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Against the double abstraction shown by the traditional history of ideas and by structuralism, the history of intellectuals, at the end of the 1980s, developed a micro social history program of intellectual life seen through the study of journals, publishing houses and intellectual circles. This cultural history of ideas, attentive to the circulation and transmission of ideas, has nevertheless ignored the question of linguistic realities. Examining how the language of intellectual works modifies the experience of historical actors is a good challenge for the cultural historian. Through the study of how works are received, of the controversies, or through the appropriate construction of the context with the dialectical play of moral and social facts, the cultural historian, at the intersection of various related disciplines (literary history, sociology of science, conceptual history of politics), is at the heart of human sciences.