Re-imagining the Cambridge School in the Age of Digital Humanities

Abstract

Recent work on the history of political thought, exploiting digital resources, is challenging the idea that empirically and hermeneutically minded political scientists must work independently in silos. Work by students of the Cambridge School and work by textual data miners are showing the way toward a new hermeneutical circle-one in which empirically and hermeneutically minded political scientists can use digital resources to analyze diverse texts and make groundbreaking discoveries on relationships between textual uses of language and political change. I analyze this new trend toward different sorts of political scientists using digital resources to study ideas, to outline underlying paradigms relating language and politics in these respective fields, and to consider how they could be brought into productive conversation. I then consider how such conversation would enrich subdisciplinary understandings of the role of language in politics. Ultimately, I use this analysis to generate a broader model for how empirically and hermeneutically inclined political scientists can benefit from collaboration in the age of digital humanities.