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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 concepts as cultural entities. The second develops an original methodology for recovering the historical formation of the concept of human rights based on data extracted from digital archives. This enables us to track the construction of conceptual architectures over time.
Having established the architecture of the concept of human rights, the book then examines two key moments in its historical formation: the First Continental Congress in 1775 and the publication of Tom Paine’s Rights of Man in 1792. Arguing that we have yet to fully understand or appreciate the consequences of the eighteenth-century invention of the concept “rights of man,” the final chapter addresses our problematic contemporary attempts to leverage human rights as the most efficacious way of achieving universal equality.
This new book by Peter de Bolla, professor of cultural history and aesthetics at the University of Cambridge, is a major contribution to historical methodology as well as to Enlightenment studies and our understanding of how modern universal human rights arose.
The Architecture of Concepts surprises us at every turn. It uses the latest data bases and search engines to upend the standard history of the concept of human rights, which exploded much later in the
eighteenth century than usually supposed. It digs into American history
by revealing the First Continental Congress as a crucial site of conceptual innovation, and reveals Thomas Paine's Rights of Man has having dispersed the phrase more than the conception. At every turn, de Bolla forges an entirely original theory of concepts as culturally active forces--not merely definitions or ideas, but instruments of thought and action.
In 'The Architecture of Concepts; The Historical Formation of Human Rights',Peter de Bolla develops a distinctive method for the purposes of cultural history. He particularly aims to identify concepts—and in particular the concept of human rights—in terms of their cultural availability.
De Bolla's concern for contemporary human rights is clearly evident, and there can be no doubt that he has undertaken the studies that comprise his carefully composed, intricately argued book with the ultimate aim of contributing to the cause of human rights.
De Bolla has produced that rare thing—an academic book that does something new. Beginning with a splendid but challenging theoretical distinction between rights conceived as the specifiable properties of people called persons, and right conceived as a universal and axiomatic value of human life, but one that is nowhere available for empirical inspection, de Bolla proceeds to examine two momentous contributions to political history—The Declaration of Independence and Thomas Paine's Rights of Man.---—Jonathan Lamb, Vanderbilt University
Peter de Bolla’s ambitious The Architecture of Concepts essentially offers three books in one. As its subtitle suggests, it aims to contribute to an understanding of the historical origins of one specific, politically highly relevant concept: human rights. Over the book’s three central chapters, de Bolla develops a highly detailed and referenced argument, investigating the development of the conceptual structure of human rights at three pivotal points in history: in the pre-revolutionary American colonies, during the first Continental Congress, and in the influential debate between Burke and Paine following the French Revolution.