In this chapter, I shall examine some of the ideological aspects of how historians and social theorists have learned to think about conceptual change.

At issue in this enquiry is what ‘historicism' in the contemporary human sciences amounts to. Historicism is often seen as the product of the changing understanding of time and human action brought about by the emergence of raison d'etat and the rise of the modern state; some also trace its roots to the interest in anthropology and the history of civilisation that emerged from early­modern natural jurisprudence.^[804] Whatever the vocabularies used in earlier forms of historicism - reason of state, natural law, nationalism, the philosophy of history - today the historicist is more likely to speak in the language of economics.

To be sure, contemporary historicism does not wear these commitments on its sleeve. But we can glimpse them in its intuitive, often untheorised, understanding of historical change. A central thesis of latter-day historicism is that the turn to history in any normative field, from philosophy to political theory to international law, shows that our concepts are subject to radical, unpredictable conceptual change. For the contemporary historicist, the whole point of appealing to historical context is that the political and moral concepts we employ to describe and evaluate our world are themselves subject to change; that is why the advocates of what is sometimes called contextualism insist that our political and moral concepts can be understood and evaluated only when we have located them in the wider system of categories from which - so the contextualist argues - they derive their meaning. The phe­nomenon of conceptual change is thus the keystone of the contextual approach. Yet it is seldom asked whether our models for conceptual change themselves express - consciously or otherwise - ideological commitments.

In what follows, I shall try to show that the standard model of conceptual change held by proponents of contextualism bears striking affinities to theories of entrepreneurial action.

Innovation has been above all a concept associated with technical advancement. Since the publication of Joseph Schumpeter's seminal The Theory of Economic Development (1911), the problem of technical change or innovation has been a problem for economic accounts of the enterprise form. Enterprise has been defined as the carrying out of innovations within an existing economic system. My central point in this chapter is that, when pressed into the service of a theory of cultural or ideological change, the idea of innovation is far from unproblematic. The search for an economics of innovation has been riven by fundamental political disagreement: some writers in Schumpeter's generation argued that free markets were themselves engines of innovation; others argued that the basic research and long-term technological investments that underpinned economic innovation were ‘public goods' best provided by the state, not markets. Innovation was a political concept from the beginning - even if in some cases the argument was that innovation was best encouraged by the exclusion of political action from the economy, and the letting of markets alone by government.

If our ‘historicist' understandings of conceptual change are indeed based in some respects on theories of economic development, how was this connection forged? I do not claim that the social theorists and historians whom I will consider in this chapter read and directly applied the doctrines of Schumpeter. So what kind of claim am I making? My view is that, just as the connections between raison d'etat and historicism were mediated and indirect, so too economic theories of development have a complex, mediated relation to the working theory of development that underpins contextualist accounts of conceptual change. Raison d'etat was more than just a doctrine of statecraft; it also implied a theory of self-government that would allow the individual to survive in a hostile, even warlike, civil sphere.^[805] Likewise, eco­nomic doctrines of development and growth have become, in late modernity, more than just academic theories: they also imply modes of individual com­portment, such as maximising one's income, hedging against risk, taking chances for large pay-offs, and so on.^[806] Among its other facets, economics is also a discourse that provides a framework for individuals to live within a modern form of temporality that cuts us off from the past and projects us - at what can seem to be ever-accelerating speed - into an unknown future.^[807] From this perspective, it is not surprising at all to find that our theories of social action have been informed by economic language that has been tailor-made for the conditions of modern society and economy. We see the substitution of economic models of action for less utilitarian conceptions in its most egre­gious forms, for example, in the conscious projection of rational choice theory and behavioural economics into political theory and sociology.^[808] But my thesis is that this happens in more subtle forms, too, such as in more obviously historicist forms of social theory. As I explain towards the end of the chapter, this economistic (in a broad sense) rendering of conceptual change fudges the question of agency in ways that lead to fatalism. I find little to celebrate in that outcome; but we should be aware that it represents a tendency in our current forms of historicism, so that we can then ask ourselves what we should do about it.