Peter de Bolla

University of Cambridge | Cam · Faculty of English

What would the history of ideas look like if we were able to read the entire archive of printed material of a historical period? Would our 'great men (usually)' story of how ideas are formed and change over time begin to look very different? This book explores these questions through case studies on ideas such as 'liberty', 'republicanism' or 'gove...

What would the history of ideas look like if we were able to read the entire archive of printed material of a historical period? Would our 'great men (usually)' story of how ideas are formed and change over time begin to look very different? This book explores these questions through case studies on ideas such as 'liberty', 'republicanism' or 'gove...

What would the history of ideas look like if we were able to read the entire archive of printed material of a historical period? Would our 'great men (usually)' story of how ideas are formed and change over time begin to look very different? This book explores these questions through case studies on ideas such as 'liberty', 'republicanism' or 'gove...

This essay revisits the long-standing debate concerning the sources for the underlying political beliefs and commitments held by the “founding generation,” those colonists who came to the conclusion that separation from the mother country was necessary and inevitable. It uses a mixed mode of enquiry and analysis, blending standard close reading of...

The French artist Pierre Bonnard created more than two thousand paintings, many of them now dispersed around museums across the world. He painted in a slightly eccentric manner—on unstretched canvas—and often worked on these paintings over decades. They typically depict closed spaces, interiors, that open out to vistas beyond the room. He also prod...

This paper presents a computational method for assessing the uses of the category “genre.” It takes as its example the long-standing “Adam Smith” problem, which seeks to settle whether Smith’s two major works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations are compatible with each other and can be seen as contributing to a larger “system”...

This article uses computational and statistical methods for analyzing the concept of liberty 1600-1800. Based on a bespoke set of tools for parsing conceptual structures it contributes to the literature on the concept of liberty and engages with the thesis concerning negative liberty first put forward by Isaiah Berlin and subsequently modified by Q...

This essay sets out a new method for the history of ideas. Using a mixed approach combining computer assisted reading methods with more traditional close reading, the essay tracks the evolution of a set of terms over the eighteenth century that have become central to how we think about government in particular and political concepts in general. The...

This article proposes a novel computational method for discerning the structure and history of concepts. Based on the analysis of co-occurrence data in large data sets, the method creates a measure of “binding” that enables the construction of verbal constellations that comprise the larger units, “concepts,” that change over time. In contrast to in...

This paper presents work in progress on an algorithm to track and identify changes in the vocabulary used to describe particular concepts over time, with emphasis on treating concepts as distinct from changes in word meaning. We apply the algorithm to word vectors generated from Google Books n-grams from 1800–1990 and evaluate the induced networks...

De Bolla turns our attention to the different voices of Romanticism, with special reference to one of Romantic studies’ strongest adjacent thinkers, Stanley Cavell. De Bolla’s linking of Cavell and Wordsworth stages a reflection on the elemental problems of scepticism, and how a change in orientation to the acceptance—or refusal—of the world marks...

This essay argues that the concept of universal human rights is incoherent. That incoherence is structural, which is to note that its internal organisation has consequences with respect to its use as a way of understanding those rights said to be universal 'by dint of being human'. As such it is a 'fuzzy' concept. The essay also investigates the cl...

The Architecture of Concepts proposes a radically new way of understanding the history of ideas. Taking as its example human rights, it develops a distinctive kind of conceptual analysis that enables us to see with precision how the concept of human rights was formed in the eighteenth century. The first chapter outlines an innovative account of con...

The final chapter addresses the vexed issue of contemporary international human rights. It uses the preceding account of the history of formation of the concept ‘rights of man’ to illumine current debates in the theory of universal human rights. It suggests that a concept of universal human rights must be structured through aspiration and outlines...

This chapter traces the history of debate in the colonies during the mid eighteenth century and leading up to the First Continental Congress around the issue of rights. It demonstrates how a new concept, ‘rights of man’ came to have currency in the colonies at this time. This concept helped the colonists explain and understand how they could propos...

This chapter explores how Tom Paine’s Rights of Man put into circulation a phrase ‘the rights of man’. It argues that this phrase is related but not identical to the concept ‘rights of man’ that was developed in the colonies before the American war of Independence. It demonstrates how a conceptual form works in the world and also how during the 179...

This chapter presents a data dependent account of the formation of eighteenth century accounts of the rights of man. It makes a distinction between right and rights and demonstrates the difference in architecture between these two concepts. The emergence of a third concept, ‘rights of man’ is also tracked through the analysis of word searches in Ei...

The Architecture of Concepts proposes a radically new way of understanding the history of ideas. Taking as its example human rights, it develops a distinctive kind of conceptual analysis that enables us to see with precision how the concept of human rights was formed in the eighteenth century. The first chapter outlines an innovative account of con...

It is often claimed that aesthetics was an invention of the eighteenth century and the Scottish-Irish philosopher Francis Hutcheson is frequently cited, along with Shaftesbury, as one of the "fathers" of this invention. This observation contains some truth but the reason why it does so is poorly understood. In this essay, I argue that we need to pa...

This chapter traces the steps by which Adam Smith developed a new concept—the division of labor—out of a chain of terms that depended upon and followed from one another: the division of the manufacturing process, worker specialization, machines, productivity gains that are (mathematically) sublime, and time and speed as a coefficient of the cost of...

On Tuesday 19 February 2008 the Guardian’s front-page coverage of the collapse of the bank, Northern Rock, included the following: Ministers are prepared, however, to face down threats of a legal challenge from Northern Rock’s shareholders, who said yesterday that the government’s plan for a temporary period of state ownership infringed their human...

On Wednesday 17 January 1776 Robert and Daniel Perreau were removed from Newgate Prison and taken by carriage to Tyburn Cross — the site of modern day Marble Arch — where the gallows awaited their execution. They had been convicted of forgery, and London had been obsessed by their stories for nearly a year. Thirty thousand spectators turned up to s...

SubStance 35.1 (2006) 52-68 In the great shift from the theocentric to the skeptical ordering of knowledge that is Enlightenment, one way of knowing stands out as preeminent, as the exemplar for the entire mathesis of modernity. There is a moment, a precise point at which this shift becomes visible, stabilizing the slow-moving plate tectonics of ep...

On 19 February 1747 the actor-manager Thomas Sheridan was tried in the court of Oyer and Terminer for assault and acquitted. Immediately following this case the court heard a suit that Sheridan himself brought against one Edward Kelly, a young man from Galway, and also for assault, and found for Sheridan. Kelly was sent down, fined £500 and impriso...

Diacritics 32.1 (2002) 19-37 Over the last twenty years or so it has become a commonplace in discussions of "aesthetics" or of "art" in the most general sense to note that the term "aesthetics" was only very recently invented by Alexander Baumgarten in 1735, where it appears in his Meditationes philosophicae de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus [see...

What price have we paid for the fantasy that there are free rights of access to the domain of the visual? That everyone with eyes to see can in fact stand on an equal footing in the republic of visuality. This fantasy has long been with us and its origins lie deep in our history of understanding the visual realm. This chapter will explore a signal...

After a five-year stint at the University of Geneva, Peter de Bolla will remove himself and his wife to the more familiar environs of King's College, Cambridge about the time we go to press. Oh to be in England, now that Peter is there!

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