This chapter uses digital humanities approaches to discover the computational signature of the idea of government in the British eighteenth century. Data mining techniques are applied to the large dataset Eighteenth Century Collections Online in order to ascertain the precise composition of the idea of government and to track its evolution over the entire century. The connections between government and despotism are explored in the concluding argument.

Can the claim that the United States of America was founded on the principles of republicanism? This chapter uses digital humanities approaches and the tools developed by the Cambridge Concept Lab to pose this question, and it concludes that such a contention must be false. The chapter demonstrates that the idea of republicanism, as an ideology or set of beliefs about the nature of government and society was not availlable to the colonists at the time of the founding.

This chapter uses methods in text mining in order to trace the history of the idea of liberty between 1600 and 1800. It seeks to investigate the standard account of this idea developed most rigorously by Quentin Skinner over many years. Using quantitative methods and the tools created by the Cambridge Concept Lab, it discovers a slightly different history from the standard accounts that complements and augments that history.

This chapter models the idea of economic growth in the period of the Enlightenment in Britain. Using methods developed in the Cambridge Concept Lab, it demonstrates that the ideas of improvement and progress supported the slow evolution of the notion of economic growth as a necessary good. It tracks the thinking of the philosopher and political economist Adam Smith as he formulated his ideas with respect to size and operation of modern capitalist economies.

This chapter outlines a novel method for discerning the structure and history of concepts and their aggregation as ideas. Based on the analysis of co-ocurrence data in large data sets, the method creates a measure of ‘binding’ that allows one to inspect the larger constellations of words and concepts that comprise ideas which can be tracked diachronically. The chapter also describes the method used for ascertaining the ‘binding’ between concepts, and for modelling ‘ideas’. A detailed account of how the ‘shared lexis tool’ was built is also included.

This book explores the ways in which computational techniques for text mining can contribute to the history of ideas. Traditional approaches to intellectual history are based on the careful, close scrutiny of texts and contexts, reading at a human scale in order to construct lines of transmission and genealogies of ideas. These approaches have served us well: the history of political thought, for example, has established deeply researched canons of texts and writers that are widely accepted as being in dialogue with each other. Over the last twenty years, however, the migration of analogue archives to digital corpora has opened up the possibility of reading at scale, creating the conditions for inspecting the transmission of ideas across hundreds of thousands of texts. Most of these texts have been deemed too obscure or insignificant for sustained close attention, and they remain at the outer margins of our standard histories of ideas.

Eighteenth-century readers of Longinus were particularly impressed by the style and verbal resonance of the text. A number of passages became almost conventional topoi for the display of a commentator's learning and appreciation, many of which were known in the fine English translations.

Longinus suggests that there are five sources of the sublime [Longinus], and these are much discussed and debated throughout the eighteenth century. See below part V in which Blair's comments represent one of the critical strands of this debate in which all but the first two sources are diminished as of real importance in the analytic of the sublime. There is, however, another strand to this discussion in which the rhetorical analysis of tropes and figures takes on far greater importance thereby creating an understanding of the sublime in terms of its discursive and figurative formation.

Another topos in the Longinian text for extensive commentary begins “So the space between Heaven and Earth” in section IX. This distinction in conjunction with images of terror leads Smith to cite Milton's sublimity:

Preoccupation with distance is a hallmark of eighteenth-century visual aesthetics, and can be found in writings on art as well as landscape. Within the analytic of the sublime distance is related to size [Hume] so that far-off objects appear to be less threatening or terrifying. Hume, however, makes the opposite case in his invocation of esteem and admiration, thereby giving a greater value to distant objects. Hume also considers temporal as well as spatial parameters and makes an important and early case for the historical imagination.

The movement from low to high [Hume] is also a pretty constant feature of the sublime tradition, unsurprisingly given the tendency to think of mountains when contemplating the sublime. Similarly the elevation of the soul is associated with the gradual ascent from the human towards the divine and furnishes the discursive analytic with another well-worn figuration. It is for this reason that, by association, virtue, riches and power [Hume] become cyphers for the sublime. This will present problems at both the ethical and political levels since some forms of power and wealth cannot be ethically sanctioned within the mainstream of civic humanism. The Scottish enlightenment attempts to square this circle, most obviously in the work of Smith, but the moral goodness of wealth and power nevertheless remain problematic.

In this movement from low to high it sometimes happens that difficulty is encountered [Hume]; given this the concept of difficulty itself comes under scrutiny and is gradually associated in and of itself with the sublime effect.