Panel Discussion

Over the last twenty years, intellectual history has experienced a marked shift from the history of
philosophy to the history of ideas in the world. From neoliberalism, human rights, and the world
economy to genocide, statelessness, and sovereignty, a raft of recent works employ the insights
and methods of intellectual history to recover the contingent evolution and political use of
concepts in the public sphere. Law and economy – as disciplines and professions as well as
systems of ideas – both feature prominently. These roundtable remarks will consider the place of
law in intellectual history today and the ways in which it both reflects and resists calls for greater
attention to the political economy of concepts. Law can hover illusively between the ideal and
the real, the empirical and the normative. Comprising its own sophisticated appraisals of that
tension, the history of legal thought contains resources for historicizing our own anxieties about
the (im)materiality of ideas. When, why, and how does the reality deficit of ideas matter?