The Architecture of Concepts

The Historical Formation of Human Rights

Peter de Bolla

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780823254392, 9780823254385
• eBook ISBN: 9780823254408
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

CHAPTER 1

On Concepts as Cultural Entities

This book proposes a new way of understanding the historical formation of the concept of human rights. It has both a specific and a general target: in the case of the former it seeks to contribute to a history of political concepts, even if, as shall become clear, some of its ways of doing history may be eccentric, and in the latter it intends to test a methodology for analyzing the structuration or architecture of concepts in general. In order to make sense of these aims, it will be necessary to establish the distinctive way in which I am thinking about concepts before outlining how, in my view, they are amenable to the historical analysis of their structuration. This opening chapter seeks to do both of these things.

From such a general perspective it might look as if this project intends to find natural company within the long tradition of Western philosophical inquiry, sharing its aims or objectives, perhaps, with certain streams of speculation into epistemology or, more recently, with the philosophy of mind or even cognitive science. But, as this first chapter seeks to explain, I have come to see its contribution lying elsewhere. In fact in a certain light this project may look like an alternative, if complementary, way of understanding conceptual forms, since the account of concepts I shall try to develop, and certainly the kinds of analytic attention I shall bring to bear on concepts, leads me to suppose that the object of my inquiry—the concept of human rights—is perhaps best understood as held within culture in its largest sense.¹ By the final chapter it will have become clear what is at stake here: The structure of the concept of universal human rights is weakened—perhaps to the extent of dissolution—when rights are considered as subjective properties. If the universal is to have any purchase on how the human in human rights is thought, made intelligible, the concept can only be applied or operated in the supra-agential. In the common unshareable of culture. Or, to put that another way, that concept, universal human rights, finds its support in the common unshareable. This leads to the observation that, for reasons outlined in this book, contemporary attempts to operate the concept of rights in a universal register are bound to fail because the structure of the concept renders “universal human rights” incoherent: One cannot think such universal human rights with a concept of rights understood as individual or subjective claims.

It is of course the case that one might prefer to characterize human rights in terms of ideology, or seek to explore and explain those rights in terms of the language or discourse used to determine or convey them.² In all these cases, one might find little of note in the claim that language, discourse, or ideology are singly and severally cultural forms.³ But the claim that the concept of human rights is not only a property of mind but also a property of culture is more unusual, and the distinction it upholds—between concepts as, on the one hand, mental and, on the other, cultural entities—will be central to the investigation following. The present study, then, is less interested in how or why an individual may have had, possessed, or used a specific concept than in the recovery of a specific culture’s conceptual resources. Or, more accurately, a recovery of the historical construction of a particular concept within Anglophone culture. This way of thinking about concepts is based upon the observation that the forms in and with which we think are not entirely—or even in some cases at all—of our own making or possession. We inhabit those forms presented to us, made available within the culture that feeds, polices, and sustains our interactions as persons, and it is those interpersonal communications that provide evidence for our sharing conceptual lexicons. Such interactions also, crucially, constitute the contestable space that gives definition to our senses of selfhood and thereby impact—perhaps decisively—what can be understood under the rubric of the human. How that observation impacts putative “human rights” is addressed in the concluding chapter.

Recent inquiries into the realm of the conceptual have placed considerable weight on the linguistic, supposing language to provide the aperture that gives access to the object of inquiry, concepts. It is difficult to imagine any other way of breaking in upon conceptual form unless one were to hold a radically materialist account of thought and thinking and to believe that neuroscience might one day be able to furnish the technology for inspecting those material objects within the brain that correspond without remainder to concepts. Leaving this aside, it seems to me that the focus on language may provide resources that have yet to be substantially exploited: There may be more than one way of using the aperture that language provides. Cognitive science tends to see the human subject as a language-processing machine and to portray concepts as mental counters that operate within a computational model of human cognition. The basis for this account lies in both empirical observation of language use and long-standing theories of psychology; in joining both together it provides a powerful account of how we make sense of the world and ourselves by attending to subjective linguistic behavior. According to this view, when a person uses a particular lexical item correctly, that person is said to posses the concept designated by the word. But what would this picture look like if the linguistic behavior attended to was not individual or subjective but cultural and historical?⁴ Once one begins to press the aperture of language in this different way, it begins to make sense to think about concepts as also counters in the world at large, as being held in the larger linguistic communities that are given shape by time and history, social and political praxis.

This study exploits the current situation in which the move from the analogue to the digital provides one with an opportunity for exploring the largest possible contexts for language use. This, coupled with the vast storage potential of the digital archive and the continuously evolving means for searching and analyzing the data held within it, is already opening up new ways of knowing the past. Although the current inquiry uses but a fraction of this powerful technology, it does, I hope, provide an example of some of the new methods that in the future will become far more sophisticated and attuned to newly minted specific areas of study and the questions prompted by and within them. In any event I hope that, as the present study advances, a second strand to the story above begins to emerge: If concepts can be thought about as mental entities, as held within the internal cognitive processes that human beings engage in, then they can also be thought about as cultural entities. By this I mean that concepts can be understood as inhabiting the common unshareable space of culture. This book sets out to explore that observation, testing it along the way, through the optic of a singular conceptual form, which today goes under the rubric of “human rights.”

If these general remarks more or less successfully set the scene for what follows, it leaves hanging a crucial question that will be addressed at length in this introductory chapter: How is the term concept to be understood in this study? If, as I claim, the move from the discursive to the conceptual creates the distinctiveness of the present study, that innovation will only be legible if a more robust account of conceptuality than is currently available is provided. It is this that will enable one to assess the pay-off of my putative “conceptual turn.” The first part of this chapter, therefore, will try to clear some space for thinking conceptuality in ways that might advance how we understand both how conceptual forms function and the manner in which they are connected historically to other concepts. One might imagine that a good place to begin, then, is the vast literature across many fields that inquires into this troublesome aspect of how we think (or at the very least commonly speak) about thinking.⁵ This, at least, was where I began, but it soon became apparent that this would be unlikely to yield much of any use. As the philosopher George Rey has noted, “the word ‘concept’ . . . is applied to a bewildering assortment of phenomena commonly thought to be constituents of thought.”⁶ Furthermore, definitions in this matter are notoriously vague as a cursory inspection of the dictionary illustrates.⁷ Notwithstanding such difficulty, this introduction aims to negotiate some current uses of the term concept in order to reveal as clearly as I can what will constitute the center of attention in the rest of this book. And, perhaps more crucially, it aims to establish a difference in kind or type between conceptual forms.

Within the philosophical tradition of speculation called epistemology, the question “What is a concept?” does not necessarily take center stage, but it would be difficult to imagine an epistemology innocent of a more or less rigorous attempt to define one or other of the following: concepts, ideas, notions, or mental representations.⁸ The very nature of this list and its implied distinctions or clarifications ought to be enough to warn one that this territory is full of rocks and stones ready to trip one up. Not all of the inquiries that might be called to mind here—a list of proper names will be enough to indicate the range and diversity of the tradition, from Plato through Augustine, Bacon to Descartes and Hume, from Kant through Davidson, Aquinas to Ricoeur—take the question “What is a concept?” to be foundational. There are indeed some philosophers within this wide and incoherent grouping who might have expressed a preference for beginning with an alternative query “What do concepts do?” Notwithstanding this qualification, the Western philosophical tradition of epistemology can be said to be necessarily implicated one way or another in the establishment of the concept of concept.⁹ Be these inquiries aimed at breaking in upon the relations between mind and world, perception and cognition, or knowledge and belief they need at the very least a working hypothesis of what it might be to operate with concepts in the most general sense—self-evidently enough, one might suppose, since concepts, as the philosopher of mind Christopher Peacocke notes, are ways of thinking something.¹⁰

Concepts feature, of course, in more than one branch of philosophy, and each requires the term to do different kinds of work: Within aesthetics, for example, conceptual coherence whereby the necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be classed under the rubric of a specific concept (say “beauty”) is often said to be inachievable or inappropriate.¹¹ But it is the philosophy of mind, and especially its most recent interface with cognitive science, that provides the most striking, coherent, and substantially developed way of thinking about concepts as mental entities. Concepts within this tradition of investigation that has developed out of psychology are most commonly taken to be mental particulars.¹² I shall, therefore, use this as my first lever for opening up an exploration of the most general question: “What is a concept?” As will become clear, this lever has helped me to identify what I think is lacking in our attempts to think about conceptual form.

Since the general orientation of this study is historical, it seeks to provide detailed accounts of the changing networked connections of “rights” over the course of the Anglophone eighteenth century, the first part of this chapter will also draw upon a very different genre of inquiry—developed in the Anglophone context to a large extent out of the history of political thought—that inquires into the historicity of concepts.¹³ Commonly referred to as the Cambridge school of intellectual history, this field of inquiry is less interested in the question “What is a concept?” than in how or why concepts change over time. Once again I shall use the following sketch of a substantial tradition of intellectual inquiry as a lever for identifying with greater precision what this study proposes to address.

The Cambridge school of intellectual history sees concepts as having extension, and it is this that generates the area of interest for its practitioners. Thus, although there is no particular reason to dissent from the view that concepts are held within the mind and its processes of intellection, that is no reason to suppose that concepts are not mental entities; there is nevertheless a further aspect of conceptuality that requires examination. Concepts are things to be “grasped” from somewhere other than the recesses of the mind in order to make sense of both the world and an interior mental universe. The concept of patriotism, for example, has a long history from the ancient Greeks to our own era: It is a counter in the languages of politics that have shaped distinct periods and sociopolitical communities; it exists within the negotiated spaces that comprise the practices of everyday political life and, as such, it is often contested.¹⁴ Although one may feel oneself to be a patriot and therefore have the sensation of possessing or owning such a concept, in applying it to an aspect of one’s identity it also has an external life: The concept of patriotism is a common (if malleable and contested) property.¹⁵ Concepts, according to this way of seeing things, also exist in the sensus communis.

It should be noted that my second exemplary field of inquiry is not particularly interested in conceptuality in its most general forms. This helps in my preliminary attempt to characterize differences in type between conceptual entities. As its rubric indicates, the history of political thought sets its sights on what we most commonly refer to as political concepts.¹⁶ Furthermore, this second genre of inquiry is not as coherent or consistent as the first in its adoption of a common disciplinary understanding of the nature of conceptuality.¹⁷ For example, some working within this tradition remain skeptical as to whether concepts can in fact be said to be historical forms, as “having history” (in these cases much hangs on how one understands historicity), while others have gone on to develop a very substantial literature that seeks to trace the alteration of concepts over time.¹⁸

One could quite reasonably object that both of these traditions of inquiry—the philosophy of mind, with its outworking into cognitive science, and the Anglophone tradition of the history of political thought—are far more varied than I here suggest. I shall nevertheless leave my sketch at this rather gross level of resolution in order to preserve the hardest outlines of a distinction that provides the foundation for my own way of thinking about concepts: the difference between words and concepts.¹⁹

Word and Concept

Answers to the question with which I began, “What is a concept?,” will to a great extent be determined by the uses to which a specific discipline wishes to put the category “concept.”²⁰ Contemporary cognitive science, for example, is by and large uninterested in the kind of mental operations that are associated with complex thoughts since its primary focus is on subpropositional mental representations.²¹ Within this area of inquiry, the distinction between words and concepts carries little weight; indeed classical cognitive science operates with a category “lexical concept”—examples are bird and bachelor—which happily blurs the boundary between word and concept.²² In contrast, many anthropological accounts of conceptual acquisition use the distinction between word and concept as axiomatic.²³ For the Cambridge school historian of political ideas Quentin Skinner, the distinction is n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. On Concepts as Cultural Entities
• 2. “. . . the Fundamental Rights and Liberties of Mankind . . .”: The Architecture of the Rights of Mankind
• 3. “There Are, Thank God, Natural, Inherent and Inseparable Rights as Men . . .”: The Architecture of American Rights
• 4. “The Rights of Man Were but Imperfectly Understood at the Revolution”: The Architecture of Rights of Man
• 5. The Futures of Human Rights
• Index