Begriffsgeschichte in Italy

S. Chignola, Begriffsgeschichte in Italy. On the logic of modern political concepts, «History of Concepts Newsletter», Huizinga Instituut, Amsterdam, 3, April 2000.

The aim of this paper is the brief presentation of the two principal directions that Begriffsgeschichte took in Italy and to attempt to enucleate a few theoretical proposals from the Italian model to further European historical - conceptual research. The history of political concepts in fact has not been directly applied in Italy to develop lexicographical works and neither has it been used to reconstruct the political vocabulary. It has acted rather as a stimulus for the importation of German constitutional and social historiography, for the translation, in volume, of individual items from the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, for the planning of seminars and journals and above all for the production of research and anthologies with a strong unitary set up through which it has elaborated a strategy for autonomous use and, which I believe, is unique on the international scene.

The main centres for study and research on the History of political concepts in Italy today are the University of Trento and the Institute of Italo-Germanic History in Trento which publish the journals «Scienza & Politica» and the «Annali dell'Istituto storico italo-germanico» in Trento and the universities of Padua and Bologna with the journal «Filosofia politica» - the first part of each issue is dedicated to the presentation of «Materiali per un lessico politico europeo» (material for a European political lexicon) and the anthologies of the research on modern political concepts. At the universities of Milan and Bologna there are also more general editorial projects, with the aim of producing volumes for general consultation and political dictionaries which take into due account the specific History of political vocabula.