José María Rosales

Este artículo explora algunas de las condiciones actuales en la práctica de la filosofía política. Su experiencia tanto docente como investigadora lleva a apreciar las vías de renovación curricular y de participación en debates académicos que su carácter interdisciplinar hace posible. Dicha práctica muestra al mismo tiempo la promesa de innovación y los costes en términos profesionales que supone trabajar con enfoques y métodos interdisciplinares. Ocurre en cualquier disciplina y la filosofía política no es diferente en ese sentido, pero su doble perfil de humanidades y ciencias sociales muestra el lado vulnerable de esa aparente fortaleza.

This article explores causes and consequences of the declining funding chances of political theorizing with the aim of advancing measures to offset them. Major national and international research programmes growingly present challenges that require problem-solving strategies. Applied research disciplines are better fitted to tackle them than basic research disciplines to which political theorizing belongs. Drawing on the enlightening contribution of theory to political research and politics, it argues that the knowledge it produces can be shared across disciplinary boundaries if its scientific reliability is secured. With that aim, the article submits two practical suggestions: enriching normative accounts of politics with research historically and institutionally informed, and streamlining its enquiring capacity by exploring standard, modular and integrated interdisciplinary approaches.

Il lavoro di Kari Palonen è rimasto negli anni una fonte di ispirazione per gli storici concettuali e intellettuali e per i teorici politici. La sua carriera e i suoi contributi lo rendono un interlocutore ideale per una conversazione sulla pratica congiunta della storia concettuale e dello studio del pensiero politico. Questa intervista, condotta da Rosario López e José María Rosales, si è svolta come una delle sessioni del seminario online _On the Joint Practice of Conceptual History and the Study of Political Thought_, organizzato da Concepta: Research Seminars in Conceptual History and Political Thought l’8 e il 9 gennaio 2024.

RESUMENEl trabajo presenta algunos de los rasgos básicos de la condición política moderna. Esboza así su génesis interna desde la sacralización del ámbito político hasta los inicios de la secularización en el siglo XIII. Para ilustrar ambos momentos de la filosofía política de Santo Tomás provee una argumentación básica que, aun siendo incompleta para reconstruir este tránsito, resulta significativamente clarificadora. PALABRAS CLAVEFILOSOFIA POLITICA MEDIEVAL-HISTORIA DEL PENSAMIENTO POLITICO- SANTO TOMAS DE AQUINOABSTRACTThe paper presents some of the basic features of the medieval political condition. This, it outlines the genesis from the sacralization of the political realm to the beginnings of secularization in the XIIIth century. To illustrate both moments, Saint Thomas' political philosophy provdes a significant, though incomplete, argumentative basis. KEYWORDSMEDIEVAL POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY-HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT- AQUINAS

This paper argues that liberalism provides democracy with the experience of civic reformism. Without it, democracy loses any tie-argumentative or practical-to a coherent design of public policy endeavoring to provide the resources for the realization of democratic citizenship. The case for liberalism rests on an argumentative reconstruction of the function it performs before the rise of a world economic order and, more specifically, in the creation of the welfare state after the Second World War. Accordingly, liberalism defines a reformist political program: it is an emancipatory political project by virtue of its struggle for an egalitarian and universalist extension of citizenship rights. This is but a formulation of the modern idea of citizenship, conceived of as a universalizable contract of rights. At the same time, liberalism embraces a socioeconomic emancipatory project that endeavors to provide the conditions, within the institutional framework of modern societies, for the accomplishment of citizenship rights.

Representation is a major and multifaceted concept of modern politics. Through open and regular elections, it shields the democratic character of representative governments, compelling politicians to pursue the interests of their constituencies and become responsive to their demands. But since the concept of representation is so embedded in the day-to-day workings of democratic regimes, it has largely lost significant traces of its history that shed light on its political dawn. The instrumentalization of the concept by representative governments in order to assess their democratic legitimacy obfuscates its seminal ambiguities and the history of conflicts about its meaning and institutional functions.

Rooted in late seventeenth-century theories of rights, liberal ideas have brought forth since the nineteenth century a full-edged complex of traditions in moral, political, economic, social, and legal thought. Yet in historiographical debates such complexity is often blurred by presenting it under the uniform terms of a canon. Along with other methods, conceptual history is contributing to the rediscovery of liberalism's diversity. This group of articles compiles three conceptual studies on scarcely explored aspects of the history of liberalism in Denmark, Finland, and Hungary—countries whose political past has only occasionally figured in mainstream accounts of European liberalism. This introductory article is a methodological discussion of the rationale and forms in which liberalism's historical diversity is rendered through comparative conceptual research. After reflecting on the limits of the Anglophone history of political thought to grasp the plurality of liberal traditions, the article examines how transnational conceptual histories recast the understanding of liberalism as a concept, theory, ideology, and political movement