by Jacob Saliba and Zac Endter
In this interview, primary editors Jacob Saliba and Zac Endter speak with award-winning and internationally recognized intellectual historian Elías Palti on his most recent work, Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Based on Seeley Lectures recently given at Cambridge University, the book consists of a meta-history of intellectual history in the last century. From the “Cambridge School,” Hans Blumenberg, and Reinhart Koselleck to Pierre Rosanvallon and Michel Foucault, Palti weaves together a complex range of thinkers as well as carefully reconstructs a wide array of concepts at the core of why and how intellectual historians do what they do. Ultimately, Palti seeks to clarify the evolving conditions, stakes, and epistemological ground on which intellectual history was built in the past and continues to be built up to the present.
The present interview is published in two parts.
Part I
Jacob Saliba & Zac Endter: We might begin with the relationship between your book and other contemporary works on the methodology behind intellectual history. In broad terms, your work demonstrates a methodological dynamism inherent in intellectual history, namely its ability to traverse and gather different disciplines together in the pursuit of historical truth. In other words, intellectual history can, in its very practice, go beyond itself. This neatly reflects Peter Gordon’s essay, “What is Intellectual History?”, in which he argues that intellectual history “functions as a kind of preserve for interdisciplinarity.” Despite some of your disagreements with Gordon’s “eclecticism” (237), do you see your book confirming his wider emphasis on thinking beyond disciplinary boundaries? You also take up and cite work by other contemporary intellectual historians, including Martin Jay, Samuel Moyn, and Richard Whatmore. How do you see your work in conversation with contemporary intellectual historians, especially on the notion of intellectual history as an inherently interdisciplinary exercise?
Elías Palti: In the first place, I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to discuss my book, its main ideas, and its aim. Regarding your question, I totally agree with Peter Gordon and those who emphasize the interdisciplinary nature of intellectual history. It has been its distinguishing brand since Arthur Lovejoy’s times. As you know, the History of Ideas Club grouped together a heterogeneous set of students, including historians of the natural sciences (biology, medicine), the arts, and so on. I still find their studies very stimulating, particularly those on the relation between Romanticism and the sciences, which enlightened me on fundamental aspects of the thinking of the period when I was a graduate student.
The study of intellectual history demands, by definition, dealing with diverse areas of knowledge. Only such a multifaceted approach allows us to grasp the discourse of an epoch. As the cultivators of the New Intellectual History (NIH) insist, this entails re-creating the broader conceptual universe from which ideas took their concrete meaning, observing their precise location within a categorical constellation. This task, in turn, obliges us to appeal to analytical tools taken from different disciplines and, therefore, to become acquainted with their problematiques and methodologies. It makes the study of intellectual history particularly challenging but, at the same time, highly rewarding, in the sense that it may yield innovative perspectives. Only observing our objects from points of view different from those typical to their given fields allows us to depart from their conventional knowledge and, eventually, to disclose aspects of these objects that were hitherto ignored or unapproachable.
JS/ZE: This book first reached the scholarly public as a series of invited Seeley Lectures at Cambridge University. Cambridge is a meaningful site from which to reconsider the intellectual foundations of the New Intellectual History (NIH). It is where both Quentin Skinner and E. P. Thompson inaugurated groundbreaking, though at-times opposed, traditions in postwar historiography: the “Cambridge School” of intellectual history and social history, respectively. To borrow Skinner’s terminology, what was the “speech context” of the lecture, what were your intentions in delivering the lectures, and how did their initial reception change the book? Zooming out a bit further, we are also curious about how you see the present state of intellectual history across the English, German, and French linguistic contexts studied in your book. You suggest, for instance, that the break from the old history of ideas was most pronounced in France in the move from structuralism to post-structuralism (144–145). Is the criticism that you levy against today’s intellectual history equally applicable across these linguistic or geographical contexts?
Palti: Regarding my lectures at Cambridge, I knew that it was rather provocative and somehow daring to go to the very cradle of the “Cambridge School” and confront some of its members and their disciples with a perspective aimed to problematize its postulates, as established by its founders (even though I also acknowledged their fundamental contributions). Yet I understood that it made no sense to tell them what they already knew and merely amplify their own views. I remain pleased with that decision. My stay there was extraordinarily productive—a superb opportunity to exchange ideas with some of the most prominent and lucid students in the field, which allowed me to reformulate in my book some aspects of my original presentation—and my proposal was warmly received. Now, I need to clarify that my goal was not really to criticize the views and theories of that school but rather to apply the Cambridge School’s own methodology to itself, placing the theories of these authors within their discursive context—in sum, referring them back to the epistemic ground that enabled their emergence. As I intended to show, despite their profound differences, the Cambridge School actually shared an epistemic ground with currents and authors in other regions and countries. It reflected a broader reconfiguration then at work in the field as a whole. In the last instance, all these different theories can be regarded as drawing together different possible trajectories within a given terrain, as I intended to trace. I thus sought to re-create the field that established the range of the alternative conceptual routes then available to these authors, the conceptual trajectories that they could eventually transit, and how they concretely did so, the series of conceptual operations that each of them produced on that field, and the rhetorical and argumentative strategies that they put to work in their texts to that effect. The expectation of this kind of approach is that we can transcend the level of the explicit content of their discourses to thereby better understand their structure, their underlying working logic, and, more importantly, the reasons for the difficulties their authors found at the time of explaining conceptual change. As I intended to show, they are ultimately revealing of deeper conceptual problems, which are intrinsic to their given form of discursivity, the system of knowledge that underlies and holds these elaborations.
Although, as I said, I did not mean to criticize these theories, but rather place them within the broader conceptual context in which they emerged; this did, in fact, demand placing myself at a distance from the Cambridge School’s own premises, objectifying them in order to turn them into possible objects of scrutiny (and thus avoid merely replicating their own perspectives and amplifying their own postulates).
[F]rench intellectual historians . . . placed into question . . . the presence of a transcendent ambit, an agent placed above or beyond every discursive context, from whom conceptual change emanates. Yet the rejection of that “metaphysical” assumption by French intellectual historians came at the price of leaving the issue unsolved, rendering the problem of conceptual change unapproachable within their frameworks.
Finally, you are right when you say that, in my view, French intellectual history marked a more radical departure from the old tradition of history of ideas. But all these theories must be seen as converging, through different avenues, towards a common goal: the de-substantialization of concepts. These theories tried to prevent their reification by disclosing the fact that they do not possess an entity of their own. They are, instead, historical constructions resting on contingently articulated foundations. That being said, due to the weight of structuralist thinking, French intellectual historians were more radical in this attempt, insofar as they placed into question the “metaphysical” assumption that still pervaded the views of both the Cambridge school and the German Begriffsgeschichte: the presence of a transcendent ambit, an agent placed above or beyond every discursive context, from whom conceptual change emanates. Yet the rejection of that “metaphysical” assumption by French intellectual historians came at the price of leaving the issue unsolved, rendering the problem of conceptual change unapproachable within their frameworks. Fully escaping that assumption actually demanded the reconfiguration of the whole conceptual universe from which these theories initially emerged (a reconfiguration which, as I observe, did later take place). In this last instance, we see the ultimate limit against which these theories inevitably crashed, since it represented the inherent limit of their particular type of discursivity (that proper to what I call the “age of forms”), thus fueling new developments that would set into question some of its basic tenets. But, at that juncture, the contours of the NIH blurred to the point where we can no longer identify any consistent trend behind these developments. It somehow marked the end of a particularly productive moment in intellectual history, in terms of the elaboration of innovative approaches which were highly influential indeed beyond the borders of the historical profession.
At this point a clarification is in order. The term “New Intellectual History,” as I use it, is just a shorthand label to designate a specific set of authors who produced their major works and elaborated their theories in a specific period of time (basically, the 1970s and 1980s). Yet, in the following decades the ground on which they rested started shaking, eventually paving the way for the emergence of a new conceptual universe in whose frameworks the issue of conceptual change would be reformulated, redefining it vis-à-vis the perspectives of the founders of the schools at stake, as I show in the book.
JS/ZE: Beginning around 1900, the “age of forms,” a concept your book coins and leans heavily upon, grasped the world as a series of systems founded on “a plane of axioms [that] escapes all normativity” (199). The subject emerges for thinkers in this paradigm, including Foucault and Skinner themselves, as a preconceptual plane and source of instability or novelty (200–201, 204, 249). While Foucault inveighed against the Hegelian subject, you argue that the age of forms within which he swam was already reaching its limits (193, 200). Indeed, the age of forms ends up appearing in your book as a transitional period akin to Koselleck’s Sattelzeit, which birthed the “age of history.” You do not name the new episteme that emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century, although you illuminate its features, particularly the notion that contingency and instability are intrinsic to systems (213). How does your periodization differ from those employed by other theorists and intellectual historians attempting to describe our epoch, such as “postmodernity” or the “age of system,” and what possibilities does it open up?
Palti: To put it schematically, what I call the “age of forms,” in which the theories I analyzed must be placed, emerged out of the crisis of the teleological-evolutionary concept of History (as a singular collective noun that displays a temporality of its own, in Koselleck’s approach). Thus, this new age marked the end of that which had begun during the Sattelzeit (a transformation that Koselleck missed, creating a number of problems in his historical perspective and ultimately some conceptual anachronisms). As my book intends to demonstrate, if we do not take into account that conceptual transformation at the end of the nineteenth century, it is impossible to properly understand the form of discursivity embodied by the NHI—that is, the regime of knowledge that underlies it and laid the conceptual ground for its emergence.
Now, at the end of the past century, as I have mentioned, that conceptual ground started shaking again, and the “age of forms” approached its own end (as I analyzed in greater detail in An Archaeology of the Political). Yet, I resist identifying this shift with “postmodernism,” not only because that category is heavily loaded but also, and fundamentally, because it has for that reason become inconsistent. As a consequence, the definition of “modernity” is inconsistent, too; from the moment that the two terms, “postmodernity” and “modernity,” are defined by their mutual opposition,” the ambiguity of the former is inevitably transferred to the latter.
A first problem has to do with periodization. For example, for Elizabeth Ermath (27) postmodernity began in the 1970s and set into question the “modern” concept of temporality initiated in the Renaissance. For Ihab Hassan, postmodernity actually began in the 1960s; for Michael Kohler (17), in the 1950s. Yet, Ermath (16) later asserts that it actually began in 1905 with the Relativity Theory and that the Romantic arts were already postmodern. David Cook (8) travels further back in time and assures us that Augustine was already postmodern. Finally, Lyotard (79) ends up concluding that postmodernism is an ever-present impulse for transformation. Now, the point is that such confusing periodization produces inconsistent and indeed contradictory definitions of the involved terms. For Ermath (27), modernity was an attempt “to save the essences,” a definition that coincides with Jim Collins’s (134–135) view of “the time of modernity” as an eternal present sealed to the past and future. However, for authors like Ricardo Quiñones, the Renaissance, when modernity allegedly began, entailed, on the contrary, a “discovery of time,” understood as a new sense of instability and ephemerality, in Calinescu’s (3) words. At this juncture, it becomes impossible to distinguish Lyotard’s concept of the “postmodern condition” from Marshall Berman’s concept of “the experience of modernity”; both look much alike. In sum, as Umberto Eco (65) writes, postmodernity has become “a term bon à tout faire, applicable to all that pleases its user.”
As for how I deal with the conceptual transformation that marked the end of the twentieth century: I observe that it was closely connected to the attempt to face the aporia present in the preceding system of knowledge, the “age of forms.” Having introduced a deeper sense of the historicity of conceptual formations, the age of forms was radically unable to account for the same without relapsing into metaphysical terrain, that is, without reintroducing the hypothesis of a transcendent agent. To avoid this, it was necessary to bend structures onto themselves to find what tinges them with the stain of contingency from within. In effect, the subsequent epistemic transformation considered historicity or contingency as an immanent dimension of conceptual formations, not something that comes to them from without, e.g. as the “subject” or “social history.”
This conceptual shift, which traversed all fields of knowledge, including the natural sciences, can be traced in the transition from structuralism to post-structuralism and from phenomenology to post-phenomenology. It entailed, in turn, a deepening in the process of the de-substantialization of conceptual formations. They then came to appear not only as changing historical construction, but also as constitutively precarious ones. That is, they would inevitably contain an irrational core that dislocates their inner logic, preventing their constitution as closed, rationally integrated systems, opening them up to historicity.
JS/ZE: Science frequently moves in and out of the historical narrative of your book, but it seems to play, in your estimation, a major role in undergirding how theories of conceptual change themselves changed. For instance, you write that, ironically, electrodynamics motivated the move by phenomenologists and structuralists at the turn of the century to reject the straightforward application of the natural sciences to the human sciences (83). More frequently still, you describe the influence of scientific theories of life as altering understandings of the relationship of a subject to its environment, milieu, or Umwelt (132–134, 176–183, 197). As we come chronologically closer to the present day, your references to the sciences become less frequent. With the exception of one reference in the middle of your book, you avoid the now-fashionable history of cybernetics, which one has to assume was intentional (134). Why did you feel it was necessary to leave the ‘home episteme,’ as it were, of intellectual history in crafting your argument, and how has the relationship between the sciences and theories of conceptual change itself changed over time?
Palti: Certainly, there is not a univocal, fixed relationship among developments in different areas of an epoch’s thinking. One cannot preestablish how the discourses and disciplines present in a given discursive context mutually articulated one another. These relations must be analyzed for each particular case, since they are always changing and unstable. At a given moment, and in a given discursive context, one discipline or set of theories becomes highly influential, permeating other disciplines and areas of knowledge, while in other moments or discursive contexts their centrality recedes and that place becomes occupied by others. In my book, I cite biological and physical theories to show their correlations with parallel developments in historical thinking, but I do so only to illustrate these conceptual convergences’ indications of broader epistemic transformations. Yet tracing the ways that the different discourses were articulated and re-articulated over time is not really the topic of the book (it is actually the object of a future work on the history of the idea of the “modern” subject, something of which I have anticipated in some preliminary essays).
Here we reach a fundamental concern in my approach to intellectual history. The currently fashionable, “postmodern” love for fragmentation and its rejection of the grand récits and holistic views (a criticism frequently levied against Foucault’s idea of episteme) runs the risk of leading us to miss the fact that different discourses do not live in mutual isolation. They continuously interact and, ultimately, this is the means for their own constitution. They take form in the course of their very interactions, which are, more precisely, what we should analyze. Ultimately, Foucault’s concept of an episteme, as I understand it, designates the different systems of interaction among discourses, and tries to observe their changes over the course of the past four centuries.
The currently fashionable, “postmodern” love for fragmentation and its rejection of the grand récits and holistic views . . . runs the risk of leading us to miss the fact that different discourses do not live in mutual isolation. . . . They take form in the course of their very interactions, which are, more precisely, what we should analyze.
JS/ZE: The question of the source of conceptual change abuts questions about the nature of creativity. In many ways, then, your book runs parallel to a growing theory and historiography of creativity by authors like Nima Bassiri, Samuel Franklin, Rob Pope, Darrin McMahon, and Andreas Reckwitz. In 1957, as the Western preoccupation with “creativity” began to accelerate rapidly, Hans Blumenberg, to whom your work frequently turns, described the opposition of the concept of human creativity to the imitation of nature as defining the modern break with medieval thought. Your critique of Skinner as relying in his historical—as opposed to his theoretical—work on a notion of the “author” as the rare figure able to introduce change from outside of an implicitly static discursive context would amount to accusing Skinner of employing a notion of Romantic genius rather than the distributed creativity of persons or systems (58–59). Is it helpful to think through changes in thinking about conceptual change in terms of changes in understandings of creativity, or is something else at play in your work?
Palti: As you know, I agree with Skinner (the Skinner of his theoretical writings) in his rejection of the presence of “perennial questions.” I consider writing history (and intellectual history, in particular) to basically be the art of establishing differences. I am aware that we cannot avoid approaching the past with our present categories, but this does not necessarily lead to the conflation of past and present. I am convinced that anyone who cannot discern the seventeenth from the twenty-first century cannot be considered a good historian, whatever that title means.
For example, saying that Skinner’s idea of the “author” replicates the Romantic idea of the “genius” misses the crucial point: the gap that separates them, why Skinner is not and cannot be Schelling; simply put, that the one and a half centuries that separate the two authors has not passed in vain. Certainly, we can observe many similarities between the two ideas. Like the Romantic “genius,” Skinner’s “author” (a transposition of Husserl’s intentional subject, the transcendental ego) is supposed to be placed above its empirical milieu. As the expressions of a symbolic realm located beyond the circle of the available categories, the two are posited to be ungraspable by strictly rational means; they remain irreducible to the discursive context of their time, indicating a kind of free-floating form of consciousness (pure creativity). Yet, these analogies hide more profound differences that reveal transformations of languages in the intervening years.
Both the author and the genius are mediating figures; their mission is to connect the given with that which lays beyond their empirical settings. Yet, the beyond that the genius must penetrate is the universal source of life, the Absolute. The genius seeks, in Schiller’s words, to “reestablish the link between the center and the periphery,” introducing a new vital principle into a declining civilization and thus restoring the unity of history’s course. The Husserlian intentional ego—and, afterwards, Skinner’s author—completely reverses the figure of the genius. The intentional ego does not seek to establish a connection with the universal. On the contrary, this ego indicates a point of fissure serving as an instance that dislocates the established forms. In sum, it is that which introduces contingency in the closed space, the regular functioning of the systems, thus breaking the linearity of evolutionary processes; it is a “singularity.”
In sum, “creativity,” like all other categories, can be expressed in very different manners, and the labor of the intellectual historian is to distinguish them by delving beneath the surface of ideas to gain access to the set of implicit assumptions—the argumentative apparatus—that underlies and identifies each of them. On this basis, we can also observe the critical role that the figure of the “author” plays in Skinner’s discourse. It comes to fill a hole within a particular theoretical grid (which no longer has anything to do with that of Romanticism). Basically, it indicates the “outside” that dislocates the established linguistic structures and forces their reconfiguration. The point is that the introduction of that figure is necessary in the context of his “discursive-contextualist” theory, since only it allows Skinner to explain conceptual change, and, at the same time, dislocates his theory’s basic tenets. What this reveals is that, on the fundamental point of how concepts are formed and change, his discursive-contextualist theory has nothing to say. It indicates its limit point, that which it presupposes but is radically unable to explain. Ultimately, this is symptomatic of deeper conceptual problems, the roots of which must be sought at the level of its underlying regime of knowledge, as my book discloses and analyzes.
Please stay tuned for Part Two of this interview!
Elías José Palti is a Consulting Professor at the University of Buenos Aires. He obtained his doctoral degree from the University of California at Berkeley and pursued postdoctoral studies at El Colegio de México and Harvard University. He previously served as Full Professor at both the University of Buenos Aires and the National University of Quilmes and as Principal Researcher at the CONICET, Argentina. He is the author of more than two hundred works, which have appeared across twenty-two countries and six different languages. His more recent books are: An Archaeology of the Political. Regimes of Power from the Seventeenth Century to the Present (2017), Misplaced Ideas? Political-Intellectual History in Latin America (2024) and Political-Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change (2024). He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of the History of Ideas and Prismas: Revista de historia intelectual. He has received the Guggenheim Fellowship (2009) and the Pensamiento de América “Leopoldo Zea” prize (2021) conferred by the Pan American Institute of Geography and History at the Organization of American States (OAS), among other distinctions and prizes. At the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, he served as the director of the Center for Intellectual History from 2016 to 2022 and as director of the Master’s Program in Intellectual History.
Jacob Saliba is a PhD candidate (ABD) at Boston College, where he studies modern European intellectual history with a focus on twentieth-century France.
Zac Endter is a PhD student at New York University researching the history of technology and concepts in the twentieth-century United States and Germany.
Featured image: Diego Rivera, The Alarm Clock, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
