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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.

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Articles
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): 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.

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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): 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

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17. Ibid., 61–62.

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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), 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

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

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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