This chapter examines a core hypothesis of the intellectual historian Reinhart Koselleck: that modern political concepts underwent an accelerated period of change during the latter half of the eigheenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries, a period he calls the ‘Sattelzeit’ or hinge period of intellectual history. Adapting word embedding models and metrics of novelty and the pace of change, this chapter helps to measure, visualise and disentangle the precise semantic transformations occuring at this threshold period: the consolidation of Koselleck’s ‘collective singular’ noun, for example, appears alongside a host of other cultural, technological, intellectual innovations in word usage. Finally, the data reveal not one but two revolutionary semantic periods between 1720 and 1960, a finding which both troubles the concept of a Sattelzeit while also extending it into new discursive, historical – and digital – contexts.

This introductory chapter clarifies the methodological approach that will be applied in the intellectual history that follows. It differentiates between conceptual history and history of ideas and explains why the method adopted lies between them. On the one hand, a conceptual history is impossible, because the word “recognition” is rarely used in the different cultures under investigation, which employ different words to describe the same relation between two subjects, for instance “amour propre” in French and “sympathy” in English. On the other hand, this book is more than a simple history of ideas, because it compares the different cultures in order to reconstruct one and the same concern, namely how to understand the relations between subjects after the decline of the feudal order, in which these relations were taken as stable and unchangeable.