Learning ‘To Read Again’

Javier Fernández Sebastián's latest book is truly a tour de force. While it offers a lucid appraisal of conceptual history, with a focus on the ‘conceptual revolution’ that the Iberian Atlantic underwent during the first half of the nineteenth century, it is also a serious statement on the profession – indeed, ‘no discipline’, as he tells us, can sustain itself ‘if it is not based on a theoretical reflection about its own status as a discipline’ (p. 17). His is an invitation to engage more fully with an approach to history that prizes above all the language of contemporaries to make sense of the past.