ABSTRACT
The idea of the present age as a “conceptual age” is a provocative idea, in the best sense of being “provocative.” Far from this being a conceptual age, it could be said that the present age is marked precisely by a diminution of concepts. Certainly, words and phrases and even neologisms abound; there is a cascade of new terms, not least in a digital age. But concepts, it may be felt, are thinning and even dissolving, for concepts imply a public able to share ideas and to engage in debate such that those ideas are deepened and strengthened into collectively understood concepts. In a liquid age, as Bauman (2000) has termed it, that very idea of an educated and reexive public that shares fundamental ideas has to be in doubt.
