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Political Sociology and the “Linguistic Turn”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Thomas Childers
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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.

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Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 22 , Issue 3-4 , September 1989 , pp. 381 - 393
Copyright
Copyright © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association 1989

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References

1. Schöttler, Peter, “Historians and Discourse Analysis,” History Worshop 27 (1989): 37–65CrossRefGoogle 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.

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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): 879–907CrossRefGoogle 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), 86–110Google Scholar; and Orr, Linda, “The Revenge of Literature: A History of History,” New Literary History 18 (1986): 1–22CrossRefGoogle 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): 581–609CrossRefGoogle 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

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8. Ibid., 885.

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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), 29–45.Google Scholar

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16. Ibid.

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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

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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), 47–59Google 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

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

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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, 85–86Google 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, 97–128.Google Scholar