Chapter 1 analyzes the shift from the history of ideas to the history of political languages, connected with the so-called linguistic turn. Beginning with Lovejoy’s proposal of a history of ideas, which served to establish it as a scholarly discipline, it aims to unravel its fundamental tenets, as well as the rationale behind the focus on “unit-ideas,” derived from the awareness of the problems to categorize different currents of thought in history. It then observes Namier’s critical perspective of that tradition and Skinner’s proposal to stand intellectual history on a new basis. By incorporating the analysis of the performative dimension of language, it overcomes the impasse generated by the shortcomings in the history of ideas and its ahistorical perspective of ideas, thus highlighting the fundamental consequences and its contribution to the control of conceptual anachronisms. This “linguistic turn” allows Skinner to perceive the fallacies or “mythologies” of the history of ideas and recover the notion of the “text” as a meaningful whole. Finally, it analyzes the subsequent “rhetorical turn” in the search to find in the very texts the discursive tracks of their contexts of utterance, and why it meant the dislocation of the antinomy between “texts”–“contexts” and “ideas”–“reality.”

The Introduction presents the main questions and aims of the book. I argue that Roman thinkers used the metaphor of the body politic to articulate competing visions of the res publica between the Catilinarian Conspiracy and Year of the Four Emperors. I frame my discussion in relation to the Cambridge School of intellectual history, which has catalyzed the revival of interest in classical republicanism. In contrast to its focus on questions of liberty and popular sovereignty, my book turns towards problems of statesmanship and constitutional transformation. It asks how a foundational metaphor of civic organization evolved in response to the establishment of autocracy. It foregrounds the importance of metaphor as an avenue of political thought.

The aim of this chapter is to look at Pasinetti’s work, as a distinctive member of the Cambridge School of Keynesian Economics, and consider if and how social concerns constitute a pillar of his scientific research. Primary literature is therefore the main source of this chapter. After having traced Pasinetti to Cambridge School, we look at his critique of mainstream economics. We then consider his analysis of the Industrial Revolution's ‘production paradigm’ and the need to move from a pure exchange model to a pure production model. Furthermore, we show how this new paradigm is linked to the analysis of specific, crucial issues: the centrality of labour; the social function of capital; and the role of the institutions. The influence of the Italian tradition of economic thought and of the Social Doctrine of the Catholic Church is discussed through the lens of the importance Pasinetti attributed to the aims of economic research and the challenges imposed by globalisation.

This chapter begins by summarising the development of the history of ideas out of which conceptual history emerged. It discusses in detail the founding figure of conceptual history, Reinhart Koselleck, and compares his approach to that of the influential Cambridge school, in particular Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, and their ‘contextualism’. The bulk of the chapter is then dedicated to a discussion of a range of examples of how conceptual histories have helped to deconstruct a rainge of collective identities, including class, religious, racial and gender identities. In all of these areas we have seen an intense interest in linking the history of conceps with the study of emotions, social practices and the problematisation of the national container for historical studies. In particular the move to a transnational history of concepts has contributed in a major way to de-essentialising collective national identities but also transnational, i.e. European ones. Furthermore, conceptual history has been emphasising the importance of studying the translation of concepts into different languages and cultural spheres.

This chapter argues that contemporary claims about what empiricist history can offer international law are part of a longer tradition. A particular vision of law and figure of the lawyer have been central to claims made by empiricist historians of political thought for at least a century. The chapter focuses on four influential scholars whose work has influenced the method debates in international law – Herbert Butterfield, JGO Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and Ian Hunter. It traces the figure of the lawyer as apologist for power that reappears in their texts and against which their historicizing methods are staged. While the figure of the lawyer appears in different guises – as Whig constitutionalist for Butterfield, English common lawyer for Pocock, Italian scholastic lawyer for Skinner, and Prussian natural lawyer for Hunter – in each narrative the lawyer functions as the foil for a new heroic figure. That figure, the historicizing humanist, arrives on the scene to offer an anti-metaphysical challenge to the oppressive authority of received tradition. This chapter situates debates over the turn to method in international law within that longer story, in which historians are able to take up their preordained place as radical disrupters of orthodoxy.

This chapter relates the turn to history in international law to the corresponding international turn taken in the discipline of history. It explores the effects of translating the stakes of those turns into a technical debate involving abstract claims about the proper scientific methods for understanding the past of international law. The chapter analyses the wide-ranging set of arguments about the scientific nature of empiricist history and the partisan character of international legal arguments that have accompanied the turn to history. It argues that international lawyers have been uncritically receptive of the idea that empiricist historical methods offer a set of technical rules to which legal scholars should conform when writing about the past.

In the framework of a critical illustration of the contemporary history of economics, this chapter discusses post-Keynesian macroeconomics: the Cambridge tradition and the new Cambridge school. Some of the main protagonists are considered separately: Kalecki, Kaldor Kahn, Joan Robinson and others. The debate on the interpretations of Keynes is then recalled, as well as the debate on the theory of capital and the critique of the marginalist value theory. Kaldor’s and Pasinetti’s post–Keynesian (or ‘Cambridge’) theory of distribution is then illustrated, as well as the developments of the different ‘Sraffian schools’ with the aim of constructing a renewed classical approach. In this direction, some suggestions for a classical–Keynesian synthesis are provided.

Ezra Pound has influenced many poets in many ways, both during his lifetime and posthumously. He brought great influence to bear upon his peers about how poetry should be written, establishing and broadcasting the tenets of poetic modernism in English, offering models for how poems could be both far shorter and far longer at the same time as achieving greater focus and covering a broader range of subject than the pre-modernists imagined. Pound’s interventions around T. S. Eliot’s verse offer the most direct example of that influence. Despite acknowledging that Eliot, uniquely among American writers, ‘had actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own’ (SL 80), Pound worked extensively on Eliot’s work, perhaps most directly in the transition between Eliot’s Poems (1920) and The Waste Land (1922), which saw Eliot initially interpreting Pound’s Imagist concision in Poems, through their shared interest in Théophile Gautier, before adopting a more expansive Poundian ideogrammic method in The Waste Land.