Political Theory Takes to the (Word) Cloud

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I have been exploring the field known as “digital humanities” in some of my Swarthmore English classes, and I believe the way scholars are applying digital tools to classic texts is, at the very least, an academic movement conservatives ought to explore.

While working with a web-based text analysis tool called “Voyant” in a Victorian Literature class, I decided to switch gears and investigate some political theory. I was curious to see if search tools like Voyant could effectively shed light on famous political works. I entered the entire digital text of Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France into Voyant and created the following “word cloud”–a collection of the Burke’s most frequent keywords:

As you can see from the relative size of the words in the cloud, the words “men”, “great”, “state”, and “assembly” appear the most throughout Burke’s corpus. Burke uses the term “constitution” 106 times; “authority” appears 100 times; and Burke suggests something “ought” to be in 98 different instances. Burke refers to “nature” in 92 examples. “Property” is mentioned 89 times, “principles” 82 times, and “liberty” 73 times. “Church,” “civil,” and “society” also have impressive frequencies.

Given that Burke is famous for his emphasis on ordered liberty, history, and civil governance, these key words are about what I expected. In this case, using a digital search tool didn’t illuminate any new information per se, but it did provide interesting electronic evidence for conceptualizing classic ideas.

To compare with Burke, I entered Rousseau’s The Social Contract and found the following:

The terms “people,” “state,” and “government” appear with the most frequency. The word “general” (i.e. general will) has 102 hits; “power” has 96 hits; and “body” has 86 hits. Now, obviously word clouds like these don’t reveal the context of these words’ use, although Voyant does allow you to explore those contexts elsewhere on the site. But I do think it’s notable—though, again, not surprising—that Rousseau’s word cloud looks the way it does. Known for his rejection of representative government in favor of the “general will,” Rousseau pivoted toward greater authority concentrated in the sovereign—and we can see that in Rousseau’s obsessive discussion of government, state, and power.

In a final experiment, I entered copied an etext of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.

“Class,” “bourgeois”/”bourgeoisie,” “society,” “proletariat,” “property,” and “production” are Marx’s greatest hits.

Again, we could have predicted that, but the digital representation is a powerful summary.