It has been long acknowledged that the functional differentiation between storage and interface, proposed by John von Neumann, is the essential condition for the self-reproduction of living beings: enabling evolution, the fundamental separation of memory from interaction increases the chances of open systems to withstand the all-devouring entropic pressure of the surrounding universe. However, the interest in the distinction has been very unevenly spread between natural and social sciences. This preliminary study is an attempt to fill the gap, at least in part. Admittedly, the DNA code shares with human language a considerable number of features facilitating preservation and exchange of information. Those include invariance to environment, universality, stability, redundancy, ability to code elementary (1-bit) information and express it in partially ordered messages, rich grammar and hierarchically ordered semantics. To be sure, in the biological world the domination of interface by storage has never been as complete as in the self-reproducing automata envisioned by John von Neumann: the standard direction of information flow (from nucleic acids to proteins) does not - and cannot - exclude the feedback from RNA to DNA. The same reflexivity is even more apparent in culture: while writing and print are usually more conservative and durable then spoken word and hence lend themselves naturally to conservation of canonical information, there is no mandatory and uniform subordination of speech to writing or print in social life. Therefore, it could be argued that culture, unlike nature, relies heavily on second-order practices upholding the differentiation between storage and interface for the purposes of cultural evolution. The whole class of canonical monotheist texts such as Bible or Quran is a poster example of this dynamics, and the final part of this paper seeks to uncover the storage-interface dualism in the monotheist religious communication of the last two millennia.

Hugo Bonin, “At the Sound of the New Word Spoken”: Le mot “démocratie” en Grande-Bretagne, 1770–1920 [“At the sound of the new word spoken”: The word “democracy” in Great Britain, 1770–1920] (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Collection Histoire, 2024), 256 pp. Javier Fernández Sebastián, Key Metaphors for History: Mirrors of Time (Abingdon: Routledge, 2024), 350 pp. Elías J. Palti, Intellectual History and the Problem of Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 284 pp.

This article begins with disputing the teleologically charged notion of unstoppable information growth, pointing at the alternation of informational contraction and expansion in open dynamic systems. Narrowing the focus, it turns to the 20th century totalitarian systems as particularly paradoxical informational environments: Being less capable of processing information than their democratic counterparts and therefore more vulnerable to overloads, they are particularly prone to suppressing informational transmission in some areas, codes and media. Dilution and conflation are singled out as the most common ways of lessening the informational value of communication in totalitarian societies. Whereas the first greatly increases the ratios of signs to messages and messages to interactions, causing redundancy and semantic inflation, the second rolls back preexisting functional differentiations (person vs. social role, sender vs. message, message vs. information etc.) within societies and their communicative system. It is argued that both attempts at semantic impoverishment of public communication in totalitarianism lead to the pathological states, failing to reduce the overall amount of information within the systems in question and precipitating the very informational explosions they were designed to prevent.

Building upon the extended notion of conceptual history as a diachronic study of conceptual interactions, the article begins with deconstructing the paradoxical semantic core of incomparability statements that, it is claimed, endows them with a capacity of stabilizing social semantics. By declaring certain foundational values—positive (Shoah) or negative (God)—“incomparable” and thus immune to the challenges of cross-evaluation, the users of discourse uphold the boundaries of civilized society. On a smaller scale, this exclusion of competitive valuation is undergirded by the ascription of “incomparability” to the small pool of political and cultural figures, literary artifacts, social events, and representative allegories. The conclusion outlines the social contingency of conventions regulating the ascriptions of “incomparability” against the backdrop of their discursive stability across genres, epochs, and languages.

This presentation sketches out three scenarios of information suppression in social environments ravaged by pervasive feelings of insecurity and looming breakup. While containment (common in totalitarian regimes) strives to decrease the amount of information in the system by encouraging redundancy and semantic inflation, escape (typical for populist milieus) results in informational nihilism (information = noise). Inversely, tolerance (common for conspiracy adepts) interprets all signs—and even non-signs—as meaningful cues reinforcing pre-existing beliefs (noise = information). It is argued that these attempts at uncertainty reduction typically lead to pathological states, failing to reduce the overall amount of information within the systems in question.

Drawing upon a wide variety of personality cults in religion, culture and politics from Ancient Egypt to our times, the author attempts to present a summary view of this phenomenon from a communicative standpoint. Personality cult is seen as an attribution of universal and eternal socio-cultural significance to certain beings, messages and interaction scenarios in defiance of changes in and diversity of the surrounding reality. The communicative implementation of such a cult involves the suspension of some of the most basic mechanisms of social coordination. Thus, deification of political, cultural or religious leaders eliminates the subordination of individuals to their social roles, whereas canonization severs the ties of certain selected texts with the contexts of their production and reception. Last, but not least, random signaling between the subject of cultic adoration and his or her subordinates runs counter the standard cooperation rules in interaction ('turn-taking'). Illustrating these points, the article points out at specific communicative pathologies accompanying personality cults and jeopardizing the stability of their socio-cultural environments.

Across the natural and social world, some fairly advanced and apparently robust systems destroy themselves without discernible reason, function, or purpose. Whereas such and similar cases have been discussed within specific branches of scholarships, the attempts to propose and test a general theory of self-destruction in complex systems remain, to our knowledge, a thing of the future. To move in this direction, we suggest that the conflicts between explicit stratification, thorough functional differentiation and tacit segmentation within complex systems, are likely to provoke their unintended self-annihilation. Furthermore, we hypothesize that whenever such systems collapse, it is the circular co-dependency of noisy signaling, redundancy, and semantic inflation that sets self-destructive mechanisms in motion. We illustrate our preliminary findings with examples from social, natural, and artificial life; reexamine autoimmunity as a popular model of systemic self-destruction; and indicate potential avenues of empirical research aimed at supporting, qualifying or disproving the underlying hypothesis.

This article aims to demonstrate that the transition from the mainstream narrative to the interactional history of concepts promises tangible benefits for scholars of social time in general and temporal comparisons in particular. It is shown that the traditionally close alignment of narration with the production of historical consciousness at various levels hinders the study of time as a semantic variable perpetually contested, amended and upheld across society. Alternatively, the references to time made in public settings, allowing for more or less instant reactions (turn-taking) as well as expression of dissenting opinions (stance-taking), offer a much more representative palette of temporal semantics and pragmatics in a given sociopolitical environment. In a particularly intriguing case, the essentially deliberative venue where contestation is supported by both institutional arrangements and political reasons (British House of Commons) is put to test under circumstances commonly known as ‘the post-war consensus’ – the unspoken convention directing opposing political parties to suspend stance-taking regarding the past actions of the government during WWII, its immediate aftermath and its future prospects. As a reliable indicator of this arrangement, the contestation of temporal comparisons between relevant pasts and futures is tested in oppositions reflecting party allegiances (Conservatives vs. Labour vs. Liberals) and executive functions (government vs. opposition) between 1946 and 1952. It is shown that, notwithstanding the prevalence of non-contested statements aimed at preserving interactional coherence and pragmatic functionality of the setting, the moderately active contestation of the adversary’s temporal comparisons in the House of Commons at that time helped all parties, albeit to a different degree, to shape their own political and institutional roles as well as to delegitimize their respective adversaries.

This introduction describes the main themes of the special issue on temporal comparisons. It provides the background for individual contributions by sketching the way in which evaluations are intrinsic to conceptions of historical time. Inasmuch as different configurations of the relationship between past, present and future imply temporal comparisons between ‘now’ and ‘then’, historical time is subject to evaluations that we project onto the differences – or similarities – between the three dimensions. Practices of comparing between and across times pervade all spheres of activity: from high-level theory and historical reflection to the most trivial situations in everyday life. Tracking temporal comparisons is thus a way of exploring the broad middle ground between the consciously elaborated theories about time and the ordinary ways of dealing with time. Our introduction conveys this message in three steps. First, it provides a brief overview of the workings of historical time; second, it introduces the central notion of temporal comparisons while paying special attention to the scales in which they can be studied and their performative character; and third, it gives a quick glimpse into the main contentions of the contributions.

The editors' concluding remarks are aimed at synthesizing the outcomes of the individual chapters, suggesting an interdisciplinary definition of ruler personality cults potentially valid beyond the explored terrain. At the same times, the unsolved problems are highlighted in a way accessible for researchers willing to follow up on interdisciplinary studies of ruler, personality and hero cults.

The article seeks to investigate the interrelation between 1) deification of political, cultural and religious leaders; (2) canonization of their texts; and (3) random signaling between leaders and followers. It is suggested that the latter communicative strategy, radically diverging from the egalitarian interactional norm routinely used in most kinds of societies (turn-taking in both face-to-face conversations and mediated exchanges), reinforces and promotes the essential invariance of leaders and their texts to actual and possible social environments. As a result, both leaders and their texts are increasingly treated as eternally and universally relevant, which, together with other factors, lays communicative foundations for personality cults. The case study underlying this chapter is focused on the three political regimes of the first half of the twentieth century (Soviet Bolshevism, German Nazism, "New Deal" in the U.S.): the respective couplings between the countries' chief executives and foundational texts are Joseph Stalin / Constitution of Soviet Union (1936), Adolf Hitler/ Mein Kampf (1925) and Franklin D. Roosevelt / Constitution of the United States (1788).

This chapter explores ways in which digital methods may help to study the historical semantics and pragmatical uses of comparisons. From the perspective of traditional conceptual history an obvious starting point would be to search for occurrences of the noun »comparison« itself, including its derivatives and synonyms. In this chapter, however, we move beyond single-word searches or collocation studies towards what one might call a computer-assisted »historical semantics of utterances«. In ordinary language most comparisons are indeed »performed« through inconspicuous sentences such as »x is like y« (equations) or »j is better than k« (grading comparisons). When utterances such as these (and not words) are chosen as our minimal unit of analysis, any computer-assisted study of the semantics and pragmaticall uses of comparisons becomes much more complicated. Digitized text corpora have to be specifically tagged, and digital search tools need to be »trained« in order to achieve an error-free identification of the searched for sentences. In this chapter we proceed in three steps. In a first step (section 2) we develop a basic typology of comparative utterances, then delimit our present field of inquiry to one particular type of utterances (temporal comparisons) and identify the crucial semantical / syntactical markers which might enable digital tools to recognize temporal comparisons in digitized text corpora. In a second step (section 3) we apply our typological considerations to an already existing, highly elaborated digitized text base: the Hansard Corpus of British Parliamentary Debates (1803-2005) (HC), supported by the HTST tagger. It is demonstrated how queries have to be formulated in order to achieve valuable and relatively error-free search results. By contrast, in a third step (section 4) our analytical framework is applied to a self-defined text corpus - a corpus of utopias and dystopias ranging from Thomas More's »Utopia« (1516) down to Adam Sternbergh's »Shovel Ready« (2014). We explain the laborious process of digitizing and tagging the corpus by using a freely available tagger (Corpus Workbench), then describe several rounds of queries and finally evaluate the search results. It turns out that these are relatively weak and defective, compared to those achieved with the Hansard Corpus and the HTST tagger, as well as compared to a »traditional«, hermeneutical way of filtering out comparative utterances. Hence, our contest between »man« and »machine« ends with a draw. While well-established corpora and refined tools may render valuable results in some cases, the balance is more mixed when corpora are self-defined and tools are less sophisticated: in these cases we still need to carefully weigh up the advantages of speed provided by digital tools against the amount of preparatory work and the rate of errors to be corrected manually.