Abstract

The purpose of this article is to show how W.B. Gallie’s proposal on the essential contestability of political concepts ended up calling into question the very notion of essential contestability proposed by this author. In spite of this, we consider that such a notion can still be a contribution to the history of concepts if it is complemented by some aspects of Hegel’s philosophy, located in his Science of Logic, which can provide a foundation for such contestability from a self-referred negativity open to semantic displacements, which allows us to receive Gallie’s proposal without having to accept all his theoretical commitments, radicalizing his proposal and providing some useful indications for the history of political concepts.