Senida Poenariu reviews Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change

Elías J. Palti. Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024. 283 pp.

Review by Senida Poenariu

21 November 2025

Growing out of a series of lectures given at Cambridge University, Elías José Palti’s study reconsiders the very foundations of the major twentieth-century approaches to intellectual history and places its author within the tradition of scholars who interrogate the conditions of possibility of their own discipline, from Hayden White and Quentin Skinner to Reinhart Koselleck. This metahistorical work neither advances prescriptive claims nor proposes a new methodology for the New Intellectual History (NIH) of the 1960s–1980s, but it aims to expose how the practitioners of NIH reformulated the inherited assumptions of their respective fields. As he writes, “The guiding thread for this exposition is the issue of the temporality of concepts, how each of the different schools and theories conceives why and how political languages mutate, what the source and dynamics of conceptual change are” (p. xi). One of the driving questions is how, over the twentieth century, intellectual history shifted its focus from ideas to languages and discourses.

Palti’s study lays out the main theoretical lines and methodological tools of NIH, not merely critiquing or exposing the contradictions, inconsistencies, and aporias within their writings, but also seeking to reconstruct the conceptual universe that made possible the emergence of the Cambridge School, German Begriffsgeschichte, and French intellectual history. His genealogical reconstruction proceeds by applying to these theoretical constellations the very methods they developed, situating theories within their discursive contexts and examining their “historical-conceptual conditions of possibility” (p. 5). This introduces a reflexive, almost mise en abyme-like structure into his analysis.

His argument moves through Skinner’s contextualism grounded in speech-act theory, J. G. A. Pocock’s historiographical revolution, Koselleck’s Sattelzeit and horizon of experience, Hans Blumenberg’s metaphorology and its theory of nonconceptual, presymbolic structures, and French intellectual history as mediated by Pierre Rosanvallon’s, Jacques Derrida’s, and, above all, Michel Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge. From these three schools, Palti extracts a shared dynamic: a radical desubstantialization, deontologization, and historicization of concepts.

The core of Palti’s argument is that these transformations presuppose the rise of a new episteme at the turn of the twentieth century, supplementing Foucault’s sequence of regimes of knowledge (the age of representation and the age of history) with a third, the age of forms, and anticipating a fourth still to be explored. The age of forms emerged from the collapse of the teleological and evolutionary model of history that characterized the Sattelzeit. This rupture displaced the modern belief that scientific, legal, or cultural systems rest on internal necessity and introduced a new notion of subjectivity: not the autonomous, self-grounding modern subject, but a preconceptual, extrasystemic instance that conditions systems while remaining unthinkable within them. Consequently, systems become the domain of structure and order while subjectivity becomes the locus of rupture and contingency.

Even though this episteme introduced a sense of historicity to conceptual formations, it could not definitively overcome the need for a transcendent agent, ultimately relapsing into metaphysical terrain (as seen in Skinner’s notion of the author, Koselleck’s appeal to “social history,”[1] or Blumenberg’s “absolute metaphors”[2]).

In its final chapters, the book reframes conceptual change through the notion of the “Event”: a moment in which the inherent incompleteness of symbolic systems—their void, an irrational core that disrupts their internal logic—becomes visible, allowing new horizons of meaning to emerge (p. 210). In doing so, Palti provides a sharper map of the epistemic terrain that intellectual historians now inhabit (the forth episteme emerging in the wake of postmodernism/poststructuralism/postphenomenology), one in which contingency is intrinsic to conceptual formation and no external reference point is required.

[1] See Reinhart Koselleck, “Begriffsgeschichte and Social History,” Economy and Society 11, no. 4 (1982): 409–27.

[2] Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca, N.Y., 2010), p. 3.