dr. H.D. (Hugo) Hogenbirk

Modern Worldviews and Culture Wars - A Transnational Conceptual History

I work on the 2023 the Dutch Research Council (NWO) funded collaborative project: 'Modern Worldviews and Culture Wars', led by Todd Weir. This project seeks to answer the question: How did “worldview” develop into a key concept in academia, policy, and public debate in the twenty-first century in the US, UK, the Netherlands and Latin America? It seeks to answer this question by investigating the formative power of culture wars in shaping modern thought, politics and religion. It is a transnational and multilingual project, that traces the history of worldview from its popularization in nineteenth-century Germany, to its invocation by Dutch and North American Christian thinkers, to its use by political ideologies such as National Socialism, and finally to its contemporary usage in Latin America in the context of emergence of Indigenous activism.

Within this project, I act as a philosopher and computational linguist. I analyze both public and elite uses of ‘worldview’ using historical semantics. Semantic changes are correlated with changes in the social function of ‘worldview’, providing a view of the relation between conceptual and social change.