Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T12:20:57.509Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Political Sociology and the “Linguistic Turn”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Extract

As we enter a new decade, it is virtually impossible to pick up a historical journal, browse through a book store, or attend a scholarly conference without confronting the growing presence of “language” or “discourse” in historical inquiry. Explications of, disputes within, and challenges to various literary and linguistic theories, especially poststructuralist approaches, ring out from virtually every corner of scholarly endeavor. Yet, while our counterparts in French, English and, increasingly, American history have taken up poststructuralist theories and methods in dealing with the past, those of us writing German history have remained for the most part caught on a conceptual roundabout, uncertain whether to follow familiar, proven routes or fight through the resistant professional traffic and to take the “linguistic turn” into uncharted territory.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1. Schöttler, Peter, “Historians and Discourse Analysis,” History Worshop 27 (1989): 3765CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In a similar vein, see jütte's, Robert useful “Moderne Linguistik und ‘Nouvelle Histoire,’Geschichte und Gesellschaft 16 (1990): 104–20Google Scholar, which also underscores, albeit without comment, the very muted resonances of such approaches in German historiography.

2. Brunner, Otto, Conze, Werner, Kosselleck, Reinhart, eds., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politsch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, 5 volumes to date (Stuttgart, 1972– )Google Scholar. See also Stierle, Karlheinz, “Historische Semantik und der Geschichtlichkeit der Bedeutung,” in Koselleck, Reinhart, ed., Historische Semantik und Begriffsgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1979), 154–92Google Scholar. See also Berning, Cornelia, Die Sprache des Nationalsozialistmus (Berlin, 1961)Google Scholar: Dieckmann, Walther, Sprache in der Politik (Heidelberg, 1969)Google Scholar; Winckler, Lutz, Studie zur gesellschaftlichen Funktion faschistischer Sprache (Frankfurt a.M., 1970)Google Scholar; and Faye, Jean-Pierre, Totalitäre Sprachen, 2 vols. (Frankfurt a.M., 1977)Google Scholar. Most recently see Ehlich, Konrad, ed., Sprache in Faschismus (Frankfurt a.M., 1989).Google Scholar

3. See Schöttler, “Historians and Discourse Analysis,” 50–51. For Koselleck's response to the criticisms and claims raised by poststructuralist approaches to discourse analysis see his recent article, Linguistic Change and the History of Events,” Journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 649–66.Google Scholar

4. The debates in the historical journals alone are already too numerous to include here. Among the most recent and useful efforts to assess the “linguistic turn” in historical scholarship are Toews, John E., “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn: The Autonomy of Meaning and the Irreducibility of Experience,” American Historical Review 92 (1987): 879907CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jay, Martin, “Should Intellectual History Take a Linguistic Turn? Reflections on the Habermas-Gadamer Debate,” in LaCapra, Dominick and Kaplan, Steven L., eds., Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), 86110Google Scholar; and Orr, Linda, “The Revenge of Literature: A History of History,” New Literary History 18 (1986): 122CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also very useful is the recent exchange between David Harlan and David Hollinger. See Harlan, David, “Intellectual History and the Return of Literature,” American Historical Review 94 (1989): 581609CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hollinger, David A., “The Return of the Prodigal: The Persistence of Historical Knowing,” in the same issue: 610–21Google Scholar. Useful collections of essays are to be found in Hunt, Lynn, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; LaCapra and Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual History; Attridge, Derek, Bennington, Geoff, and Young, Robert, eds. Post-Structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge, 1987)Google Scholar; Veeser, H. Aram, ed., The New Historicism (New York, 1989).Google Scholar

5. Harlan, David, “Intellectual History and the Return of Literature,” 592.Google Scholar

6. Ibid., 585.

7. Toews, John, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn,” 882.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., 885.

9. Hunt, Lynn, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1984), 12.Google Scholar

10. Sewell, William H. Jr., Work and Revolution in France: The Language of Labor from the Old Regime to 1848 (Cambridge, 1980), 11.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Jones, Gareth Stedman, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983), 22.Google Scholar

12. See Hunt, Lynn, “Introduction,” in Hunt, , ed., The New Cultural History, 7.Google Scholar

13. See, for example, Bryan D. Palmer's engaging polemic against what he sees as the “reification of language” and subversion of historical materialism in the new linguistically oriented studies. Descent into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia, 1990)Google Scholar. See also Foster, John, “The Declassing of Language,” New Left Review (1985), 2945.Google Scholar

14. See, for example, Canning, Kathleen, “Rethinking German Labor History: Gender and the Politics of Class Formation”Google Scholar; Linton, Derek, “The Social Construction of Working-Class Youth”Google Scholar; Spohn, Wilfried, “Religion, Politics, and Working-Class Formation in Imperial Germany”Google Scholar; and Crew, David, “Welfare and the State: Some Thoughts on the Wilhelmine and Weimar Comparison,”Google Scholar papers delivered at the DAAD conference, “The Kaiserreich in the 1990's: New Research, New Directions, New Agendas,” held at the University of Pennsylvania, February 23–25, 1990.

15. Scott, Joan Wallach, “On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History,” in Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), 59.Google Scholar

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid., 61–62.

18. Jones, Stedman, Languages of Class, 22.Google Scholar

19. I have endeavored to demonstrate this in the case of the Weimar liberal parties. See Childers, Thomas, “Languages of Liberalism: Liberal Political Discourse in the Weimar Republic,” in Jarausch, Konrad H. and Jones, Larry E., eds., In Search of Liberal Germany (New York, 1990), 323–59.Google Scholar

20. Jones, Stedman, Languages of Class, 96.Google Scholar

21. See, for example, Hunt, Lynn, Politics, Culture, and ClassGoogle Scholar; Furet, Francois, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar; Robin, Régine, Histoire el linguistique (Paris, 1973)Google Scholar; Ozouf, Mona, Festivals and the French Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1988)Google Scholar; Agulhon, Maurice, “Politics, Images, and Symbols in Post-Revolutionary France,” in Wilentz, Sean, ed., Rites of Power: Symbolism, Ritual, and Politics since the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 1985), 177205Google Scholar; Sonenscher, Michael, “The Sans-Culottes of the Year II: Rethinking the Language of Labour in Revolution ary France,” Social History 9 (1984): 301–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Claes, Gregory, “Languages, Class and Historical Consciousness in Nineteenth Century Britain,” Economy and Society 14 (1985): 239–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar; as well as Jones, Stedman, Languages of ClassGoogle Scholar; and Sewell, Work and Revolution in France.

22. See, in particular, Pocock, J.G.A., The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975)Google Scholar; Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1985)Google Scholar; and “Texts as Events: Reflections on the History of Political Thought,” in Sharpe, Kevin and Zwicker, Steven N., eds., Politics of Discourse: The Literature and History of Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1987), 2134.Google Scholar

23. The vast majority of this work has focused on the NSDAP. See Kater, Michael, The Nazi Party: A Social Profile of Members and Leaders, 1919–1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1983)Google Scholar; Childers, Thomas, The Nazi Voter: The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919–1933 (Chapel Hill, 1983)Google Scholar; and the articles of Falter, Jürgen W., “Die Wähler der NSDAP 1928–1933: Sozialstruktur und parteipolitische Herkunft,” in Michalka, Wolfgang, ed., Die nationalsozialistishe Machtergreifung (Paderborn, 1984), 4759Google Scholar; Falter, and Hänisch, Dirk, “Die Anfälligkeit von Arbeitern gegenüuber der NSDAP bei den Reichstagswahlen 1928–1933, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 26 (1986): 209ffGoogle Scholar; Falter, Jürgen W., Lindenberger, Thomas, Schumann, Siegfried, Wahlen und Abstimmungen in der Weimarer Republik: Materialien zum Wahlverhalten, 1919–1933 (Munich, 1986).Google Scholar

24. Among the most creative approaches to local studies are Zofka, Zdenek, Die Ausbreitung des Nationahozialismus auf dem Lande: Eine regionale Fallstudie zur politischen Einstellung der Land bevölkerung in der Zeit des Augstiegs und der Machtergreifung der NSDAP, 1928–1936 (Munich, 1979)Google Scholar; Koshar, Rudy, Social Life, Local Politics, and Nazism: Marburg, 1880–1935 (Chapel Hill, 1986)Google Scholar; Blackbourn, David, Religion, Class, and Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Center Party in Württemberg before 1914 (New Haven, 1982)Google Scholar; and most recently, Fritzsche, Peter, Rehearsals for Fascism: Populism and Political Mobilization in Weimar Germany (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

25. Two of the most impressive recent additions to this literature are Retallack, James N., Notables of the Right: The Conservative Party and Political Mobilization in Germany, 1876–1918 (London, 1988)Google Scholar; and Jones, Larry E., German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System, 1918–1933 (Chapel Hill, 1989).Google Scholar

26. Pocock, J.G.A., Virtue, Commerce, and History, 5.Google Scholar

27. I have developed these arguments in Childers, Thomas, “The Social Language of Politics in Germany: The Sociology of Political Discourse in the Weimar Republic,” American Historical Review 95 (1990): 331–58.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28. See, in particular, Blackbourn, David, “The Mittelstand in German Society and Politics 1871–1914,” Social History 4 (1977): 409–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Caplan, Jane, Government without Administration: State and Civil Service in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar; and Moeller, Robert G., German Peasants and Agrarian Politics, 1914–1924 (Chapel Hill, 1986).Google Scholar

29. See Winkler, Heinrich August, “Die ‘neue Linke’ und der Faschismus,” in Winkler, Revolution, Staat, Faschismus: Zur Revision des historischen Materialismus (Göttingen, 1978), 79.Google Scholar

30. Chartier, Roger, “Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories,” in LaCapra, and Kaplan, , eds., Modem European Intellectual History, 30.Google Scholar

31. White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973), 10.Google Scholar

32. See, in particular, Boak, Helen L., “‘Our Last Hope’: Women's Votes for Hitler – A Reappraisal,” German Studies Review 12 (1989): 289310CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and her “Women in Weimar Germany: The ‘Frauenfrage’ and the Female Vote,” in Bessel, Richard and Feuchtwanger, E. J., eds., Social Change and Political Development in Weimar Germany (London, 1981), 155–73Google Scholar. See also Bridenthal, Renate and Koonz, Claudia, “Beyond Kinder, Küche, Kirche: Weimar Women in Politics and Work,” in Bridenthal, Renate, Grossmann, Atina, and Kaplan, Marion, eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York, 1984), 3365Google Scholar. For a review of the literature on fascism and language, see Childers, Thomas, “The Social Language of Politics in Germany.”Google Scholar

33. Sewell, William, Work and Revolution in France, 11Google Scholar. The potential for such studies is reflected in Lüdtke, Alf, “Wo blieb die ‘rote Glut’? Arbeitererfahrungen und deutscher Faschismus,” in Lüdtke, , ed., Alltagsgeschichte: Zur Rekonstruktion historischer Erfahrungen und Lebensweisen (Frankfurt a.M. and New York, 1989), 224–82.Google Scholar

34. LaCapra, Dominick, Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts, Language (Ithaca, N.Y., 1983), 19, 8586Google Scholar. I am here particularly indebted to the analysis of Kramer, Lloyd S., “Literature, Criticism, and Historical Imagination: The Literary Challenge of Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra,” in Hunt, , ed., The New Cultural History, 97128.Google Scholar