Writing Intellectual History after the “Age of Forms”: An Interview with Elías J. Palti – Journal of the History of Ideas blog – Part I and Part II

In this interview, primary editors Jacob Saliba and Zac Endter speak with award-winning and internationally recognized intellectual historian Elías Palti on his most recent work, Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Based on Seeley Lectures recently given at Cambridge University, the book consists of a meta-history of intellectual history in the last century. From the “Cambridge School,” Hans Blumenberg, and Reinhart Koselleck to Pierre Rosanvallon and Michel Foucault, Palti weaves together a complex range of thinkers as well as carefully reconstructs a wide array of concepts at the core of why and how intellectual historians do what they do. Ultimately, Palti seeks to clarify the evolving conditions, stakes, and epistemological ground on which intellectual history was built in the past and continues to be built up to the present.