Contested Concepts and their Trajectories

Many of the key concepts used in political science and theory are ‘essentially contested’. They provoke, as Walter Gallie pointed out, endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users, and these disputes cannot be settled by appeal to empirical evidence, linguistic usage, or the canons of logic alone. We propose a series of Panels that use a contextualist approach to tackle a wide range of contested concepts. They involve rethinking, first and foremost, political ideologies such as ‘liberalism’, and critically discussing constitutional principles such as ‘militant democracy’. The second set of panels revisits the fundamental political concepts of ‘the people’ and ‘human rights’, as well as methodological axioms such as ‘deliberation’ and key thinkers like Max Weber, shedding light on neglected or forgotten aspects of their study. The third group of Panels focuses on concepts related to international and EU politics, drawing attention to how these supranational processes are defined by and redefine basic political ideas such as democracy, liberty and representation. Drawing on a variety of textual and empirical material, Papers in this Section will illustrate that concepts are historically and politically contingent. They can become subjects of public debate and political controversy, just as they can guide (or restrain) political research and inspire scholarly discussion.