This project follows two precedents: Theories and Practices of Conceptual History (HUM2007-61018/FISO) and Towards a Comprehensive Conceptual History: Philosophical and Cultural Gyros (FFI2011-24473). In the first, we delimit Conceptual History from other related approaches and conclude that it is not a simple auxiliary means, nor does it have a philosophically subsidiary status, but that, beyond its lexicographic praxis, it aspires to become substantive knowledge, permeable to other human and social sciences. In the second one, the permeability of the different versions of the Conceptual History to the most recent cultural turns, mainly to the linguistic and the iconic, was assessed. Reinhart Koselleck's work was the most fruitful, since it does not stop at a mere history of concepts and is nourished by a philosophical ambition.

It is precisely the veneration that wishes to exploit the project we are asking for that promotes a critical reflection on historical times (sponsored by the Koseleckian Historical Society) and questions the prevailing, obsolete and emerging timeframes. This critical reflection has been turned into an ideological critique of new forms of mystification and domination by some of its current representatives. Conceptual history has focused on the modern era, but it is not limited to recording the conceptual processing of its genesis and development, that is to say, to making a diagnosis, but it dares to make a prognosis about its course and to unveil its stalks without renouncing a therapeutic function. Then it supposes a discussion with the theory of modernization and the theory of modernity and even of modernity in the plural (after the collapse of the singular collective). While the former is based on a historical description of the emergence and deployment of Western industrial societies, the latter deals with phenomena marginalised by the concept of modernisation, which adopt different aliases: distortion, pathology, alienation,... The Conceptual History, which contains among its variants both that descriptive and normative vocation, has inspired the most daring current thinkers and contemporary intellectual constellations in the examination of capitalism and its crisis in temporal terms: the anthropology of the homo compensator of the ritterians (H. Lübbe and O. Marquard) or the symbolic (from A. Warburg to the Poetics and Hermeneutics group, in which Blumenberg stands out), the sociology of the acceleration of H. Rosa and Byung-Chul Han, the liquid modernity of Z. Bauman, the dromology of P. Virilio, the postmodern presentism of H.U. Gumbrecht and his counterpoint F. Hartog whose fallacy has already been methodologically denounced by the Skinner and Pocock tandem, the cult of the memory of Assmann, the Paduan research group of the European political-legal lexicon, etc. These perspectives invite us to review and recycle the premises of Conceptual History (temporalization, democratization, ideologization and politicization) in order to investigate its validity from the 20th century onwards, since we can see a hiatus between the Sattelzeit (1750-1850) with its high points of the French and Industrial Revolution - and our present. The historical-political language of modernity is once again affected by a change in meaning, that is, the transformations that led to modernity seem to have led to a transformation of modernity.