The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights

How do concepts come to be? And, in particular, how current conceptions of international human rights are built upon a particular conceptual architecture? Peter de Bolla, author of The Architecture of Concepts: The Historical Formation of Human Rights, addresses these questions in incremental steps, building on what scholars currently understand when it comes to concepts more generally. The methodology is based on the use of the Eighteenth Century Collection Online (ECCO) digital archives predominantly, with the aim of constructing data-dependent descriptions of conceptual architectures. The author, thus, looks at conceptual networks and the extensive relationships found within them so as to direct researchers in conducting future plotting of connectivities within networks. The opening chapter looks at concepts as a way of thinking. Concepts are treated as a metaphorical "subway or tube maps project into multiple dimensions." The author then focuses on the eighteenth century and its printed materials. The use of large data allows the author to extrapolate matters of language spanning large communities. The following chapters combine the issue of creating conceptual dispositions with poignant debates about rights that pervaded the First Continental Congress during the 1770s, while repositioning the items of inquiry, mentioned previously, by challenging the assumption of the origin(s) of human rights.