Algorithms and Conceptual History

This essay explores the theoretical questions emerging from the proliferation of digitally mediated forms of social intercourse and their impact on the modern constellation of political and social concepts. While several disciplines have long since begun to address the impact of digital technology on their objects of study, an inquiry into how the semantics of politics and society mutates within contexts regulated by algorithms is still all but absent from the landscape of the history of concepts. The essay aims at laying out a cartography of the theoretical problems that derive from them and that need to be faced and discussed when addressing the technological margins of conceptual history. First it does that by looking for tools and answers in the work of the founders of Begriffsgeschichte, focusing in particular on how the topic of technology has been treated in laying the grounds of conceptual history. Second, it discusses some contributions that have tried to answer to the conundrums exposed above, laying the first fragments of a conceptual history of ‘algorithmic politics’ in its link with the current transformations of State.