the meaningful transformations that ideas undergo are not connected to the differential discursive contexts in which they participate in each case, as if they were self-generating entities containing the principle of their own transformations. In sum, it would mean the reification of ideas.

What underlies the above-mentioned criticism is a confusion between “ideas” and “languages” or “discourses.” While ideas migrate, languages do not, they are always historically situated. They are fully historical entities in the sense that they contain a principle of temporal irreversibility. They rest on a set of assumptions, contingently articulated, due to which they cannot be projected either prospectively or retrospectively beyond the horizon within which those assumptions remain valid without reducing them to merely sets of generic ideas that, in effect, could be found anytime and anywhere.

At this point, Gordon takes up Skinner’s argument that identifies the discursive context with authorial intentionality to turn it against him and his own theory. As a matter of fact, Gordon states, “when individual philosophers or political theorists articulate their ideas, it is quite often their intention to speak beyond their own time and to communicate with a broader audience stretching from the present into the sometimes remote future.”Footnote ¹⁰ The example he provides is Spinoza’s, whose doctrine of the substance, he affirms, was not intended as an argument “only for the inhabitants of seventeenth-century Amsterdam or Western Europe,” but he imagined it as participating in a wider temporal context. “One might even think that the proper horizon as defined by authorial intent would have to be one that considered the meaning of an idea sub specie aeternitatis.”Footnote ¹¹

Actually, Skinner’s identification of discursive context with authorial intentionality is problematic, and it is true that, if we follow that premise, we should consider simply as valid the authors’ intention of transcending their specific contexts of utterance and addressing a broader audience. However, again, this argument may appear as demolishing only that narrow way of considering discursive contextualism. Two clarifications are in order here. First, analyzing a discursive context does not mean to taking the authors’ intentions at face value. The goal is rather to understand them; more precisely, to address the questions that derive from them, but that can be answered only through the analysis of their context of utterance: What did an author like Spinoza do to imagine that he was speaking to a broader (actually universal) audience? How did he imagine it? Did he think it was the community of the faithful, or a rational forum? What future reception of his doctrine did he envisage? Did he think that his premises would be consecrated as final truths by History, or by God on final Judgment day or, eventually, by an impersonal scientific community? Only the answer to this series of questions may make sense of Spinoza’s plea. And this demands understanding the conditions that made Spinoza’s very intentions possible and thinkable. In sum, addressing the paradox of how his intention to overcome his particular discursive context resulted from that very discursive context which he sought to transcend.

The second observation refers to the actual reception of Spinoza’s ideas; how they became transposed from their “native” context to different ones. If it is certainly true that his ideas have interacted with his future readers, this means that their reception was never merely passive. It inevitably entailed their reinterpretation according to the new keys provided by the languages and conceptual frameworks of the time. This leads us back to the differences between ideas and languages.

A language, as we have seen, is not a set of ideas. We cannot find what differentiates one language from another if we focus exclusively on the ideas contained in them, since their differences are not there, but in the way in which these ideas become, in each case, mutually articulated. It is from this that they take their concrete meanings. Hence, if we focus exclusively on the level of ideas, and how they travel, as if they were discrete, atomistic units, we cannot perceive the meaningful transformations they undergo. The result of doing so is, inevitably, an image of intellectual history as a continuum that uniformly traverses the different epochs and discursive contexts. To give an example, the day that two atoms of hydrogen fused with an atom of oxygen, the atoms remained the same, but the result was a completely new element. Now, if we pay attention exclusively to the atoms, we can never understand the nature of the transformation produced by their fusion, and, much less, how crucial that event was in the history of the universe (as a matter of fact, it was one in a long string of accidents, that preceded and followed it, allowing us to be here).

In this contention between “containment and movement,” as Gordon defines it, his conclusion continues the currently predominant eclectic tendency. In fact, when the question thus posed, in such dichotomous terms, a middle ground between the opposite poles appears as the most sensible option. “I noted further,” he affirms, “one must strive for a certain balance between them.”Footnote ¹² However, this kind of eclectic solutions obfuscates the problems at stake rather than solves them. One of the paradoxical consequences of disregarding the analysis of the discursive contexts can be drawn from Gordon’s reference to Habermas’ perspective regarding the connection between the past and the present: “The point was made quite well by Jürgen Habermas when he characterized ‘today’s historicism’ as ‘an empiricism’ that ‘denies seriousness to the validity claim of universalist character that stands behind every affirmation and negation of the subject who takes a position’.”Footnote ¹³

Habermas refers here to the pressure of the past on the present, the “unfulfilled” promises of the past that still await redemption. He associates it to what he calls the “unfinished project of modernity,” which, in turn, he says, is the Enlightenment’s original stance. This perspective actually rests on a highly stylized view which identifies the “project of the Enlightenment” with “the project of modernity,” at large, and, in turn, interprets it as a presumably universalist ideal which is allegedly performatively implicit – at least counterfactually – in every communicative action. I think it is not necessary to demonstrate why, from a historical–conceptual perspective, it is clearly untenable, an arbitrary interpretation. What Habermas understands as the “unfinished project of the Enlightenment” is, very obviously, Habermas’ own project projected upon the past. Thus, in the process, he collapses under the label of “modernity” the whole range of theories, perspectives, methodologies, and “projects” present in the “modern age,” which were, in fact, widely diverse, and indeed many of them mutually incompatible. Therefore, to produce that identification, he must submit intellectual history to a – clearly arbitrary and subjective – selectivity process.

We can perceive here one of the paradoxical consequences implicit in the plea for “plurality” and the rejection of the “holistic” view of discrete contexts. As soon as it intends to become more specific, it turns into its opposite; that is, it inevitably leads us to imagine the whole history of thinking (or, at least, of modern thinking) as a single, seamless context. To the contextual “holism” it thus opposes a transhistorical holism. The alleged plurality thus resolves itself into a generic, undifferentiated identity. Ultimately, behind “methodological pluralism” we can perceive a teleological concept of history, a view of it as a march toward the final realization of a supposedly “unfinished project,” which necessarily results in all sorts of conceptual anachronisms.

Now, Gordon’s strongest point is his remark referring to Skinner’s limited idea of the “discursive context,” which is focused exclusively on political ideas, disregarding the other spheres of thinking that constitute conceptual contexts:

In this sense, the NIH compares negatively with the old history of ideas, as conceived by Lovejoy. As McMahon underlines, Lovejoy was more sensitive to the plurality of areas, beyond political discourse (arts, sciences, metaphysics, etc.), through which ideas deploy, and the comprehension of whose connections is vital, therefore, for a more precise view of discursive contexts. For McMahon, there is no radical difference between the new intellectual history and the history of ideas; the two shared their rejection of the formalist approaches.Footnote ¹⁵ Their differences would refer to how each interprets the labor of the contextualization of ideas.

Gordon’s criticism could thus be seen, not as directed against contextualism, as such, but against the restrictive way that Skinner and the founders of the Cambridge school have interpreted it. It could be considered as advocating a more comprehensive, interdisciplinary view of it, in consonance with Lovejoy’s proposal. According to McMahon, thus understood, contextualism would provide a necessary balance in the postmodern love for plurality and fragmentation:

This demand is perfectly valid and, I think, acceptable for the members of the Cambridge school. However, the true point that it raises is where to find and how to recreate that “common ground” among the different disciplines and discourses that McMahon speaks of. It is at this point that a more precise differentiation between “ideas” and/or “languages” (or “discourses”) becomes essential.

From the History of Ideas to the History of Languages

In effect, it is clear that this “common ground” articulating the different realms of symbolic reality cannot be found on the level of ideas. There is not, and cannot be, any common idea between, for example, Baroque music or painting and the political discourse of the time.Footnote ¹⁷ Pretending to find it would result in an arbitrary operation of mutual reduction of clearly diverse cultural areas. Yet, these different cultural areas did not exist in isolation. Actually, they could only develop and take form in the play of their mutual relationships. The question, thus, is how to recreate the modes of their interactions.

Reaching the final goal of the NIH – to identify the distinction between ideas and discourses or languages – demands, precisely, to recreate the different modes of articulation among discourses; more precisely, the specific nature and structure of the fields of their interactions. Now, only from the combination of the respective insights and contributions of the different schools and theories we have analyzed in the precedent pages can we draw a clearer picture of that whose contours, when each of these theories was considered separately, still appear blurred: why the shift in focus from “ideas” to “languages” was not a merely nominal change, but entailed a fundamental redefinition of the very object of study for intellectual history. Ultimately, what the sense of “historiographical revolution” that Pocock spoke of was. We will try to summarize it.

1. 1. In the first place, as we have seen, a language does not consist of statements; it is not a set of ideas which could eventually be listed but a characteristic way of producing them. This means that languages are semantically undetermined (in any given language, we can affirm something and also its opposite). Ultimately, political languages, as well as natural languages, lead us back to a second-order level of symbolic reality, the means of production of statements. Thus, to gain access to them, we need to transcend the surface level of discourses, their semantic contents, and to penetrate the argumentative apparatuses that underly them, that is, the particular ways or formal principles of their articulation.

2. 2. The previous point allows us to discern the content of discourses from the underlying political languages. The former refers to the semantic level: the latter, to the syntactic one, the form of discourses. Now, the point is how these two linguistic levels are connected, how the passage from the signifier to the signified is produced. It demands, in turn, the intercession of a third dimension of language: the performative. Insofar as a language is semantically undetermined, its actual contents – the specific modes in which it is articulated to meaningfully invest reality – cannot be inferred from its premises. It is not, then, a pre-constituted entity like the “models” or “ideal types” of the history of ideas. It is configured in the play itself of mutual interactions among the different areas it comprises. In sum, its deployment has a performative character, in the sense that it is produced in the very uses of it.

3. 3. This has, in turn, a fundamental methodological consequence, connected with the problem of “presentism” (the fact that we always need a theory to approach the past). Actually, it is a problem with no solution. But, once we accept it, we can at least devise some strategies to deal with it. The shift from ideas to languages is one of them. Unlike the approaches founded on “models of thinking” or “ideal types,” a history of languages opens up a space for historical analysis, one where its end term does not merely replicate what we knew from the start. Thus, even though we need a categorical framework, it does not prescribe what we will find, nor can it be inferred from its very premises. It can be discovered only in the very course of historical research.

4. 4. This entails, thus, a double labor, on theory and on history. Only the labor on theory allows us to elaborate new approaches to our objects, to pose new questions to the texts of the past. Otherwise, we tend merely to reproduce the set knowledge in the field. But, conversely, only the labor on history may serve to test these approaches and methodologies, their assets and possible shortcomings, and, eventually, to generate the demand for their reformulation and the elaboration of new ones.

5. 5. However, as we have seen, today’s reigning eclecticism in the area has had the effect of blocking this oscillation by inhibiting theoretical debates. This results from the fact that, when transposed to the analysis of discursive formation, the currently much appreciated methodological pluralism has a disaggregating effect of the “discursive contexts.” The criticism of the “holistic views,” although most times valid, leads, however, to missing the fact that the plurality of discourses that co-exist within a given discursive context do not live in mutual isolation, they interact with each other. And, more importantly, that the field for their interaction is not a flat, homogeneous surface; that it possesses a structure. It is what we should try to recreate if we intend to understand how discourses were produced, the means of their configuration, and how they changed over time. That is, we must analyze the series of mutations undergone by what Pocock called “the generalized language of discourse of a given time.” This leads us to a further point, more specifically, with regard to political languages and their differences with political ideas or ideologies.

6. 6. A political language cannot be identified with any particular ideology. As Koselleck states regarding the fundamental political and social concepts that articulate a language, they are those that everybody uses in a given context.Footnote ¹⁸ Hence, it makes no sense to speak, for example, of a “liberal language” or a “republican language,” since a language would refer to that which allows their mutual confrontation. Lastly, languages run across the entire ideological spectrum of an epoch, from the moment that they establish the field for their interactions; more radically, they are the very means of their interactions.Footnote ¹⁹

7. 7. The articulation of a language into the level of the ideological contents is, thus, a subsequent task, open, in different instances, to different alternative courses. This implies a radical reversal of the traditional methodology of the history of ideas. Historians of ideas normally seek to establish the fundamental concepts defining each particular current of thought and then “horizontally” trace their evolution over time. Instead, political languages cannot be discovered except by vertically cutting through the ideological spectrum. The different ideologies thus become relevant only insofar as they reveal, in their mutual interaction, the set of shared premises on which the public discourse of an epoch hinged, and how these premises eventually shifted over time. In sum, the turn from ideas to political languages leads to transcending the textual surface of discourses and reconstructing contexts of debate.

8. 8. The recreation of the contexts of debate, however, does not mean moving beyond the realm of discourses. In fact, the focus on political languages breaks the antinomy between “text” and “context” in which the history of ideas was locked. A political language becomes such only insofar as it carries within the conditions of its own enunciation. This leads us, again, to consider the pragmatic dimension of discourses: who speaks, to whom they speak, in which social context – power relations – they speak, which were the quintessentially rhetorical questions defining the positionality of discourses. A history of political languages would thus seek to trace the ways in which the context of utterance is inscribed within the ambit of discourses, becoming an integral part of them, that is, to recover its linguistic tracks within the discourses themselves.

9. 9. This is associated, in turn, with the “unspoken dimension.” The articulation of a given context of debate entails the presence of a set of implicit assumptions which enable communication and interaction among the different currents and ideologies. These assumptions are contingently articulated; they always have an epochal character. Lastly, these sets of implicit assumptions, which are never fully articulated in discourses (not their ideas, which are generic, by nature) are the ones that historicize discourses, that provide them with a principle of temporal irreversibility, preventing their transpositions from one epoch to another. Ultimately, a history of political languages would seek to identify those thresholds of historicity that render any prospective or retrospective projection unfeasible. As Koselleck showed in relation with the Sattelzeit, having trespassed across a given threshold of historicity, a plain return to the past is no longer possible.

10. 10. A crucial point is that political languages, qua articulators of contexts of debate, unlike ideas, are not merely subjective attributes but objective historical entities. They refer to an ambit of symbolic reality that does not circulate exclusively in the mind of the subjects. The contexts of debate and their changes are independent from the consciousness and indeed from the will of the agents (we do not know how political language has changed in the last twenty years better than we know how society or economy has done). A history of political languages seeks to recreate, not merely how the ideas of the subject changed, but how the conditions of their public articulation did. Actually, ideas are relatively viscous. Most Frenchmen in 1795 probably did not think very differently from how they did a decade before. Thus, if we focus on the ideas of the subjects, we may conclude that, in the meantime, nothing happened. Yet we know that everything changed, indeed, in the realm of intellectual history. The point is that ideas do not keep a record of these changes since they do not refer to them but to the conditions of their public utterance: the same idea pronounced in 1795 had a very different meaning of that pronounced a decade earlier, since, as Collingwood affirmed, the questions it addressed had changed, and it is this that we should try to understand.

11. 11. Thus, a history of political languages not only intends to overcome the antinomy between text and context but also, and fundamentally, that which underlies it: the opposition between “ideas” and “reality.” Discourses are not merely mental representations of an external reality but are themselves “real” events. Lastly, the NIH can be seen as a rebellion against the “philosophies of consciousness,” which is at the basis of both the “materialist” and the “idealist” perspectives. One of the fundamental contributions of the theories hitherto analyzed is having disclosed the presence of a dimension of symbolic reality which is embedded in the very systems of practices. In actual fact, every social, political, or economic practice is founded on a series of assumptions of a conceptual nature. They are constitutive of these practices and, therefore, mutually inseparable.Footnote ²⁰

12. 12. This, thus, finally allows us to overcome the externality between the conceptual and the social spheres, between discourses and practices, and to find an internal link that connects them. In Foucault’s definition, a “discourse” refers to the set of rules that preside over a practice. It is clear that a given practice, like the medical, does not pre-exist the rules that preside over it. These two dimensions, then, cannot be detached. This has further methodological consequences. It paved the way for a perspective of how discourses, institutions, their social settings, and so on, imbricate in actual reality,Footnote ²¹ as well as how their transformations are convergent: a change of a given discourse, that is, of the rules presiding over a practice, is a change of the practice itself, and vice versa, thus rendering futile the whole debate around their priority (what the determinant in the last instance is).

As we have said, the preceding picture results from the combination of the respective insights and contributions made by the different schools and theories. Albeit, at the same time, this conjugation has entailed the revision of some of their fundamental tenets, insofar as they are, in many cases, mutually incompatible. And, at a given point (particularly, at the moment of boarding the issue of the temporality of concepts), they are also revealed to be problematic. Here is the fundamental limitation of the NIH, the wall against which all the different theories elaborated in its context inevitably collided. When explaining how political languages change (something infinitely more complex to understand than the changes of ideas), what the source and dynamics of conceptual transformations are, these theories end up relapsing into the antinomies of the history of ideas, the same opposition between “ideas” and “reality” against which these theories rebelled and which they tried to overcome.

This problem has led, in subsequent years, to the elaboration of a new perspective of the temporality of concepts. To prevent that relapse and effectively overcome the traditional antinomies is now thought to entail introducing a “stronger” principle of the contingency of conceptual formations. That is, to think of both languages and the systems of practices associated with them as fully historical entities, not only in the sense that they are founded on a series of contingently articulated premises, temporally localizable, but also that they can never fulfil their vocation to constitute themselves as fully rational and logically integrated systems. In short, that what lies at their center is a meaningful void.

The unerasable residue of irrationality at the basis of every conceptual formation is just the ever-present mark of the contingent nature of their very institution (that they do not have their roots in reason or nature), thus preventing their full articulation as organic wholes. We can call this the principle of the constitutive incompleteness–inconsistency of conceptual formations. It would finally allow us to explain conceptual change without the need of positing the presence of a transcendent agent. It is that irrational core at the center of every conceptual formation that determines its precarious constitution and makes room for ideological disputes, that which underlies and becomes manifest in antagonism on the level of political practice. Ultimately it is what prevents the stabilization of a given discursive regime rendering its transformation eventually feasible.

Now, the constitutive incompleteness of discursive formations (the points of singularity contained in them) is what makes an event possible, that is, their break and the emergence of new and radically different horizons of meanings, but it is not yet itself an event. It would be what Badiou calls an “evental site.” The point, however, is that no set of facts or happenings would constitute an event unless they establish a connection with these evental sites, unless they touch that which is at once constitutive and unthinkable in a given context. The event is thus what opens the horizon for that hitherto unthinkable; hence, it cannot be explained by the pre-existing conditions from which it arises. And it poses, in turn, the paradox of how an event can emerge out of that very context to which it comes to disrupt.

We find here condensed the whole problematique of conceptual change; which, as we can appreciate, is immensely more complex and difficult to observe and explain than the changes in ideas. And the same applies to the practice of intellectual history. It is not merely a process of accumulation of knowledge, as changes in it also have an “evental” character. This is connected to the paradox of how we can understand that alien to our categorical universe, from within that categorical universe, without dissolving its alterity, reducing it to that which is familiar to us. And this leads us back to the issue of eclecticism.

The Evental and the Plural

The underlying premise behind eclectic perspectives, which attracts historians, is the rejection of the normative pretension implicit in every theory. To this, one could reply that not only anti-contextualism, but indeed the rejection of theory, in general, cannot escape from it either; it also contains a normative pretension regarding how intellectual history should be written. Actually, the plea for methodological pluralism alone is still an empty stance, and, as soon as one intends to make its meaning precise, it inevitably entails positing some directions and norms on the writing of intellectual history.

Yet, this is not necessarily invalidating. We should here discern this kind of normativism from the one that triggers historians’ uneasiness. It entails, in turn, a distinction in levels of discourse, between the discourse-object and the metadiscourse. One thing is the normativism that seeks to impose upon the authors of the past what they should have said, as it happens with the models of thinking, and a very different thing is the kind of normativism that intends to propose how to understand what the authors of the past actually said. The two involve a pretension of truth, but two very different ideas of it. Again, one thing is the pretension of finding the true idea of democracy, liberty, justice, and so on, to dictate how we should think about them, and another very different thing is the – more modest – pretension of understanding what democracy, liberty, justice, and so on, was for this or that author, how they conceived these concepts, without judging their veracity. While the former pretension sterilizes intellectual history, leading to the de-historicizing of thinking, the latter pretension constitutes the very premise on which it stands, even though we may postulate that it is ultimately unattainable.

Lastly, eclecticism is vacuous if adopted as an interpretive framework to approach the discipline itself, or to describe its state of the art, in short, as its own fundamental metadiscourse. By saying that intellectual history is currently diverse, and should be so, we say nothing. Certainly, today’s writing of intellectual history is plural, diverse. Many different – and indeed opposite – types of approaches and perspectives coexist in the field. Now, the same could have been said fifty years ago and, probably, could also be said fifty years from now. As a matter of fact, the writing of history has always been and will always be inevitably plural and diverse. The issue at stake is that it has always been, and will be, differently diverse. Today’s diversity is different from yesterday’s diversity and tomorrow’s diversity. What matters is understanding how these different diversities diverge, what features, tendencies, patterns, we can find that allow us to discern each of these diverse forms of diversity, and thus understand the broader epistemic transformations that the field has undergone in the meantime. The real challenge, thus, is how to understand that “common ground” which effectively existed without annulling, in the process, that diversity on the level of its contents, but making sense of it.

Eclecticism prevents us from understanding the differences among discursive formations, except in purely quantitative terms. All the epistemological problems that they raise would thus be reduced to establishing their relative degrees of diversity. Now, the epistemic mutations from which the different discursive contexts or languages emerge do not refer merely to how diverse or how homogenous they are. They involve the redefinition of the very field of virtual objectivities in the function of which the diverse diversities of discourses are, in each case, articulated. This is, in the last instance, what we should try to analyze; not merely what is said in discourses and how it changed, but also, and fundamentally, how that which they speak of changed over time.

Here we come to the second goal of this essay. The first was to specify what distinguishes the NIH from the old history of ideas, why its emergence represented a truly theoretical revolution in the field, which redefined its very object, and, as a consequence, the ways of approaching it. In short, to try to assess its fundamental contributions, explore the possibility of conjugating them and assess what the resulting picture of it is. And, eventually, to identify its inherent limitations. The second goal is to place these historical–conceptual theories themselves in a historical–conceptual perspective, observing the particular epistemic conditions that made their conception possible, and, ultimately, explain the problems these theories found at the moment of explaining conceptual change.

The Well in the Philosopher’s Ground

An old story tells of the philosopher who, absorbed in the contemplation of the sky, trying to decipher the secret structure of the universe, fell into a well, triggering the laughter of the slave girl that accompanied him. The classical interpretation of this anecdote refers to the philosopher’s lack of practical sense. Being always buried in his thoughts, he would be unable to deal with the simplest and easiest matters of everyday life. However, this story is open to a different interpretation. That of which the philosopher remains ignorant, the well into which he falls inciting the mockery of the slave girl, can be understood as referring to the conceptual ground on which his thoughts stand, the set of assumptions under his feet, which are at the basis of his perspective of what he sees above his head, but remains buried.

To observe that which is below, he needed to change his vantage point, to inscribe his perspective within another horizon where it could appear before his eyes. Now, the perception of it entails, in turn, remaining ignorant of that which lies now under his new position, risking again breaking his neck by falling into some other well. Lastly, the task of penetrating the ground of knowledge on which systems of thought rest is an infinite and also dangerous enterprise. Yet, we cannot help undertaking it, over and over, without any guarantee of success.

It has been the second main aim of the present book to try to dig below the surface level of the theories, their explicit postulates, and gain access to the hidden conceptual ground that lies behind them. It is not intended to polemize with the authors and their theories, to hold or refute them, but to observe them against the backdrop of their “discursive contexts,” and thus contribute to a better understanding of them. In short, to recreate the particular epistemic niche to which they belong, thus rendering their particular type of discursivity meaningful and intelligible, from a historical–conceptual perspective, including their inherent points of logical fissure.

It is at this juncture that we have resorted to Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge. His idea of a “discursive formation” can be understood as a precision and sophistication of Skinner’s idea of a “discursive context.” It allows us to discern the conceptual grounds from which social and political discourses emerged, and how they changed over time. And also, how, after each epistemic mutation, the whole field of knowledge became reconfigured, moving reflection onto a different realm of phenomenological reality. Hence, these epistemic mutations mark thresholds of historicity. It is not the ideas that changed after each of them but that of which they are their mental representations, the represented thing, which is not, however, an “external” historical framework, a sheerly empirical dimension of reality, one which is not always already shaped by a given system of cultural and symbolic references.

This methodology is also applicable to the study of intellectual history itself, and, particularly, to the comprehension of the epistemic foundations of the NIH. Yet, to inscribe it within this archaeological perspective, we have had to move beyond Foucault’s proposal. The attempt to comprehend these theories has led us to re-elaborate it and observe something missing in it: the epistemic mutation produced at the beginning of the twentieth century, from which the particular regime of knowledge on which the NIH stands emerged. In effect, the theories elaborated in its context are revealing of a broader epistemic mutation that, as such, traversed the whole Western thinking of the period. And, conversely, the reference to the underlying regime of knowledge there at work allows us to observe the epistemic roots of the problems that these theories found in addressing the issue of the temporality of concepts.

The transition from structuralism to post-structuralism and from phenomenology to post-phenomenology reveals, in turn, how this epistemic ground started to be undermined, laying bare the inconsistencies contained in these theories. In this new context, the problem of conceptual change would be reformulated, paving a way to explain it without positing the presence of transcendent agents. It also marks the end of our journey through the recent developments in the field. To conclude, I would like to clarify in which sense an “archaeological” perspective opens a door for a new and more precise perspective of the NIH, the sense of the transformation it introduced in the field, as well as the kind of problems it raised.

The Desubstantialization of Concepts

If I were urged to define in a few words what the NIH has been, and what its main achievement is, I would say it has been the most radical process up to that moment of the desubstantialization/deontologization/historicization of concepts. Perhaps the best example of it is Koselleck’s analysis of the concept of History, as a singular collective noun. As he showed, it is not an eternal category. There was not always a “History,” as we tend to assume, since the mode of experiencing temporality associated to that concept has not always existed. Nor is the meaning of it as self-evident as is customarily assumed. Today we talk of the History without further ado, taking its meaning for granted. However, for a sixteenth-century person, it would have been incomprehensible. As a matter of fact, it is a very abstract concept, and a rather recent construction: it emerged only at the end of the eighteenth century, in the context of a general process of singularization of concepts. It was only from then on that it was possible to predicate something of it (to say: “History is such and such a thing”), as if it possessed an entity of its own and a set of attributes inherent to it (an inner logic of development, laws presiding over its course and a goal to which it is addressed, etc.).Footnote ²²

Now, the true question is: How was it possible for Koselleck to produce its desubstantialization/historicization? It is revealing, in turn, of how, at the time he was writing, the epistemic conditions that had originated that concept mutated, making its historicization possible, stripping off its veil of naturality. In effect, the break of its teleological–evolutionary idea, which was produced at the end of the nineteenth century, had already dissolved the concept’s aura of transparency. At that moment, the idea of History was not abandoned, but it turned into a “generic category,”Footnote ²³ one which lacked all positive content. There was no longer any definite thing that could be predicated of it (a discernible logic, a goal, etc.).

It actually participated in a broader process of desubstantialization of concepts, which entailed a kind of reversal of the Sattelzeit. We get here to the “age of forms.” At that juncture, the definition of all fundamental political concepts was rendered problematic. They were revealed as plurivocal, by nature, as Koselleck insists. Now, once the idea of “History” lost its former content, the burden of providing a direction and a meaning to it was transferred to that other concept which would be closely associated to it: the “Subject.” The twentieth century would be, as Alain Badiou remarks, “the paradoxical century of a voluntaristic historicism.”Footnote ²⁴ A Subject was now necessary to make History possible and thinkable. It was what interrupted the linearity of evolutionary processes introducing ruptures into them. However, the paradox is that the concept of the subject also participated in that broader process of desubstantialization. It had turned into a generic category too. The “subject” here at stake no longer had any project attached to it, no historical mission to fulfil. Once detached from a teleological perspective of history, his action became deprived of a framework within which it could appear as significant, in historical terms.

At that juncture, the “subject” then turned merely a function within a given conceptual grid: the name given to that “outside” of structures that explains their transformations. This may eventually adopt different names in the different realms (like the “author” in Skinner, “nature” in Dilthey; “social history” in Koselleck) but all of them refer to the same function: designating that which comes to dislocate the crystalized forms.

This was, in short, the conceptual ground from which the NIH could emerge, whose project of the desubstantialization of concepts became conceivable. Now, the basic aporia intrinsic to this regime of knowledge was that it always had to designate that Subject–Function without ever being able to define it, it had to confer upon it an entity without ever being able to specify its nature. It actually did not possess categories for it. In the context of this type of discursivity, every attempt to specify its concept led to unsolvable aporias. It was thus revealed as its inherent blind spot, at once constitutive and destructive of this entire horizon of meaning.

Ultimately, the same process that had placed that category at the center of the social and political thinking of the time (the undermining of the teleological–evolutionary concept of History) had also rendered it unconceptualizable. In effect, just as, as Nietzsche said, without God, the idea of Truth becomes untenable; without History, the idea of Subject would also become untenable. This is indicative, in turn, of a new epistemic mutation at work. Then, that Subject–Function was revealed as merely the outer projection of that ontological void placed inside the systems themselves, constituting their very cores.

This last conceptual transformation also had repercussions in the field. The focus then moved from that Subject–Function to the intrasystemic conditions of its possibility; that is, the goal then became to penetrate those conceptual fissures that demanded the positing of that Subject–Function. The idea of subject is then stripped of its appearance of self-evidence, as referring to an actual entity, to be revealed as such, that is, as fulfilling a function within a particular type of discourse, a nod within a particular conceptual network. To put it in another way, the aim now is to investigate what that meaningful void that demanded to be filled with that category, at once necessary and indefinable, was. As was then discovered, that category was nothing but the means of giving it a discursive presence to that meaningful void at the center of systems in order to make it symbolically graspable and controllable, to strip it of its singularity. In short, the point now became to unravel the mechanism that demanded the hypostatization, the reification of that ontological void, thus making manifest the limits to the process of desubstantialization of concepts in the context of the “age of forms.” Ultimately, what we are seeing now is the culmination of that very process that it initiated.

The transition from structuralism to poststructuralism is the expression of this conceptual transformation currently in progress. The image that it has led to an absolutization of language, that it resulted in a radical textualism, is in fact misleading; and Derrida’s unfortunate expression, “there is no outside-the-text,” does not help in this regard, since it lends itself to this kind of misunderstanding.Footnote ²⁵ The point is not really whether or not there is an “outside the text” but where to look for it, where we could find it. We can return here to the story of the philosopher and the slave girl to illustrate it.

The ways of trying to escape from the meshes of language and reach that “outside” can be attempted in two different ways: from above and from below. The typical way of looking for it by the theories analyzed in the first chapters was by flying up to the heaven of pure ideas, to an ethereal realm of reality where meanings are immediately given to consciousness, without having to traverse the opacity of the conceptual webs, the linguistic milieu. This was not only the door that Skinner opened by appealing to the “idealistic” idea of the “author,” but also Koselleck’s “materialistic” idea of “social history,” a presumably crudely empirical realm of historical reality that is not always already traversed by conceptual webs. In both cases, the underlying assumption is that the new meanings spontaneously emanate from there (from the unconditioned mind of the “authors,” or from events themselves), dislocating the established linguistic conventions, without ever being able to ground that assumption.

The other way is by digging in the ground to discover that well in which those conceptual webs are torn apart, the singularities where their logics break, and their inner gaps, their constitutive inconsistencies, are laid bare. This is a different manner of conceiving that “outside the text”; actually, an outside which is not really outside, but both opposite things, internal and external, at the same time. This “outside” is not something that pre-exists the symbolic but is produced by it, and from within it, one that inhabits its interior, and is actually constitutive of it, since it is placed in its very core. It indicates that residue of irrationality present in every conceptual formation, the “Real,” in Lacan’s terms (that which absolutely resists its symbolization, an analogue to Blumenberg’s idea of an “absolute metaphor”).Footnote ²⁶ It is, lastly, the expression of the radically contingent nature of its own foundations, of its own institution; in sum, that which stigmatizes its constitutive incompleteness–inconsistency.

The comprehension of a conceptual system would thus demand not merely trying to observe how it is constituted and the logic that presides over the mode of its articulation but also, and fundamentally, discovering the fault lines that traverse it, preventing its logical closure and achieving its full consistency. This can be seen as a reformulation of Collingwood’s idea of the “logic of the questions and answers.” In this case, they are questions that do not accept univocal answers. However, they are the truly relevant questions, since they are those in whose function a given context of debate is articulated, those which open up and articulate the field for the mutual opposition among the competing theories and ideologies that seek to fill that gap, to symbolically surround that void, to designate it and, thereby, render it symbolically controllable.

The end of the “age of forms” thus paved the way to the reformulation of the problem of conceptual change, to explain it without resorting to the idea of the presence of a transcendent agent. Now, this does not mean that the most recent theories are unproblematic in conceptual terms either. As I have discussed elsewhere, there are a number of theoretical problems that can also be observed in contemporary political philosophy and particularly in the so-called post-foundational currents.Footnote ²⁷ Yet, here I preferred to concentrate on their potential contributions to our specific field, intellectual history. In the last instance, the deepening of the sense of contingency of conceptual formations they yielded permits carrying out the original project of the NIH, namely: to get rid of the teleological assumptions and ahistorical perspectives of the old history of ideas, thus helping to achieve its goal of preventing conceptual anachronisms.

In fact, this epistemic mutation has fundamental methodological consequences for the study of intellectual history. Ultimately, only the awareness of the aporetic nature of political concepts permits making sense of the debates historically produced around them. Only to the extent that we penetrate that traumatic core that underlies these concepts can we understand why they have been matters of permanent dispute and avoid reducing the debates around them as mere expressions of a kind of misunderstanding or insufficient comprehension of their true definitions. However, it is true that these conceptual developments were unevenly assimilated in the field and has not yet crystallized in new comprehensive theories. Somehow, the eclectic mood that followed the end of the “golden age of theoretical inquiry” has had the effect of precluding it, reducing these transformations to a mere plea for “plurality” and “diversity.”

Anyway, there are also more profound theoretical problems that conspire against it. In fact, the radicalism of these recent perspectives is inherently problematic to assimilate. The real challenge here is to take charge of its problematic nature, to lead it to its last logical consequences, without outflanking its most disturbing aspects. That is, not to precipitate accepting as valid (eclectic) solutions that, in reality, solve nothing;Footnote ²⁸ resting the case before unpacking all the problematic edges contained in it, in short, cancelling reflection at the very point it should start. In any case, our goal in this work is not to provide answers but rather to try to clarify the questions.

In An Archaeology of the Political, I defined the current situation as a “second disenchantment of the world.” The “first disenchantment of the world,” the secularization process produced in the seventeenth century, was a traumatic event. The burning question then was: How can a sense of community be established once we have been abandoned by God, when all sense of transcendence has disappeared, and we have become reduced to a merely animal condition? The nineteenth century (the Sattelzei) provided an answer. The singular, collective nouns that, as Koselleck showed, then emerged (History, Nation, Reason, State, and so on) came, precisely, to fill that void left by God’s death, to provide a sense to our worldly existence in a secular time.

The burning question that the “second disenchantment of the world” now poses is: How can a sense of community be articulated at a time when, not only have we been abandoned by God, but also all His secular surrogates have collapsed and have been revealed as illusory, merely contingent conceptual constructions, thus turning into “generic” categories that lack all positive content or attribute? The translation of this dilemma into the field of intellectual history (certainly tougher and much more complicated to answer than, for example, choosing between two alternative ideas of liberty) would be this: What horizon of meaning can emerge in a post-foundational era, in which all conceptual formations have been revealed as inevitably inconsistent and conceptually untenable? What can be found in that well, that hole in the ground in which the philosopher has sunk and intends to explore? And, finally, what kind of comprehensive theories can develop in such a conceptual context? Is it really possible? I leave it to you to ruminate.