ABSTRACT
The way sociology has tried to understand intellectuals and the way ideas are produced have both been seriously challenged by the arrival of competing programmes, most prominently in the form of intellectual history, conceptual history. Sociology's own attempt to find refuge in discourse analysis, social constructivism or, even worse, banal references to the social environment at large, has not helped to advance the field. As in Mannheim and Merton, for Bourdieu understanding and conceptualizing the intellectual and academic world is the precondition for doing any serious sociology. From Pocock's conceptualization and understanding of intellectual history it is finally but a small step to the German conceptual history as coined by Reinhart Koselleck. Apart from political debates, most interesting and certainly of the first order to the conceptual historian are those terms that directly relate to historical times and periodization. Indirectly Lepenies's historical-sociological studies also reveal and point towards the omissions or fallacies of historians of ideas and concepts.
