ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what sociological studies on translation and on the international circulation of ideas may contribute to this project of a global intellectual history attentive to spatial aspects of ideas. By crossing the study of the international circulation of ideas with other forms of intellectual circulation, it confronts the mechanisms underlying the circulation of ideas between countries and linguistic zones with those underlying the circulation of ideas between other types of spaces. The chapter focuses on the role of mediators in these circulations, namely all of those agents whose actions contribute to making a text or a set of ideas circulate between the spaces. It describes the diversity of the mediators who make these circulations possible, the positions they occupy, the strategies they are likely to implement and the forms of rewards they may obtain. Pierre Bourdieu distinguished three processes at work in the international circulation of ideas: selection, marking and reappropriation.
