This edited collection analyses the reception of a selection of key thinkers, and the dissemination of paradigms, theories and controversies across the social sciences and humanities since 1945. It draws on data collected from textbooks, curricula, interviews, archives, and references in scientific journals, from a broad range of countries and disciplines to provide an international and comparative perspective that will shed fresh light on the circulation of ideas in the social and human sciences. 

The contributions cover high-profile disputes on methodology, epistemology, and research practices, and the international reception of theorists that have abiding and interdisciplinary relevance, such as: Antonio Gramsci, Hannah Arendt, Karl Polanyi, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak. This important work will be a valuable resource to scholars of the history of ideas and the philosophy of the social sciences; in addition to researchers in the fields of social, cultural and literary theory.

“The international travel of ideas gives them their distinctive shape as well as impact – and this very international examination of how ideas circulate both traces particular paths and cases and advances the project of understanding the international character of humanities and social science.” — Craig Calhoun, Professor of Social Sciences at Arizona State University, USA

“Theories travel, but who sends them on their way, in which vehicles, under what flags? Ideas on the Move provides richly inspiring answers to these compelling questions. Its detailed maps of the mobility of cultural studies and critical theory, structuralism and public economics, and its dense accounts of authorial itineraries, from Arendt and Bourdieu to Said and Spivak, exemplify some of the most creative recent work in intellectual sociology and the social history of ideas.” —David Armitage, Professor of History at Harvard University, USA

“Ideas on the Move demonstrates how some of the most influential contemporary theories and authors have been exported, transformed and used. In particular, it shows how these processes can be explained by integrating in a coherent, heuristic and transdisciplinary way hypotheses and tools elaborated by different traditions such as field theory, center-periphery framework, network analysis, comparative approach and transnational perspective.”— Anna Boschetti, Professor of French Literature, University of Venice, Italy