Abstract
It is sometimes said that the history of ideas is the history of words, because what people are able to think is conditioned by what they are able to say. But this claim seems a bit presumptuous. It might be more accurate to say that the history of ideas is a history of compelling but poorly defined words, the sort of words that people sling around all the time, words that they assume they fully understand, that they serve up as incantations, even build their lives around, even fight to the death for, until they are called upon to give a more fine-grained account of what such words actually mean.