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The climate crisis has raised questions about the proper scale of historical analysis in the Anthropocene. After explaining how this methodological crisis differs from an earlier stand-off between proponents of microhistory and total history, this paper suggests a role for intellectual history in moving us beyond the current debate. What is needed is a history of “scaling”; that is, we need to historicize the process of mediating between different frameworks of measurement, even those that might at first appear incommensurable. Historical examples are explored in which such a process of commensuration has allowed for a pluralism of perceptions of space and time.

Grafton recalls the precept and practice of the history of ideas from 1950-2000 and beyond. The Journal of the History of Ideas (JHI), in the twenty years or so after its foundation, has attracted attention from many quarters, some of them unexpected. It has also occupied a unique position, between the technical journals of history and philology, each firmly identified with a discipline, in which professional humanists normally published their results, and the quarterlies, which cultivated a mixed readership to which they offered fiction and poetry as well as essay. By contrast with both, the JHI fifty years ago ran on a rich mix of technical articles and wide-ranging essays that could easily have attracted the attention of a sophisticated administrator--or at least made a good impression on his coffee table.

[...]medical terms and their meanings change and evolve over time, and can differ greatly from the definitions of today. The history of ideas about stroke, as van Gijn recounts in his book, begins in the mid-16th century, when the ancient concept of apoplexy—loosely defined as a loss of movement and sensation, with sudden fall and without impairment of breathing and pulse—dominated medical thought. Stroke: A History of Ideas Jan van Gijn Cambridge University Press, 2023 pp 250, £64·99 ISBN 978-1-108-83254-0

Mark Bevir’s impressive theory of the logic of the history of ideas continues to attract readers and to irritate many theorists. This article has two purposes. One is to present the modified version, in which the focus will be on some major elements of Bevir’s theory. The concepts that he introduced from analytic philosophy did not always fit perfectly with the ones used from continental philosophy. In contrast with those critics who think that his borrowings from analytic philosophy damage his theory, I think that it will benefit by adding more. The other purpose of this article is to answer some of the most prominent criticisms of Bevir’s theory.

This essay criticizes Bevir’s account of the logic of the history of ideas by comparing it with Oakeshott’s account of the logic of historical enquiry. It concludes that Bevir’s account is deficient in two main respects. First, his account neglects to identify the logical status of the historical pasts which historians create. Second, his account is guided by a misleading conception of the relationship between philosophical analysis and historical practice.

Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways in political thought and social science. This essay challenges how the liberal tradition is typically understood. I start by delineating different types of response—prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory—that are frequently conflated in answering the question \"what is liberalism?\" I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting \"stipulative\" and \"canonical\" approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. Liberalism, on this (comprehensive) account, is best characterised as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time and space. In the remainder of the article, I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how Locke came to be characterised as a liberal. I argue that the scope of the liberal traditionexpanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious (and deeply confusing) understanding of liberalism was a product of the ideological wars fought against \"totalitarianism\" and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it.

Mark Bevir’s book stands as one of the most influential recent interventions into debates central to the history of political thought, intellectual history, and textual interpretation more broadly. The introductory essay to this symposium situates Bevir’s position as not only a “middle way” between Straussian and postmodern deconstructive approaches, but one that distinguishes itself from the leading claimants to that terrain, namely the “Cambridge School” most closely associated with Skinner and Pocock. I conclude by briefly characterizing the four subsequent essays, which both engage Bevir’s work through constructive criticism and extend it to issues of contemporary political theory and practice.

Mark Bevir’s The Logic of the History of Ideas is highly influential in intellectual history circles. What intellectual historians may not realize is how much influence Logic has for other disciplines linked to intellectual history. Relying upon Bevir’s arguments for the place of evidence, coherence, and non-methodological prescriptivism in the performance of intellectual history, in this symposium contribution I outline what comparative political theorists might glean from Logic for the purpose of developing a more coherent field of their own.

This article argues against the assumption that Athenian political practice involved an evaluative distinction between terms signifying the good “statesman” and the bad “demagogue.” Terms now translated “demagogue” are used by Aristophanes, Thucydides, and other Athenian orators and historians in a neutral, or even positive, sense. Instead, the evaluative distinction is built by Plutarch out of Platonic analysis, Aristotelian vocabulary, and the Thucydidean classification of Athenian politicians. The article concludes with reflections on the context of Moses Finley’s classic analysis of Athenian demagogues, and on the implications of the argument for political practice and thinking today.

In the works that follow The Logic of the History of Ideas, Mark Bevir develops a post-foundational, participatory, and deliberative conception of democracy. This article examines the relationship between Bevir’s logic of the history of ideas and his logic of democratic deliberations. I argue that, given Bevir’s own framework, the logic of the concepts that are employed by historians can and should be vindicated through the logic of democratic deliberations. In this understanding, historical meanings are not objects that are analytically prior to the narrative in which they are embedded. They form an integral part of the narrative itself.