The Concept of Emancipation as Political Action (Marx, Arendt, Rancière)

The text attempts to rethink the concept of emancipation and how it is structured as political action, while describing its historical origins and how it is further understood by the three important political philosophers: Karl Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Rancière. All three of them – specifically and with substantial differences – understand politics as a space for political action that leads to emancipation in the name of equality. In order to determine the historical origin of the concept in more detail, the argumentation of the text rely upon its elaboration within the school of “conceptual history”, which deals with the historical semantics of terms and sees the etymology of and the change in the meaning of terms as forming a crucial basis for a contemporary cultural, conceptual, and linguistic understanding, and afterwards it links this “pre-history” with Marx’s, Arendt’s, and Rancière’s understanding of the concept of emancipation, and see how they differ and are related to each other, considering what theoretical conclusions about the concept of emancipation we can take from these relations. Particular interest is aimed at how the concept of emancipation is perceived today, who the subject of emancipation is, what the method and final goal of emancipation is, and, finally, how these understandings can help us in the present time when it seems that we need emancipation more than ever.

Kinesisk yoga? Sinificering af yoga-begrebet i sinologiske, terapeutiske og nyreligiøse sammenhænge

This article provides a conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte) of the use of the word yoga in the context of both scientific, therapeutic, and religious approaches to Chinese cultural history, with a focus on somatic practices commonly associated with Daoist traditions. Under the heading Chinese yoga, the author investigates how historical practices such as neidan, daoyin, kaimen, zhanzhuang, gusha, fangzhongshu as well as new therapeutic innovations are referred to as types of yoga such as Taoist yoga, meridian yoga, yin yoga, and sexual yoga. The article traces the origins of variations of the concept of Chinese yoga to the 1920s and 1930s in publications by Richard Wilhelm and C. G. Jung, Cary F. Baynes, and Arthur Waley, follows its reception in the hippie milieu of the 1960s and 1970s, and demonstrates how references to various forms of Chinese yoga have been, and are still being used in both academic research, and therapeutic and new religious milieus.

Conceptual History of the Near East

Conceptual history holds tremendous potential to address a central issue in Near Eastern Studies, namely the formation of modernity in the Near East, provisionally located between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The encounter with European powers, primarily Britain and France, was a decisive historical factor in this formation; and European hegemony is, in fact, inscribed into the very concept of “modernity,” which we take as an historical, rather than analytical, concept. The conceptual formation of modernity in Arabic and Turkish was, however, a multilayered process; involving both ruptures and continuities, intersecting various temporalities, and incorporating concepts from several languages. To interrogate this multilayered process, we suggest the metaphor of the Sattelzeit (Saddle Period) as a heuristic tool, precisely because of its being tied to modernity. Finally, the article will show what conceptual history of the Near East has to offer to conceptual history more broadly.

Part 2: After the Big Bang

In part one, I followed the debates and the scholars involved in the big bang of international Begriffsgeschichte. Part 2 takes us from the first encounters between the German and the Anglophone tradition within intellectual history to the more formalized efforts of establishing conceptual history on the international, academic scene. With more scholars joining the debate, the understanding of concepts in language and in context were both broadened and deepened. Case studies from a wider range of European languages added a stronger comparative and transnational perspectives to conceptual history, which would prepare the ground for a conceptual history beyond Europe.

6. Koselleck and conceptual history

‘Koselleck and conceptual history’ reviews how the study of the history of political thought ended up as the site of the Third Reich and the Holocaust. The question to ask is what had gone wrong with the German traditions of philology and lexicography that is associated with studies of the classical past? Systematic knowledge can be defined through foundational concepts. The disaster of modern history and the failure of historical sensibility in Germany can be used as new techniques to investigate how the past explained the sense of national and cultural failure. The project of ‘conceptual history’ was formulated in the 1950s by Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck.

Why International Lawyers Measure Time with a Telescope: Grotian Moments & Richard Falk’s Histories of the Future

This article contextualises the origins of the term Grotian Moment, coined and frequently redefined by Richard Falk. By generating a conceptual history of the idea and its uses, the article draws attention to the ways that Falk’s sustained interest in the question of temporality and the nature of change in international law can inform present legal debates. The recovery of Falk’s efforts to engage with critics, geopolitical changes, and new legal ideas by reinterpreting and reimagining the meaning of a Grotian Moment sheds light on its relationship to questions of free trade, Eurocentrism, and revolutions in international law. By considering the methodological parallels with the work of Reinhart Koselleck, this article emphasises the importance of both historiographical and historical debates for the study of change in legal history, the analysis of the global legacies of Hugo Grotius, and the generation of expectations of the future in international law.

“To Love the Rest of His Thoughts as Myself” – Translating Mendelssohn’s Singular Bildung

The conceptual history of Bildung, the German term for self-formation, encapsulates the ethical revolution of modern German thought, associated with the Kantian moment and its aftermath. Reshaped in modernity to respond to a post-Kantian, critical sensibility, the modern term emphasizes the reflexive, active process of self-formation, in contrast with the medieval theological sensibility which emphasized the receptive imprint of the image of God. In this article, I unpack Moses Mendelsohn’s idiosyncratic notion of Bildung. I show that what is unique, indeed, singular in Mendelssohn’s notion of Bildung is the way it merges the traditional, theological notion with the modern one. For Mendelssohn, to imitate God is to come to value one’s contingent being. The imitation of the ideal, the most perfect, is tantamount to embracing the perfectible, and the process of perfection or self-actualization. Jacobi, Mendelssohn, Bildung, Contingency, Pantheism affair, Moral Perfectionism