Abstract

In examining the ideas expressed in Melvin Richter's book, 'The history of political and social concepts', 1995, the author reviews the programmes of research of the German Begriffsgeschichte school and of the 'history of political discourse' propounded by Pocock, Skinner and Dunn. The author - who partly revives Derrida's criticism to Austin - maintains that the two methodological models are hardly compatible, due to their different conceptions of philosophy of language and to their opposite view of the relation between political concepts and history. The author proposes a different perspective in conceptual history, which antedates to the logic of the Hobbesian social compact the 'Sattelzeit' of modernity, as well as a defence of the 'Lexikon' form conceived as a space of historic representation of the genealogy of modern political concepts.