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OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 15/03/19, SPi
L I N G U I S T I C T U R N S , 1890 – 1950
Linguistic Turns,
1890–1950
Writing on Language as Social Theory
K E N H I R S C H KO P
1
1
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© Ken Hirschkop 2019
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First Edition published in 2019
Impression: 1
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for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
To my father, Ray Hirschkop

Preface and Acknowledgements
This book was inspired by something I was researching, something I was teaching,
and something that annoyed me. The research was on M. M. Bakhtin: in the
course of looking at his intellectual trajectory, I could see there was a distinct
moment in the late 1920s when he turned what had been an ethical philosophy
into a theory of discourse and novelistic style. In a brief period of time, the archi-
tectonics of moral experience became the dynamics of prose style, the dangers of
Kantian theory became poetic monologism, and the moral force of his earlier phil-
osophy became a property of certain kinds of language. I had heard of ‘linguistic
turns’: now I was seeing one in person. Everyone who reads Bakhtin thinks the
force invested in what he called ‘novelistic discourse’ is extravagant; I realized that,
to some extent, that force had been transplanted.
At about the same time, my teaching responsibilities included introducing
students to the works of Saussure. Like any responsible teacher, I thought about
how to make this as interesting as possible for the students (and, I suppose, for
myself as well). This quest led me to look into the history of Saussure’s work in
general linguistics and the process whereby what had been a few lecture courses
became a central work in the human sciences. Saussure thought of language as a
social institution; I therefore should not have been surprised to learn that some of
his ideas about language were not, strictly speaking, linguistic in origin, but had
been borrowed from other spheres of social theory: from sociology, crowd theory,
social contract theory, and neoclassical economics. When Saussure revolutionized
the study of language, he was writing about language, but never just language, in
the sense that one can never write about the structure of any social institution in
complete isolation.
What annoyed me was quite straightforward. The advent of structuralism and
post-structuralism in the humanities had led to a great deal of confident, excited
talk (in which I was a very willing participant). Much of that talk was about how
language mediated between ourselves and the world around us, how it structured
that world for us by means of its ‘differences’, how it could disguise or hide the very
process of structuring, and how its inner slipperiness meant we could no longer be
certain of very much. Over time these claims became more elaborate—people
working in literature, political theory, history and cultural studies would adopt an
account of language and then use it to make substantial historical claims or polit-
ical claims in their discipline, as if theories of language (Saussure, Wittgenstein,
speech act theory, Foucault) had political or social affiliations. We probably don’t
need much in the way of examples here. Lyotard’s argument against grand narratives
in The Postmodern Condition appealed to and relied on Wittgenstein’s philosophy.1
1 ‘[T]he observable social bond is composed of language “moves”’, Jean-François Lyotard,

The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 11.
viii Preface and Acknowledgements
Judith Butler thought the idea of the performative, drawn initially from speech act
theory, together with Foucault’s concept of discourse, demonstrated the fragile
nature of identity in general and gender identity in particular, with serious conse-
quences for feminist and queer politics.2 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe
argued that post-structuralist theories of signification—artfully combined with a
certain reading of Gramsci—demolished Marxist claims for the primacy of prole-
tarian struggle in political revolutions.3 Gareth Stedman Jones claimed if you took
the linguistic turn seriously enough, you arrived at a different interpretation of
eighteenth-century political radicalism.4 In some cases, writers told us both that it
was impossible to grasp the world yet possible to grasp—to understand—how and
why language made it impossible to grasp the world. Given what I’d figured out
concerning Bakhtin and Saussure, I was coming to realize that people were able to
draw political tendencies and conclusions out of accounts of language because the
accounts already had political and social ideas embedded in them. You couldn’t
talk about language without talking about a great deal else.
There was a moment when I thought I would do something quite polemical in
relation to what annoyed me, but that moment passed, happily, and I knew that
I needed to look not at the theories of language that were circulating around me, but
at the theories that had got the ball rolling at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The more I looked into the matter, the more interesting and urgent it became. For
the early twentieth century was also the moment in Europe when societies had to
figure out what to do about the democratization of their political and social worlds
and how to square this democratization with the ever more popular idea of the
political nation-state. Language itself was involved in that crucial political struggle,
but it also had become a way to think about that struggle, to think about what a
nation was, what consent was, how we made collective decisions, or didn’t, and
what the basis of a democratic social order might be. The extravagance of the
investment Bakhtin had made in language and the extravagance of the investment
structuralists and post-structuralists were making in language suddenly had a
potential source—and I had a potential thesis.
Elaborating that thesis and finding evidence to support it turned out to be a
rather lengthy endeavour. I already had Bakhtin and Saussure to hand, and any
study of linguistic turns had to reckon with analytic philosophy, which had given
us the phrase ‘linguistic turn’ in the first place. I didn’t have to look hard for more
linguistic turns; in fact, I hardly had to look at all. Several figures I’d been interested
in all along—Walter Benjamin, the Russian linguist G. O. Vinokur, Gramsci—
were implicated in the phenomenon I’d just framed for myself and many others
were a single degree of separation from the writers I’d assembled (Cassirer, Russian
2 Thus: ‘This theoretical inquiry has attempted to locate the political in the very signifying practices
that establish, regulate and deregulate identity.’ Signifying practice, in its turn, was a theory of
language drawn from the world of post-structuralism, mostly Foucault. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble
(New York: Routledge, 1990), 147.
3 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985).
4 Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘The Determinist Fix: Some Obstacles to the Further Development of the
Linguistic Approach to History in the 1990s’, History Workshop Journal 42 (1996): 19–35.
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
Futurism and Formalism, Ogden and Richards, Sorel). I could have gone on
adding names to the list indefinitely.
To many friends and loved ones, this appeared to be my plan. I have to thank
them in the first place for persuading me that it was not a good plan. Several of
them helped bring the project to a conclusion by agreeing to read the manuscript
in part or as a whole. Individual chapters (or early papers that eventually became
chapters) were read by Craig Brandist, Mika Lähteenmaki, Galin Tihanov, Terry
Eagleton, Patricia Marino, Harsha Ram, Tony Crowley, Richard Hogg, Bruce
Robbins, Rebecca Tierney-Hynes, Paul Hamilton, and Jonathan Doering. Each
provided me with detailed criticism and useful suggestions about where to look
next and often they pushed me to think harder about matters I’d tried to finesse.
Nigel Vincent read Part I in its entirety and gave me the benefit of his wide-ranging
erudition, but he also alerted me to linguistic traditions I’d been unaware of, saved
me from some foolish generalizations, and prompted me to calibrate my rhetoric
to the matter at hand. Sascha Bru read the manuscript in its entirety and knew
right off the bat what I was trying to do: his generous advice helped broaden the
horizons of the work, sharpened its argument, and helped me be bolder when
being bold was called for. John E. Joseph, my wonderful reader for OUP, responded
to the project with notes and advice that were erudite, insightful, sympathetic, and
witty: his careful and demanding engagement with the text made the process
of revising it rewarding and even enjoyable. Scott McCracken read through the
manuscript several times, often at disturbingly short notice: his pointed and
shrewd criticisms, combined with his unwavering belief in the project as a whole,
shaped the work profoundly and have put me eternally in his debt. It would have
been a different, much poorer book without him.
Papers based on the research have been delivered at Manchester Metropolitan
University, the University of Salford, Lancaster University, Stirling University, the
University of Sussex, New York University, Yale University, Queen’s University
(Ontario), the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the Toronto Semiotic Circle, and at
many conferences. In every case, colleagues listened carefully and made excellent
and thoughtful suggestions about what to do next, not all of which, regrettably,
I could follow up. As will become abundantly clear in the following pages, I cannot
claim to be expert in any of the fields I’ve covered, save the work of Bakhtin. Given
the range of what is attempted here and, frankly, the difficulty of the project, I have
depended, even more than usually, on input and criticism from a wide range of
colleagues in humanistic scholarship. As ever, my name is on the cover, but the
project is collective. Nevertheless, where there are errors and hasty, ill-advised
conclusions, the blame lies with me.
Of course, one needs collegiality of the day-to-day kind, and for this I want to
thank my colleagues at the Universities of Manchester and Waterloo, who offered
warm support and a stimulating environment—I’ve greatly enjoyed working
with them and I want to offer particular thanks for the intellectual companionship
of David Alderson, Richard Kirkland, Howard Booth, Tony Crowley, Kevin
McGuirk, Randy Harris, Michael McDonald, Win Siemerling, and Rebecca
Tierney-Hynes. I want also to offer thanks to the many librarians who have helped
x Preface and Acknowledgements
me directly and indirectly in my work, including those at: the British Library;
the libraries at the Universities of Manchester, Waterloo, and Toronto; McMaster
University Library; Houghton and Widener Libraries at Harvard; Helsinki University
Library; Sterling Library at Yale; and the Russian State Library in Moscow. Without
their intelligence and dedication, the scholarship necessary for a project like this
would be impossible. One needs space to work and think, of course—those libraries
and my home provided much of the space, but many of the ideas in this book
depended on time in the Jet Fuel coffee shop in Toronto (thanks to the staff there)
and long walks with the dog in nearby Riverdale Park (thanks to the City of
Toronto).
At an early stage of the research, the Leverhulme Trust granted me a research
fellowship that allowed me to focus on this research for a full academic year: I’m
grateful to them for this invaluable aid and for their continued support for
scholarship in the humanities.
Authors provide text; publishers create books. This one was created by the
excellent work of my editors at Oxford University Press, Jacqueline Norton and
Aimee Wright, my production managers Alamelu Vengatesan and Seemadevi
Sekar, and my patient copyeditor Joanna North. My deepest thanks to them and
the other people who made this book.
I have enjoyed working on the book: quite a lot, to be honest. Those around me,
I have reason to believe, have enjoyed it a good deal less. I thank my partner Joanne
Hurley for supporting what seemed to be a crazy, endless project and for giving me
a reason to look forward to every day. My children Jacob and Roisin urged me to
finish, occasionally evinced interest in the work, and made the last several years a
boundless, undeserved pleasure. I am fortunate to have the support and love of my
sister and her partner, as well as the joy of knowing my brother and his. The efforts
of my family have been complemented by the kindness and patience of many
friends, who kept my spirits up and my confidence high. I can’t name them all, but
you know who you are, though you don’t know just how much you’ve done for me
over the many years.
Parts of Chapter 5 were previously published in the journal Modernist Cultures,
as ‘Language in 1910 (and after): Saussure, Benjamin and Paris’; they are repro-
duced with permission of Edinburgh University Press though PLS Clear. I want to
thank the editors, Andrzej Gasiorek and Deborah Longworth, for kindly giving
the material its first airing.
Contents
Note on Translations and References xiii
1. Introduction: Linguistic Turns as Social Theory 1
PA RT I . O R D E R
2. ‘Grammar, for example, can only be studied in the crowd’:
Reason, Analogy, and the Nature of Social Consent 29
(Ferdinand de Saussure)
3. The Ship of Logic on the High Seas of Discourse 53
(Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, a little Gilbert Ryle)
4. Saussure and the Soviets 105
(S. I. Kartsevskii, G. O. Vinokur, L. Iakubinskii)
5. On the Diversity—and Productivity—of Language 128
(M. M. Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Saussure)
PA RT I I . M Y T H
6. Do They Believe in Magic? The Word as Myth, Name, and Art 159
(C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards, Frege, George Orwell, Bakhtin, Saussure)
7. Myth You Can Believe In 184
(Ernst Cassirer, Viktor Shklovskii, Velimir Khlebnikov,
Roman Jakobson, Benjamin)
Excursus: Reversing Out—Sorel’s Heroic Myth, Gramsci’s Slow Magic 237
8. High Anxiety, Becalmed Language: Ordinary Language Philosophy 247
(Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin)
Conclusion: Motorways and Cul-de-Sacs—What the Linguistic
Turns Turned To 271
Bibliography 285
Index 315
Note on Translations and References
I have used existing English translations for all texts in French, German, and
Italian, except where none are available. If the translation has been amended in any
way, this is indicated in the notes. Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics has two
existing translations, an early one by Wade Baskin and a later one by Roy Harris.
I have used Harris’s in almost all cases, but where Baskin’s is preferred I mention
this in the accompanying note.
Translations from Russian are my own, though I have naturally benefited from
the existing ones. The complicated case is, of course, Bakhtin’s. Almost every
existing English translation has relied on a Russian text that we now know was
severely edited or censored, owing to a number of circumstances. I’ve therefore
translated from the recent scholarly edition of Bakhtin’s works, the Sobranie
sochinenii [Collected Works], published between 1996 and 2012 in Moscow under
the editorship of S. G. Bocharov, except where the text in question was a book
published during Bakhtin’s lifetime, i.e., the books on Dostoevsky and Rabelais.
For all Bakhtin translations the first page reference will be to the Russian text I’ve
used, the second to an available English translation, details of which I provide in
the notes.
1
Introduction
Linguistic Turns as Social Theory
We talk and write incessantly, and some of our talking and writing is devoted to
the language we use when doing it. But there are times when talk about language
expands and acquires a new urgency, leading to dramatic changes in the way we think
about it. The moment when rhetoric flowered in ancient Athens and Syracuse was one
such episode; the explosion of interest in the origin of language in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Europe was another. Such sudden intensifications of concern
are provoked in part by changes in the condition and form of language itself, but
they reach fever pitch because in these moments language is invested with larger
worries: worries about new forms of communication, about the relationship of
discourse to politics, and about the existence and nature of the social order itself.
To adapt a comment of Antonio Gramsci’s, every time the question of language
surfaces, ‘it means that a series of other problems are coming to the fore’.1
This book is devoted to a recent moment of this kind. In the last decades of the
nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, a striking number of intel-
lectuals in Europe were gripped by the sense that confusions about language were
everywhere and everywhere responsible for both local intellectual disorders and
larger social ones. They believed that language itself was fundamentally misunder-
stood and that its significance for the society around them had been fundamentally
misunderstood as well. They responded by executing a series of ‘linguistic turns’, in
which they both reorganized their intellectual fields around language and argued
for a new understanding of language itself. The results—in philosophy, in linguistics,
in literary criticism, in anthropology, in political theory—were dramatic and
long-lasting. But scholars have tended to examine these turns in isolation, as
episodes in the development of individual figures and disciplines. In this book we
look at these turns in concert, as a whole, as a comprehensive reconceptualization
and revaluation of language in the modernist moment.
Scholars have not examined the turns in concert because they have not thought
about 1890 to 1950 as a historical moment of linguistic turns. They have typically
understood it as the moment of ‘the linguistic turn’, in the singular, executed
uniquely in philosophy. Even the philosophers whom we now credit with this
1 Gramsci, in the original, refers specifically to the problem of an Italian ‘national language’; Antonio
Gramsci, Selections from Cultural Writings, trans. William Boelhower (London: Lawrence & Wishart,
1985), Prison Notebook 29, §3 (183).
2 Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950
turn—some combination of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein,

and J. L. Austin—did not know that was what they were doing at the time, though
they felt they were doing something revolutionary. It was only in 1952, when the
dust was beginning to clear, that Gustav Bergmann observed that ‘[o]f late philoso-
phy has taken a linguistic turn’.2 Bergmann thought the advance guard of what was
then called ‘linguistic philosophy’ had transformed the discipline by means of
(as Bergmann later put it) a ‘fundamental gambit as to method’: the conviction
that philosophers should ‘talk about the world by means of talking about a suitable
language’.3 From the final decades of the nineteenth century through the early
decades of the twentieth, philosophers in England and Austria had recast familiar
philosophical issues as problems with language: in order to understand what an
object was, what it meant to be responsible, or what it meant to know something,
one had to understand the word ‘object’, the word ‘responsibility’, and the verb ‘to
know’—understand either by logical analysis or by an assessment of how it is used.
The change prompted the rise of a ‘linguistic philosophy’ that thought of itself as
revolutionizing the discipline; for several decades it looked like the move that
would finally set philosophical discussion on the right path.
But at the same time that Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein wondered about the
nature of logical symbols, the literary critic Viktor Shklovskii cried for the ‘resur-
rection of the word’, the native metaphoric energy of which was being slowly
dissipated by habit. Seeing words, hearing words, apprehending them in their
original density would make not only for better art, he claimed, but better every-
thing else as well: the resurrection of the word would also be ‘the resurrection of
things’.4 Shklovskii’s plea for the powers of the word would find itself comple-
mented by developments in the study of language proper, in which Saussure
argued that linguists had not been looking at language at all, but at a confused
and disordered set of facts. Saussure would redirect the attention of linguists
(and, when his text reached Russia, literary critics) to a new object, ‘language in
general’, which would have a systematic form and shape no one had acknowledged
before. When Wittgenstein’s Tractatus—the book destined to become the old tes-
tament of analytic philosophy—was published, C. K. Ogden (who would trans-
late the Tractatus into English) and I. A. Richards began work on a critique of the
‘word magic’ that was making normally sane and rational Europeans do crazy
things. As they were preparing a study of ‘symbolism’ that would destroy the
magical force of language, Ernst Cassirer, the accomplished neo-Kantian philoso-
pher of science, was concluding that a systematic philosophy of the modern age
should take the shape of a ‘philosophy of symbolic form’ that would explain the
power of magic as well as the force of language. As its second volume came out,
Antonio Gramsci, the Secretary of the Italian Communist Party and former
advanced student in historical linguistics, was imprisoned by Mussolini; in the
2 Gustav Bergmann, ‘Two Types of Linguistic Philosophy’, Review of Metaphysics 5.3 (1952): 417.
3 Gustav Bergmann, ‘Strawson’s Ontology’, Journal of Philosophy 57.19 (1960): 607.
4 Viktor Shklovskii, Voskreshenie slova (St Petersburg: Z. Sokolinskago, 1914), 1. Translation: ‘The
Resurrection of the Word (1914)’, in Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt (eds.), Russian Formalism
(Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1973), 41.
Introduction: Linguistic Turns as Social Theory 3
eleven remaining years of his short life, he would demonstrate that linguistics
offered a model for the working of political leadership and ideological change.
Left-wing politics would also find inspiration in a philosophy of language in the
work of Walter Benjamin, although Benjamin’s conception of language and his
conception of political commitment were as different from Gramsci’s as could be.
There is perhaps no more confused assimilation of philosophy of language to
politics than that propounded by Bakhtin, who spent a decade on a mammoth
project of ethical philosophy, which he then, in the space of a couple of years,
rewrote as a theory of ‘novelistic discourse’ in the late 1920s.
It’s a remarkable constellation of thinkers, all of whom decide within a relatively
brief span that they need the study of language to solve problems that are discip-
linary and theoretical, but not only disciplinary and theoretical. Since Benjamin
himself made the concept of a ‘constellation’ theoretically respectable, though, we
have tended to forget that constellations were originally instances of reading too
much into coincidental facts, of projecting human conceptions onto the indiffer-
ent and random appearance of the stars. Is the simultaneous appearance of so
many linguistic turns also a coincidence? It could be: but the wager of this book is
that it is not. And if the argument works, then we need to look at these turns, up
till now seen and interpreted in isolation, in a very different light. From within
each discipline or sphere, a linguistic turn appears to be the fruit of sustained
reflection on a set of issues unique to that discipline, be it logic, linguistics, or liter-
ary criticism; it’s a moment of intellectual insight and progress, even revolutionary
progress. If we see the same turn, however, as one element of a constellation, it
appears in a different guise. Maybe one field turns to language to solve problems
peculiar to its discipline. When several do, when attention to ‘language’ is simul-
taneously the key to advance in philosophy, to the revitalization of literature and
literary criticism, to neo-Kantian philosophy of culture, to the reform of English
political thinking, to the renewal of European communism and syndicalism,
something else is going on.
In the period from 1890 to 1950 ‘language’ didn’t just attract the attention of a
couple of stray but innovative thinkers—it seized the imagination of intellectuals
throughout Europe. A couple of the resulting romances—the turn in analytic
philosophy, the rise of linguistic structuralism—are well known because they left
a great many progeny, but others—short-lived, childless affairs—have been neg-
lected. That not every turn was equally successful lends weight to the suspicion
that intellectual issues were not the only thing urging a greater role for language.
That even the successful, ‘productive’ turns had an endpoint is perhaps even more
telling. At its inception the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy was regarded as
an irrevocable step forward, but we see now it was an historical moment. When
Russian Formalists turned literary criticism into the theory of poetic language,
they thought they had put criticism on a respectable, scientific path, and for a
while it seemed they were right. As late as 1982 a confident Paul de Man would
equate literary theory itself with ‘the introduction of linguistic terminology in the
metalanguage about literature’; but then Theory itself would stall, and the linguis-
tic turn in literary criticism would give way to a cultural turn, to political criticism,
to psychoanalysis and the love of literature.5 The linguistic turns we will explore look
like on-ramps to scientific progress, but the path they take turns out to be circuitous:
not a useless detour but a route which is nevertheless eventually abandoned.
Many linguistic turns, but not, as it happens, many turns to a single object. For
one of the most curious features of this constellation is that, although each writer
claims to have grasped the necessity of confronting language, the word, the sym-
bol, in all its intractability and complexity, each writer has a quite different idea of
what language is. Language will be a system to some, a form of behaviour to others,
a sphere of symbols conveying logical ideas (imperfectly) to another group, a set of
tools, pictures, or games to Wittgenstein, depending on when you asked. Even
Bergmann, when he first named ‘the linguistic turn’, had to admit that ‘[f ]rom this
common origin two distinct types of linguistic philosophy have developed’ that,
though courteous to each other, lacked ‘mutual appreciation’.6 There is, in short,
firm agreement on the need to get to grips with language and to acknowledge that it
is not a mere medium of communication, and equally firm disagreement on what
sort of thing language might be instead.
This odd difference of perspective, however, makes more sense if we think of
‘language’ not as an object to which one turned, but as a problem that compelled
or demanded attention. In the early twentieth century language became a problem,
not only in the intellectual sense of being hard to comprehend, but also in the sense
that it was causing problems, serious problems of a social, cultural, political, and
philosophical kind. What the linguistic turns of the time share is not a definition
of language, but anxieties and hopes that coalesce around it, that seem to stick to
it and express themselves through it. In the period of European modernism language
became invested with new possibilities—with an extraordinary force, for good or
ill. A force that demanded some kind of assessment and reckoning, an engagement
with a ‘language’ that had somehow lost its way.
The predicament is neatly captured in the title of Walter Benjamin’s notorious
1916 essay, ‘On Language as Such and Human Language’. It’s as if the language
that confronts the intellectuals of the time is internally ruptured, turned against
itself, imbalanced or out of whack. Benjamin would contrast the immediate
power of what he called pure language with the human language that had fallen
‘into the abyss of the mediateness of all communication, of the word as means, of
the empty word, into the abyss of prattle’.7 The complaint that language had been
drained of its native force would be echoed by Shklovskii, who regarded the lan-
guage we actually spoke as a thin, insipid medium, robbed of its ‘poetic’ magic.
Writers like Wittgenstein or J. L. Austin would point their fingers in a different
direction (at other philosophers for the most part) and talk about the ways in
5 Paul de Man, ‘The Resistance to Theory’, in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1986), 8.
6 Bergmann, ‘Two Types of Linguistic Philosophy’, 417.
7 Walter Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, in Selected Writings:
Volume 1, 1913–1926, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1996), 72. I have altered the translation of the title, as ‘Human Language’ seems to me preferable to
the antiquated phrase ‘Language of Man’.
which our language was led astray, although they would only hint at the larger
ramifications. Whereas for someone like Heidegger no ramification could ever be
large enough: he therefore spoke urgently and melodramatically of the need ‘to
regain the unimpaired strength of language and words’, because ‘the misuse of
language in idle talk, in slogans and phrases, destroys our authentic relation to
things’.8 Idle talk, slogans, and phrases were commonly mentioned dangers, pressing
practical issues that demanded a response. But what is distinctive and striking is
that in nearly every instance the language to which writers turn lacks coherence
or ontological consistency, as if language, however conceived, possessed both an
inner elegance and a set of bad habits from which it had to be forcibly weaned.
Language had acquired a certain density, but it was not inert or thing-like: on
the contrary, it appeared as something with inner tendencies and pressures, which
could push it in one direction or another. Its analysis, therefore, was never merely
contemplative: it was always the struggle for a certain kind of language and a certain
form of lucidity, a struggle which would unlock a force, coherence, and lucidity
lying within language itself.
The forcefulness of language was not entirely its own: some of it was, so to
speak, borrowed. Look, for example, at the justification for philosophy’s linguistic
turn made by one of the field’s most prominent figures, the American philosopher
W. V. O. Quine, who suggested in his book Word and Object that ‘[w]ords, or their
inscriptions, unlike points, miles, classes, and the rest, are tangible objects of the
size so popular in the marketplace, where men of unlike conceptual schemes com-
municate at their best.’9 Philosophy had been marred by constant skirmishing and
fruitless battles between competing Weltanschauungen (world-views); focusing on
words would make philosophical discussion civil and progress possible. But the
language in which Quine talks about language is telling: the civilizing force language
exerts is that of the marketplace, and markets, according to Quine, are spheres of
peaceable human interaction, where the logic of commerce renders ideological dif-
ference moot. What looks like a turn to mere words, to the stuff of language, is in
fact an appeal to language-as-a-market, an appeal to language because it’s a market
and an appeal to markets as a way to keep the peace. That appeal had some history
behind it. As the political philosopher Pierre Rosanvallon has pointed out, in the
nineteenth century the market emerges as the model for ‘a self-regulating civil
society’, in which the impersonality of transactions replaces all political authority,
political struggle, and political will.10 One could therefore appeal to the market as
an alternative sphere of public authority, an alternative to the strife and drama of
politics. Quine’s opening line in Word and Object had been ‘Language is a social
art.’11 But to describe the manner and mode of language’s social being, to describe
what kind of society language might be—and what pressures that society would
8 Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1959), 13–14.
9 W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 272.
10 Pierre Rosanvallon, ‘The Market, Liberalism, and Anti-Liberalism’, in Democracy Past and Future
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 53.
11 Quine, Word and Object, ix.
bring to bear on the discussions of philosophers—he had had to go beyond language,

calling on the resources of social theory.
Not everyone was as forthright as Quine. Some writers turning to language—
Wittgenstein, Cassirer, Shklovskii, for example—invoked concepts of social theory
rarely and obliquely; others—say, Ogden and Richards—thought a linguistic turn
would have a direct payoff politically and socially. Where intellectuals didn’t bor-
row concepts or theory, however, they borrowed force and tension, a force and
tension that language could embody, host, or refract, depending on how one
imagined the ‘social art’ of language related to the larger social world surrounding it.
Which is to say that while it is no doubt true that the ‘language’ writers turned to
had problems, was in some sense distorted or awry, these problems were not just
its own problems. The disagreements that Europe’s linguistic turns were supposed
to resolve were inevitably couched in terms of an intellectual discipline, but the
continent on which they took place was racked by a kind and level of disagreement
that threatened its very existence. In the early twentieth century the ruptures,
forces, and inconsistencies that defined language, that made it compelling and fas-
cinating, stand metonymically for ruptures and inconsistencies that seem to plague
the European body politic, ruptures expressed in certain specifically linguistic
phenomena to be sure—in novelties like the radio broadcast, the mass newspaper,
the talkie film, state propaganda—but in no way exhausted by them.
Metonymically: which is to say, part for whole, cause for effect, container for the
contained, and so on. Metonymically: as when Ogden and Richards would point
to the way word magic or myth was inflaming the newly enfranchised masses; or
Shklovskii and Orwell to the way cliché and habit were wearing away our linguistic
attentiveness; or Sorel to how parliamentary wrangling was weakening the resolve
of the working class; or Saussure to how language itself was conservative and
impossible to revolutionize. In each case, there is a genuine linguistic issue with
powerful discursive forces in play, but also something more—the absorption of
larger social and political problems into language, not because a society is ‘like’ a
language (though we find that kind of metaphoric modelling, too) but because the
sociopolitical ruptures and forces of the day work themselves out in part through
language. Metonymically, finally, because this seems to me the right way to think
about the relationship language has to the social world (and by extension, linguis-
tic theory to social theory) in general. If I may lay a few of my theoretical cards
on the table (not all: this is seven-card stud for theorists) I believe an adequate
philosophy of language, one grounded in social theory, doesn’t think of language
as a reflection of the social world, a function of it, or something ‘caused’ by it, but
as an institution which is always ‘part’ of it, but not always part of it in exactly the
same way. Metonymy is the figure that fits that bill.
LANGUAGE AND THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY
What kinds of social ruptures? Studies of European modernism—its literature,

music, visual art, emerging popular culture—invariably refer to one or more ‘crises’
of the early twentieth century. The description is obviously justified: this is, after
all, the time in which Europe tore itself apart in two massive wars, inflicted con-
tinuous suffering on the peoples who lived in its colonies, witnessed the emer-
gence of political movements like feminism and civil rights, and discovered the
mass media and the modern city. Even its rare moments of political ‘normality’
are haunted by Walter Benjamin’s apt observation ‘[t]hat things “just keep on
going” is the catastrophe’.12 But a crisis is also a crossroads or turning point, a
moment for decision, and the crisis relevant here is a particular decision that
European societies continually made and then remade, obsessively, in the first half
of the twentieth century. For they needed to make, but could not make, a decision
about ‘democracy’.
In Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century, Mark Mazower notes that democ-
racy was not, current triumphalism notwithstanding, ‘rooted deeply in Europe’s
soil’.13 It was, in fact, extraordinarily fragile in the period between 1918 and 1939,
when its institution was at best halting and unconvincing, and when support for
democracy and its principal mechanism, the parliament, often turned out to be
less than half-hearted. The short-lived Weimar Republic, from the outset a kind of
messy compromise with few real adherents, continually under threat from the
socialist Left, the aristocratic ‘Junker’ Right, and the newly emerging fascist
movement, was the poster-child for this kind of anaemic democracy.
Matters had initially looked more promising. When the Russian, Austro-
Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires tumbled, opening the door to the establish-
ment of new ‘national’ democracies, elaborate constitutions provided a framework
for new nations. Constitution-making aimed, in Mazower’s words, ‘to “rationalize”
power and sweep away the inconsistencies and irrational residues of the old feudal
order’.14 The paradigmatic form would be the democratic republic affirming the
sovereignty of the people and vesting their power in a strong parliament: this kind
of arrangement sprung up, with variations of emphasis, in postwar Germany,
Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Greece, Ireland, and Hungary, among other
places. In those countries that already had parliamentary rule, the pressure for
democracy took the form of extensions of the suffrage and the rise of independent
working-class movements. In Britain the business begun in the Reform Acts of the
nineteenth century continued into the twentieth century, as universal male suf-
frage was granted in 1918 and a powerful and militant feminist movement pushed
for the rights that would be granted in 1928. By the beginning of the First World
War, extensions to the franchise had doubled or even tripled the electorate in
Belgium, Finland, and Norway, while universal manhood suffrage had been
granted in Austria and Italy.15 Such developments, as Eric Hobsbawm has noted,
12 Walter Benjamin, ‘N [Re the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress]’, trans. Leigh Hafrey and
Richard Sieburth, in Gary Smith (ed.), Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1989), N9a, 1 (64).
13 Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Allen Lane, 1998), xi.
14 Mazower, Dark Continent, 5.
15 Figures from Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1995), 85–6. For a vivid account of how Habsburg Empire voters embraced their recently granted
‘were viewed without enthusiasm by the governments that introduced them’,

which sought various means of controlling the newly enfranchised ‘people’.16
Democracy, or democratization, was not, however, only a matter of parliamentary
democracy. It also meant the entrance of popular groups, working-class or agrarian,
onto the political scene in other ways: through the creation of mass parties and
unions, through strikes and demonstrations (often the catalyst of constitutional
change), through new cultural institutions—newspapers, theatres, educational
associations, and the like—that created the basis for a kind of ‘mass’ urban culture
that did not yet need the assistance of media technologies. And, in this context,
‘urban’ is as important a qualifier as ‘mass’, for this was a culture centred in
European cities that grew dramatically and that spawned the great working-class
neighbourhoods that would become centres of political action and resistance in
the twentieth century. The emerging twentieth-century democracy was not a
democracy of peasants, who coexisted, in Marx’s famous phrase, like potatoes in
a sack, at once similar and separate, but a democratic movement that drew its
strength from urban patterns of association.
‘By the 1930s’, however, ‘parliaments seemed to be going the way of kings.’17 It
turned out that there were other ways to organize modern European societies than
parliamentary democracy, and these forms could accommodate ‘mass’ society in a
more authoritarian manner: some would even claim to be more democratic than
the parliamentary regimes they displaced. Nations and their peoples remained, but
liberal democracy ‘might have to be sacrificed if the Nation was to survive’.18 There
was Communism in Russia and the other Soviet Socialist Republics, fascism in
Germany and Italy, and a variety of right-wing authoritarian regimes in Hungary,
Spain, Portugal, and elsewhere. The new fascist regimes differed from the classic
monarchical-aristocratic regimes in their embrace of mass politics and populist
ideologies. Those who railed against parliamentary rule and its messy procedures
invoked not just the good of the Nation, but the principle of democracy itself in
their arguments. Thus Georges Sorel would rail against parliamentary socialists for
defanging popular struggles best expressed by violent acts, and Carl Schmitt would
insist that ‘the distinction between liberal parliamentary ideas and mass democratic
ideas cannot remain unnoticed any longer’.19
Schmitt’s example reminds us of something else: democracy itself had its ambi-
guities. Conceived of as the political expression of nation-building projects, as the
means by which a people asserted its political right and power, it could easily take
a decidedly illiberal or racist form. Schmitt argued that the principle of democracy
entailed a unified ‘people’ or demos, not the wrangling of parliamentary parties,
and that ‘dictatorial and Caesaristic methods not only can produce the acclamation
rights, see the marvellous opening of Pieter M. Judson’s The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 1–4.
16 Hobsbawm, Age of Empire, 86. 17 Mazower, Dark Continent, 2.
19 Carl Schmitt, ‘Preface to the Second Edition (1926): On the Contradiction between
Parliamentarism and Democracy’, in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 2.
of the people but can also be a direct expression of democratic substance and
power’.20 The problem was not merely one of Schmitt’s fantasizing. As Mazower
points out, ‘the new democracies tended to be exclusionary and antagonistic in
their ethnic relations’: states built on the basis of nationality inevitably spawned
national minorities which appeared prima facie to be threats to national unity.21
The problem was not confined to the newer democracies, either: in the 1890s
France had shown just how uncomfortable its elites were with the modern society
on its horizon when it tore itself to pieces in the Dreyfus affair. That democracy
didn’t imply any kind of liberal respect for different nationalities, or any kind of
‘multicultural’ thinking about citizenship or nationhood was made clear in the
treatment accorded to Jews in modern Europe. Mazower again:
Because democracy was about the creation of national communities, it was generally
anti-Semitic, or at least more ready to allow anti-Semitism to shape policy—through
separate electoral colleges, for example, or entry quotas into the universities and
civil-service posts—than old-fashioned royalists had been.22
How to handle this mass society, a society full of urbanized people, working and
lower middle class, now educated and enfranchised, ready to participate, in one
way or another, in the cultural and political life of the nation? Modern Europe
could not make up its mind.
In this context, the question of democracy was more than a matter of deciding
on appropriate government institutions or procedures. It was the question of social
and political order itself, the urgent matter of figuring out how to maintain order
and cohesion in societies that had been rendered dynamic and unruly by the pol-
itical and economic transformations of the nineteenth century. Rosanvallon has
described these changes as leading to ‘the extension, and one might even say the
unleashing, of the political’, that is, a burdening of political life with new tasks it
must assume when the old ‘natural’ order has been dissolved by capitalism and
political revolution.23 The entrance of ‘the people’ onto the political and social
stage makes the social order itself amorphous, even unrepresentable:
The people is like Janus: it has two faces. It is at once a danger and a possibility. It
menaces the political order at the same time as it grounds it [ . . .] Whence the central
problem: it is at the very moment that the principle of popular sovereignty triumphs
that its face, in a sense, becomes problematic.24
The result is an endless anxiety—one that haunts us still—about the constitution of
the social order itself. For ‘the people’ both define the substance of the nation and
yet appear to ruling classes as an unpredictable and destabilizing force within it.25
20 Schmitt, ‘Parliamentarism and Democracy’, 17. 21 Mazower, Dark Continent, 41.

23 Pierre Rosanvallon, ‘Toward a Philosophical History of the Political’, in Democracy Past and
Future, 61.
24 Pierre Rosanvallon, ‘Revolutionary Democracy’, in Democracy Past and Future, 84–5.
25 On current anxieties about how democracy is rendering societies ungovernable, see Jacques
Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2009).
If we go back to the beginning of this period, when anxieties about the social
order and the role of the people within it were intensifying, we see that several
intellectuals concerned with language make an interesting move. In the late nine-
teenth century, after the Paris Commune, a few linguists make the novel claim
that language has always been ‘of the people’. ‘Universal suffrage has not always
existed in politics; it has always existed in the domain of language’, claimed the
nineteenth-century French linguist, Arsène Darmesteter.26 If it had, linguists
were not always willing to recognize it. Carita Klippi has shown how Darmesteter,
Michel Bréal, and Victor Henry gradually made popular usage the test of what
belonged to ‘the language’, displacing an earlier belief in the priority of written
sources and standard forms.27 This ‘linguistic communism’, as Pierre Bourdieu
dubbed it, was not without its ambiguities.28 On the one hand, it broke with the
prescriptivist idea—embodied in earlier dictionaries and guides to elocution—
that popular usage tended to degrade or corrupt a language that had, at an earlier
point in time, been purer or more logically structured. At the same time, it could
be taken to imply that because language was the product of collective activity,
everyone in that collective played an equal role in determining its shape and sub-
stance. It is, of course, the reflected image of the problem facing democratizing
nations. The political community of the nation was expanding until it included
most of its adult citizens; ‘language’ was expanding so that it represented the
speech of more or less the same group. It was this isomorphism that made it pos-
sible for problems in the political and social field to be represented and worked
through as problems in the linguistic field.
LANGUAGE AND THE PEOPLE IN

T H E N I N E T E E N T H C E N T U RY
Of course, the identification of language with nation and people was nothing new:
it had been established by an earlier generation of language-obsessed intellectuals,
the comparative philologists of the nineteenth century. For ‘language’ lay at the
centre of the nineteenth century’s intellectual universe as well. The invention of
comparative philology as a method and a discipline by Friedrich Schlegel, Franz
Bopp, Rasmus Rask, and Jacob Grimm gave the study of language both an empirical
and scientific character and a strikingly practical orientation. On the one hand,
comparative philology produced a method: linguistic forms, at both the phonetic
and the morphological level, would be explained as the result of systematic, often
‘lawlike’ historical change, change which could be charted by careful observation
26 Arsène Darmesteter, The Life of Words as the Symbols of Ideas (London: Kegan Paul, Trench &
Co., 1886), 109.
27 Carita Klippi, ‘Vox populi, Vox Dei: The “People” as an Agent of Linguistic Norm’, Language &
Communication 26 (2006): 356–68.
28 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language’, in Language and
Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1991), 43.
and arguments that were open to empirical checking and refutation. The results of
comparative philology would be elaborate, scientific accounts of the genealogy and
development of the world’s languages. On the other hand, although its source
materials came from language that was variable and constantly changing, its con-
clusions centred on distinct ‘languages’, with a comprehensible internal structure.
During the springtime of nations, this could not be an innocent gesture. Possession
of a distinct language with a well-attested history appeared to be a sine qua non of any
group aspiring to independent nationhood in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Europe. So while comparative philologists created the history of Europe’s languages,
those languages were codified and purified in grammatical studies and historical
dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary, Littré and Grimm among them, and
lovingly refined in novels, now thought of as elements of a ‘national’ literature.
That these two strands of the comparative philological project could not be
disentangled, that the political dimension could not be fenced off from scientific
aspirations is evident from one of the most detailed and thoughtful histories of the
period, Anna Morpurgo Davies’s Nineteenth-Century Linguistics. The story Morpurgo
Davies wants to tell is of the emergence of a ‘data-oriented linguistics’, in which
‘progress was seen as defined by the accumulation of concrete results and by the
diminishing number of unsolved problems’.29 But as Morpurgo Davies herself
demonstrates, this project can never quite shake off something one would have
hoped was alien to it: ideas of cultural nationalism, aspirations to tie one’s own
language to a distinguished ancestor, the desire to link the genealogy of languages
to the movements of distinct ‘peoples’ across Europe and Asia. At the beginning,
Friedrich Schlegel’s 1808 book On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians will
open with ‘a purely linguistic demonstration of the genealogical links between
Sanskrit and the other languages [ancient European ones, KH]’, but these will be
followed by Orientalist disquisitions on Indian philosophy and speculations on the
migrations of peoples.30 Schlegel will also initiate both a commitment to the
typological classification of languages—in his case, an overarching distinction
between organic and mechanical languages—and the evaluative conviction that
one class of language is culturally or epistemologically superior to the others (a
pattern that will work itself all the way down to Cassirer, as we shall see later).
Franz Bopp, the first to hold an institutional chair in the subject of ‘general linguistics’
will, in the careful words of Morpurgo Davies, ‘create a working style which
survived when some of his assumptions and his conclusions had gone out of fashion
or had been forgotten’.31
And then, of course, there is Jacob Grimm, author of the comprehensive Deutsche
Grammatik of 1819–40, collector of folklore, co-discoverer (with the Dane,
Rasmus Rask) of systematic phonetic change, and ardent German patriot. On the
one hand, a man wholly devoted to the detailed empirical examination of all things
29 Anna Morpurgo Davies, History of Linguistics, Volume IV: Nineteenth-Century Linguistics

(London: Longman, 1998), 19.
30 Morpurgo Davies, Nineteenth-Century Linguistics, 70.
German; on the other hand, a scholar who believed, as Morpurgo Davies notes, ‘in
a direct link not only between the history of words and the cultural and historical
development of a nation but also between the development of the more structured
parts of language and that of culture in the broadest possible sense’.32 ‘Our lan-
guage’, Grimm asserted, ‘is also our history’: this meant, in practice, that appar-
ently technical features of the Germanic languages reflected the distinguishing
characteristics of the Germanic peoples.33 So, for example, the phenomenon of
Ablaut—when variation in a root vowel corresponds to a grammatical distinction,
such as English swim/swam—was not only described as ‘a fundamental and exclu-
sive characteristic that runs through all the German languages and distinguishes
them from most others’ but also as ‘the form in which the spirit of the German
language appears’.34 Grimm’s most famous technical discovery, known as Grimm’s
Law or the Grimm–Rask Law, was given a similar cultural spin. Grimm had
discovered a series of systematic shifts in consonants between Greek and Gothic
(a precursor of modern German), which was followed by a shift in the same con-
sonants between Gothic and Old High German in the Middle Ages: among them
would be the shift from Greek p to Gothic f and then High German v or the shift
from Greek t to Gothic th and then Old High German d.35 The latter shift would
help create the split that defined German, but it did more than that, for it was
‘connected with the violent progress and craving for freedom found in Germany
at the beginning of the Middle Ages’.36 In the meantime, Grimm’s German com-
patriots will suggest new typologies of language, of which the best known may be
Wilhelm von Humboldt’s distinction between inflecting, agglutinative, and isolat-
ing languages (roughly speaking: languages that mark grammatical distinctions
with a suffix that may modify the root, languages that mark each distinction with
a separate, fully-formed morpheme, and languages that rely on word order and
prepositions to do the job). Here, too, the structure of language is meant to reflect
or embody the spirit of the nation that uses it. And while, according to Humboldt,
‘nations, as such, are truly and immediately creative’ in the languages they make,
each presumably in their own way, there are more and less impressive ways in
which to be creative.37 Agglutination, for example, works by a ‘compounding used

33 Jakob Karl Ludwig Grimm, On the Origin of Language [1851], trans. Raymond A. Wiley (Leiden:
Brill, 1984), 20.
34 Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, Vol. 1 (1819 edition), 546 and Vol. 2, 73, as quoted and
translated in Kevta E. Benes, ‘German Linguistic Nationhood, 1806–66: Philology, Cultural Translation,
and Historical Identity in Preunification Germany’ (PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 2001),
112, 113.
35 In order to illustrate these shifts more easily we can substitute Latin for Greek and English for
Gothic (because Latin and Greek shared much of the same sound system and English retained the
Gothic consonants that changed in Old High German). Thus Latin pater becomes English father and
German Vater, while Latin tu becomes English thou and German du.
36 Jacob Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, vol. 1 (1848), 416, as quoted and translated in
Morpurgo Davies, Nineteenth-Century Linguistics, 139.
37 Wilhelm von Humboldt, On Language: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and its
Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind, trans. Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1988), 42.
as inflection, an inflecting, therefore, deliberate but not brought to perfection—a

more or less mechanical adding, not a truly organic accretion’.38
What binds sonorous claims for national character to the minute, scientific
business of detailed linguistic observation? The thread that stitches them together
will be belief in the ‘genius’ or peculiar spirit of a language. As Christiane Schlaps
has shown, the earlier idea that each language had a distinctive ‘genius’—a pattern
of grammatical forms, a characteristic lexicon—was repurposed in the nineteenth
century as an explanation of each language’s historical development: its ‘genius’
was now ‘a personified driving force behind the teleological historical development
of a language’, dictating the direction a particular language’s evolution would take.39
Grimm could thus speak of how the ‘eternally vigilant genius of language’ causes it
to ‘choose’ certain forms of expression over others and allows it to heal whatever
wounds the accidents of history may visit upon it.40 The phonetic changes charted
by comparative philology took place behind the backs of the language’s speakers,
even though the language had no other existence except as the output of speakers.
If these changes were not to be random, one needed some collective entity, some-
thing supra-individual, to ground them. The genius or spirit of a language—Grimm’s
term is Sprachgeist—provides a principle of development, a force within language
that can easily be allied or even merged with a national spirit or character.
We ought to stop and take note, however, of the collective entity that isn’t selected
by the comparative philologists to guide language: the modern European state. We
ought also to take note of the irony that the state is elided from the theory of lan-
guage precisely at the time when it becomes rather important to actually existing
languages in Europe. The dictionaries and the literary culture so central to the
establishment of national languages were the work of civil society for the most
part—cultural intellectuals working in universities or independent writers. But the
state also had a significant role in the definition, spread, and maintenance of a
national language, by virtue of the systems of state education minted in the late
nineteenth century. Insofar as literacy was the first order of business in public edu-
cation, states had to decide what sort of language had to be imparted to the young
citizenry. Which is to say that the state had a directive role in language (as did the
intellectuals of civil society), guiding its development and evolution consciously
and thoughtfully.41
38 Humboldt, On Language, 106. Grimm’s position was more complicated. While he regrets the
loss of inflections that produces the Romance and Germanic languages out of Latin and Gothic, he
argues that inflected languages ‘had to yield to the striving for a still greater freedom of thought’ made
possible by the use of prepositions and particles. Grimm, On the Origin of Language, 21.
39 Christiane Schlaps, ‘The “Genius of Language”: Transformations of a Concept in the History of
Linguistics’, Historiographia Linguistica 31.2–3 (2004): 376.
40 Jacob Grimm, ‘Über das pedantische in der deutschen sprache’, Kleinere Schriften I (1864), 340,
quoted in Schlaps, ‘The “Genius of Language” ’, 378.
41 On the establishment and directing of ‘standard English’ see Tony Crowley’s brilliant study,
Standard English and the Politics of Language, 2nd edn. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
On the role of literary French in the education system, see Etienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey,
‘On Literature as an Ideological Form’, in Robert Young (ed.), Untying the Text (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1981), 79–99.
That kind of collective activity finds no echo in the work of comparative

philologists in part, of course, because they are mesmerized by the seemingly
organic cultures of the past (ancient Greece, Rome, Persia, India). The hegemony
of ancient cultures, however, was slowly being eroded, as the atomized nature of
modern Europe became clearer and sharper, throwing the lack of social order into
relief. You can see this dawning recognition in the theoretical programme of the
so-called Neogrammarians of the 1870s and 1880s. In what is usually regarded as
their manifesto, the preface to the first volume of their Morphological Investigations
(1878), Hermann Osthoff and Karl Brugmann argued that the laws and processes
of linguistic development that governed the modern vernaculars were the very
same as those that governed the classical tongues—Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and the
hypothetical Indo-European mother language. Rather than focus attention on the
reconstruction of languages long gone, the comparative linguist should learn
about language by examining its recent history in ‘fields like Germanic, Romance
and Slavic’, where there was not only a continuous record of textual material but
also a connection ‘with genuine popular speech, with the common language of
communication and colloquial speech’.42 This was justified by a ringing endorse-
ment of the linguistic present. Comparative linguistics had to be guided by two
principles:
first, that language is not a thing which leads a life of its own outside of and above
human beings, but that it has its true existence only in the individual, and hence
that all changes in the life of a language can only proceed from the individual
speaker; and second, that the mental and physical activity of man must have been at
all times essentially the same when he acquired a language inherited from his ances-
tors and reproduced and modified the speech forms which had been absorbed into
his consciousness.43
Olga Amsterdamska has cleverly described the Neogrammarian move as a ‘philo-
sophical “equalization” of ancient and modern languages’: the idealized notion of
an original language organically rooted in a stable culture would no longer provide
the model of a language.44 In fact, the equalization decisively tilted the field in
favour of the modern present, or, to be more precise, a particular conception of the
modern present. To say that language had its true existence only in the individual
and that change originated with the individual speaker was to dissolve any particu-
lar language into millions of distinct utterances, was to say that, in truth, languages
themselves had no real boundaries and were miracles of collective coordination,
guided who-knows-how by some mysterious mechanism. Hermann Paul, the
acknowledged theoretician of the Neogrammarians, would accordingly define ‘[t]he
true object of philological study’ as ‘the entire sum of the products of the linguistic
42 Hermann Osthoff and Karl Brugmann, ‘Preface’, Morphological Investigations in the Sphere of the
Indo-European Languages (Leipzig, 1878), in Winfred P. Lehmann (ed.), A Reader in Nineteenth-Century
Historical Indo-European Linguistics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), 200, 201.
43 Osthoff and Brugmann, ‘Preface’, 204.
44 Olga Amsterdamska, Schools of Thought: The Development of Linguistics from Bopp to Saussure
(Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1987), 139.
activity of the entire sum of individuals in their reciprocal relations’.45 Having

defined the object of his attention as something so mutable, amorphous, and com-
plicated as to be virtually impossible to take in, he at once admitted that the best
one could hope for would be ‘to get a general idea of the play of the forces at work
in this huge complex’.46
In the face of such atomism and the conviction, shared by Osthoff, Brugmann,
and Paul, that a modern unhistorical psychology was the key to understanding the
acts of individual speakers, the Neogrammarians retained a conservative conception
of their discipline. When Brugmann composed one of the last great comparative
compendia, his Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages, he intro-
duced its discussion of eleven ‘indo-germanic’ tongues with the claim that: ‘The
science of the Indg. [Indo-germanic, KH] languages forms, like Indg. Mythology,
a section of Indg. “Philology”, i.e., of that science, which has to investigate the
intellectual development of the Indg. peoples from the time before their separation
up to the present day.’47 Like mythology, because language and myth are but differ-
ent media or expressions of the culture of a people, here thrust back in time so that
the Indo-Germanic language family has an imaginary ‘national’ correlate. However
willing he was to think of language as disordered and individualized, for Brugmann
‘linguistics is not a separate discipline but a research area within the various philo-
logical fields’, which will remain divided on national-cultural grounds.48
The contradiction did not go unremarked upon. Michel Bréal—prominent
linguist, coiner of the term ‘semantics’, and notable Dreyfusard—appreciated the
scientific achievement of comparative philology, but was scathing about the
nationalism that deformed it. In comparative philology, as he put it ‘[t]he mystical
theory and the naturalist theory [. . .] gradually amalgamated’.49 It’s thus no accident
that Bréal’s short article ‘Is Linguistics a Natural Science?’, published as an appen-
dix to his Essay on Semantics, was in fact an abridged version of a piece with a sig-
nificantly different title, ‘Language and Nationality’, for nationality was the secret
‘intellectual’ substrate of the nineteenth-century conviction in the lawlike nature
of linguistic change.50 To claim that a language was national was, Bréal realized, to
make a claim not just about the scale of the collective that supported it, but about
the unconscious form of that collective as well. The principle of nationality, he
observed, was used by peoples ‘to subordinate their destiny to that of ancestors
long since dead, and to diminish any freedom and reason which the world has
45 Hermann Paul, Principles of the History of Language, trans. from the 2nd edn. by H. A. Strong
(London: Swan Sonnenschein, Lowrey & Co., 1888), 2.
46 Paul, Principles, 3.
47 Karl Brugmann, Elements of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages, Vol. I:
Introduction and Phonology, trans. Joseph Wright, (London: Trübner & Co., 1888), 1. ‘Indo-Germanic’,
coined in 1823, described the family of languages that we now know (thanks to a later coinage) as
‘Indo-European’. See also Benes, ‘German Linguistic Nationhood’, 65.
48 Amsterdamska, Schools of Thought, 136.
49 Michel Bréal, ‘Language and Nationality’, in The Beginnings of Semantics: Essays, lectures and
reviews, ed. and trans. George Wolf (London: Duckworth, 1991), 202.
50 George Wolf, translator of ‘Language and Nationality’, points out that the abridged version was
published as ‘La linguistique est-elle une science naturelle?’ in the 6th edn. of the Essai de sémantique;
Bréal, ‘Language and Nationality’, 199n.
managed to gain’.51 Unsurprisingly, belief in the national character of language

exhibited ‘a fundamental disdain for reason. A certain caste pride was mixed in: the
notion of privileged races, including of course one’s own, was not be shunned.’52
Bréal was ready to acknowledge that linguistic order had to be made, created by
a collective of individuals, that there was no natural principle, national or racial,
that could ground it. A people would therefore shape their language not by swim-
ming with the tide of some spontaneously evolving spirit but by means of a collect-
ive ‘intelligence, hidden and yet so alert, which takes advantage of the smallest
accidents to furnish thought with new resources’.53 The grammatical categories
and lexical richness of language are, for Bréal, the fruit of human reason, which
slowly but surely perfects its most precious instrument, discarding words and cat-
egories that are useless, while creating those it needs and desires out of the historical
stuff it inherits. Perfection and improvement arise from a process of collective hit-
and-miss, as the product of countless individual acts of speech, the happy result, as
he put it, ‘of thousands, of millions, of billions of furtive attempts’, culminating in
a linguistic instrument both reasonable and orderly.54 In this respect Bréal figures
as a crucial transitional or intermediary figure. He thought of languages as the
expression of collective will, but a will that arises from countless and apparently
random interactions, an intelligence that is no one’s in particular.
‘ L A N G U A G E I N G E N E R A L’ I N
T H E T W E N T I E T H C E N T U RY
What, then, is the moment that separates the nineteenth century’s prodigious
investments in language—as a model of evolutionary historical change and a
resource for nationalism—from the linguistic turns of the early twentieth century?
We could describe it as the moment when one no longer takes the orderliness and
homogeneity of language for granted, when the unleashing of the political enters
the heart of language, turning its shape and cohesiveness into a problem that must
be solved. It could be described in disciplinary terms, as the moment when the
obsession with ‘language’ migrates from the cultural world of philology, folklore,
and nationalism to the somewhat different spheres of psychology, philosophy,
logic, and literary criticism. But we can also define this dramatic break concretely,
metonymically if you will, as the moment when Bréal’s young colleague, Ferdinand
de Saussure, realizes with a sinking heart that he’s going to have to put aside his
work on Indo-European languages in order to examine something quite different
51 Bréal, ‘Language and Nationality’, 215.

52 Bréal, ‘Language and Nationality’, 202. For a strikingly vigorous and sympathetic account of
Bréal’s critique, see Hans Aarsleff, ‘Bréal vs. Schleicher: Reorientation in Linguistics during the Latter
Half of the Nineteenth Century’, in From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and
Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 293–334.
53 Michel Bréal, Semantics: Studies in the Science of Meaning, trans. Mrs Henry Cust (New York:
Dover, 1964), 86.
54 Bréal, Semantics, 7.
and more worrying, ‘language in general’. The realization comes in an oft-quoted

letter Saussure writes to Antoine Meillet in 1894:
Ultimately, the only aspect of a language that interests me is its picturesque or quasi-
ethnographic side—what distinguishes it from others as the property of a particular
people with certain origins. But I have lost the pleasure of unreservedly devoting
myself to such study [. . .]
The utter inadequacy of current terminology, the necessity of reforming it and, in
order to do that, of demonstrating what sort of object language is, continually spoils
my pleasure in philology, even though I have no dearer wish than not to have to
concern myself with the nature of language in general.55
In the past lies the tradition of comparative philology in which Saussure had
been trained and which he clearly enjoys—the ethnographic examination and
appreciation of particular languages; pressing towards the future, the demand to
confront ‘language in general’. Just ploughing ahead in the existing manner is not
an option, because Saussure knows it is ‘necessary to show the linguist what he is
doing’ (and also knows it will be ‘an enormous amount of work’).56 He will ruminate
on ‘language in general’ in a series of notes in the 1890s and in some lectures at the
University of Geneva, but come to no firm conclusions. He will be forced to con-
front it again when the death of a colleague at the University of Geneva compels
him to deliver three series of lectures on ‘general linguistics’ between 1907 and
1911. In the last of these lecture courses, Saussure will begin by admitting, that
language ‘is manifested in an infinite diversity of languages’ and ‘[o]ne must there-
fore begin with what is given: languages; then, draw out what is universal: the
language [la langue]’.57 But though Saussure makes it sound as if he’ll assemble ‘the
language’ from the features of particular languages, by mere abstraction, this will
turn out to be impossible. For the linguist is immediately faced with the obstacle
‘that there is no homogeneous entity which is the language, but only a conglomer-
ate of composite items’.58
Hermann Paul and his colleagues had seen the problem—how does this activity
called language hang together, what are the forces at work in it?—without quite
admitting the seriousness of it. Saussure would start by admitting there was a prob-
lem and would never let anyone forget it. In the notes he made for a book on
general linguistics in 1893–4, he confessed that ‘language does not in any of its
manifestations present a substance, but rather combined or isolated actions of
55 Ferdinand de Saussure, Letter to Antoine Meillet, 4 January 1894, translated by Gregory Elliott
in Françoise Gadet, Saussure and Contemporary Culture (London: Hutchinson Radius, 1989), 19.
56 Saussure, Letter to Meillet, 4 January 1894, 19.
57 Ferdinand de Saussure, Lecture of 4 November 1910, in Robert Godel, Les sources manuscrites
du Cours de Linguistique Générale de F. de Saussure (Geneva: Libraire Droz, 1969), 77. The content of
Saussure’s three lecture courses in general linguistics is known from detailed notes taken by various
students. For the two later courses (1908–9, 1910–11), there are two different sets of notes now avail-
able. While I quote here from Godel’s reconstruction of the course, based on the notes taken by one
G. Dégallier, hereafter I’ll refer to a later, fuller reconstruction of the course based on notes by Emil
Constantin (which were not available to Godel).
58 Ferdinand de Saussure, Saussure’s Third Course of Lectures on General Linguistics (1910–1911),
ed. Eisuke Komatsu, trans. Roy Harris (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1993), Lecture of 4 November 1910, 6a.
physiological, physical, or mental forces’.59 No substance, no readily available object:

instead the place in which a series of different forces, not necessarily commensur-
able with one another, intersect. Therefore there would be no ‘luminous synthesis
of the language system, starting out from a given principle’; language ‘can only be
understood with the help of four or five principles, intertwining constantly’.
Saussure knew he was navigating unknown and uncertain territory: in a book on
‘language in general’, ‘each paragraph must be set like a solid object planted firmly
in the marsh, marking the route both forward and backward’.60
To cut a path through the marsh, one would have to be brutal and decisive; to
Saussure’s enduring credit he was, despite some well-documented hesitations.
Linguistics would have to reorientate itself around this new object, la langue—
variously translated as ‘the language’, ‘the language structure’, and ‘the language
system’—which was by no means an abstraction from the composite, amorphous,
endlessly changing universe of langage. It represented the system of language as it
existed in the instant when one spoke or understood something spoken: more
precisely, it was the system, the order or set of relationships that made it possible
to say something or understand something in the first place. The order was, Saussure
would have been the first to admit, something of a fiction: he could never say
exactly where this system was to be found (in the mind of a single speaker, as the
average of a community of speakers, in dictionaries and grammars?).61 One could
only find it by cutting away a great mass of linguistic underbrush, which would
henceforth be declared either a matter of ‘external’ linguistics (political factors,
cultural and ethnological matters, questions of migration and geography) or ‘dia-
chronic’, i.e., relating to the constant mutations that change the system from one
instant to the next. The new object would set linguistics on a new and productive
path, from which it has, in many respects, not strayed since Saussure’s time.62
It’s a linguistic turn within linguistics: a linguistic turn, and not just a change of
scientific paradigm (in Kuhn’s sense), because it looks to ‘language in general’ for
forces that will somehow order the composite, heterogeneous world of speech. For
all the talk of objectivity and science, la langue, as we’ll see in the following
chapters, is not a state of language, but a way of directing and guiding the force of
59 Ferdinand de Saussure, ‘Notes for a Book on General Linguistics, I (1893–1894)’, in Writings in

General Linguistics, trans. Carol Sanders, Matthew Pires, and Peter Figueroa (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 136.
60 Saussure, ‘Discourse as a site of modifications—Organization of this book’, in Writings in General
Linguistics, 65.
61 In the Course in General Linguistics, la langue is described as: ‘a collection of necessary conventions’
(9); ‘some sort of average’ (13); ‘the sum of word-images stored in the minds of all individuals’ (13); ‘a
storehouse filled by the members of a given community’ (13); and what is represented in ‘dictionaries
and grammars’ (15). These translations are taken from Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics,
trans. Wade Baskin (London: Fontana, 1974). In presenting Saussure in English I will sometimes use
Baskin’s translation, sometimes the later one by Roy Harris (London: Duckworth, 1983), and sometimes
an amended version made in consultation with Tullio de Mauro’s critical edition (Cours de linguistique
générale, ed. Tullio de Mauro (Paris: Payot, 1985).
62 The extent of Saussure’s influence in American linguistics is a matter of dispute. On the indi-
genous sources of American ‘descriptivism’, see Julia S. Falk, ‘Saussure and American Linguistics’, in
Carol Sanders (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Saussure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 107–23.
language. Nor will Saussure pretend that this language system is disengaged from
the social world in which it operates. Having cut his way through the marsh, he
lights on a new aquatic metaphor, to which he’ll recur throughout his writings on
‘general linguistics’:
A sign system is destined for a community just as a ship is for the sea. Its only role is
that of allowing comprehension between people in groups large or small, but not for
the use of a sole individual. This is why, contrary to appearance, semiological phenomena,
of whatever kind, are never devoid of the social, collective element. The community
and its laws are among their internal, rather than external elements, as far as we are
concerned.63
Of course, ‘the community and its laws’ are not a stable object: societies change
under the pressure of innovation, political revolution, and counter-revolution, and
at any one point the globe may play host to a quite diverse set of communities.
That much would have been painfully obvious to any European intellectual of the
time. But to allow this kind of historical contingency into la langue would have
been tantamount to admitting that language was simply too mutable at its core to
permit any kind of permanent definition. Saussure therefore has both disciplinary
reasons and sociopolitical reasons for believing one must make stability and cohe-
sion defining features of ‘language in general’. In his texts the search for a stable
object of linguistic inquiry becomes a way of thinking about what might stabilize
‘the community and its laws’.
haupt, слово как таковое, ‘the symbol’, ‘language with a capital L’: each linguistic
Saussure is exemplary, but not unique. ‘Language in general’, die Sprache über-
turn will feature an appeal to a modernist, universal object, or rather, to a linguistic

force or tension intrinsic to language as such, but not coterminous with actually
existing language. Language itself will appear as fractured, divided against itself or
unable to perform the tasks assigned to it. Its problems will be myriad: a tendency
to dissolve into a mere aggregate of individual actions, the disjunction between
rational and irrational aspects of its ordering, a tendency to tedious cliché and pre-
fabricated speech, its liability to utterances full of ‘word magic’, at once forceful
and unreasonable. The solutions will claim that the resources needed to tame or
solve the problems posed by language will be drawn from language itself, which
has to be prodded, shaped, exploited, rid of dangerous excrescences. For intellectuals
throughout Europe, language will be both the problem and the solution.
It can be both because the problem and the solution concern far more than
language: those who take the linguistic turn are doing social theory by other means.
Sometimes quite self-consciously, as we shall see, and sometimes with utter convic-
tion that words are all that matter to them. In each case we will see that an idea of
‘language as such’, of a language within language, is what mediates between the
surface concerns of the argument and the problem of democracy and social order
that endows it with its shape and urgency. Language will be a metonym for this
problem, but not a simple one-to-one figure: its inconsistency, which gives rise to
63 Saussure, ‘Sign systems—Community’, in Writings in General Linguistics, 203.

a ‘language as such’ within it, is a metonym for mass democracy, understood as a

challenge to the prevailing order and a social and political problem to be solved.
THE SHAPE OF THE BOOK: THREE CLAIMS
The argument of this book can therefore be separated, with only a little violence,
into three related claims. The first is simply that in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries there were multiple linguistic turns and that we need to think
of them as a whole, as a constellation across Europe. I believe the very breadth of
the book, the number and variety of writers discussed, provides compelling evi-
dence for that claim. But though the spectacle is grand enough, it is by no means
all-inclusive. One has to admit at the outset that it would be well beyond both
my competence and my energy (and perhaps my lifespan) to examine European
linguistic turns comprehensively. In what follows I discuss instances of them in
Britain, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, France, Italy, and Russia (Soviet and pre-
Soviet). That is, of course, a somewhat odd construction of Europe and one likely
to annoy many of its current inhabitants. It excludes most of Eastern and Central
Europe, all of Scandinavia, the Low Countries, and the Iberian Peninsula. It also
ignores the fact that most of those nations were also the ruling centres of empires.
The fact of extensive colonies—in which language was a pressing question and
democracy non-existent—has a clear bearing on the investments these nations
made in language and its political significance, but I lack the expertise to address it.
Even given these limitations, there are many omissions, which—if I can invoke
the reader’s trust—I regret greatly. Martin Buber wants to characterize Jewish
religious life in terms of ‘basic words’. Vienna, with its own pressing language
question, is home to Karl Kraus on the one hand and the Vienna Circle on the
other. There are Fritz Mauthner and Gustav Landauer, whose explicit melding of
politics and language make them ideal candidates. There’s the Prague Linguistic
Circle and Havranek. There is Victoria Welby, a significant European figure, who
deserves far more than the cursory treatment she gets here and whose serious
inclusion would have broken up the all-male tedium of my cast. And there are two
whose absence may strike a dagger in the heart of the whole project: Freud and
Heidegger. What can I say? I started juggling, and at a certain point adding another
ball seemed impossible.
The second claim is that language draws such a crowd because crowds have
become a problem: in the linguistic turns of the early twentieth century, language
is a metonym for problems of social order and social division, democracy and con-
sent, nationality and difference. These problems circulate around the problem of
mass democracy, which by the beginning of the twentieth century had become a
political question throughout Europe. Mass democracy was not a mere quantita-
tive extension of what came before: it entailed new constituencies, new forms of
organization, new procedures, and new forces. In some linguistic turns, the meto-
nymic relation between language and the problem of democracy is explicit: Ogden
and Richards think we need a theory of symbolism to prevent the demagoguery
that threatens mass democracy; Gramsci thinks a national-popular form of Italian

is part of cultural hegemony. In other cases, say that of Shklovskii, language is
appealed to as a force that might revivify social life, but the connection with political
matters is oblique. In the linguistic turn taken by analytic philosophy, politics
arises only as the seemingly random subject of example sentences.
The claim is not, of course, that literary critics, linguists, or philosophers were
interested in words because of the democratic crisis challenging Europe: they had
a natural interest in words and would have paid them careful attention in any case.
The claim is that the kind of investment they place in language—it figures as a
force and not just a neutral field—and the way in which they configure language
(ruptured from within, in need of renewal or redemption) are the signs of the
political and social crisis.
Hence the third claim: that the distinguishing feature of these linguistic turns is
a commitment to some version of ‘language as such’, a force or structure within
language that can provide the vitality, the order, the lucidity, or some combination
of these, necessary to cure language of its present ills. Happily, many of the writers
we examine explicitly invoke something along these lines, but where they don’t
I will show that the conception is there even if the name isn’t.
The claims imply one another: the assertion that there are many linguistic turns
depends in part upon the idea that we define them by their attention to ‘language
as such’; that the democratic crisis provokes the turns is the explanation for why
there are so many of them in such different areas in a discrete period of time; the
role and significance of ‘language as such’ depends upon the claim that it arises to
help resolve a larger social crisis; and so on. They do not, however, demand each
other: it’s possible for the reader to be persuaded by one or two, but not all. If the
reader comes away convinced that from now on we should think of the early twen-
tieth century as the moment of linguistic turns (and therefore linguistic turns as a
characteristic move within the historical event of modernism), the book will have
at least opened up a new research area. If they also believe that a commitment to
‘language as such’ is what unites these turns, I’ll consider the book a success. If
people are persuaded that these turns are in part attempts to do social theory meto-
nymically, that they are wrestling with the social and political problems posed by
mass democracy in Europe, my happiness will be complete.
These claims unite the book and they constitute its basic case. But it is in the
nature of the beast that they cannot be cashed out in a single historical narrative.
The linguistic turns make up a constellation, not a story; they are a series of
responses to a crisis, the significance of which becomes clearer when you see them
together, but the responses are only occasionally related by influence or direct con-
nection. We’ll see that Ogden translated Wittgenstein, that Jakobson read and
lectured on Saussure, and that Cassirer read practically everyone. But for the most
part, writers who became heavily invested in the force of ‘language as such’ didn’t
know that other, contemporary writers had similar investments. As a result, though
there’s a story to tell here, it has to be told episodically and thematically.
Very roughly, the problems posed by mass democracy can be divided into prob-
lems of order on the one hand and problems of myth on the other; the book’s two
parts follow from that. In the episodes contained in Part I, ‘Order’, the focus is on
how a society grounded in ‘the people’ can be both consensual and orderly. The
unleashing of the political Rosanvallon describes means society now has to be
instituted, and instituted democratically: there is no natural order of estates, no
organic corporate hierarchy, on which one can found the structure of the polity. If
we are already used to thinking of language as embodying ‘the nation’—thanks in
large part to the work of the nineteenth century—then the problem of social order
can be framed as a question about the cohesiveness of language: how is a whole
woven and maintained from ‘the combined or isolated actions of physiological,
physical, or mental forces’, the incoherent, amorphous, and mutable stuff of speech?
Such an order must command consent, although consent does not, as we shall see,
mean reason and argument as well. (As Habermas pointed out many years ago, and
I will remind the reader repeatedly in the pages to come, the enlargement of the
public sphere in the nineteenth century went hand-in-hand with the blunting of
its argumentative features.)64
The first chapter of Part I explores this question through a discussion of the role
of analogy in Saussure’s new linguistics. Analogy may seem like a minor linguistic
byway; in fact, in it are condensed a series of critical questions about linguistic
order. By the twentieth century, analogy was understood as the principle that
underlay the systematicity and orderliness of language, but it was also understood
to be a psychological process. Did it involve reasoning (which would mean that the
consent grounding language was a reasoned consent)? This was the question
Saussure wrestled with in his lectures on general linguistics. In this chapter we
observe the wrestling and see how a conservative version of ‘language as such’—
language as such as embodying an unconscious consent—emerges victorious.
Analogy would also play a role in the linguistic turn urged on by Ludwig
Wittgenstein. In Chapter 3 we look at the linguistic turn in analytic philosophy as
it emerges from Gottlob Frege, gains momentum in Bertrand Russell, and finds
elaboration in the early and middle work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. This linguistic
turn in philosophy would ultimately produce a great many different kinds of
philosophical practice, but its initial impulse is a sense that ordinary language—
the language in which we hold conversations and compose non-philosophical
prose—is logically deceptive or ‘muddled’. The characteristic move of linguistic
philosophy will therefore be the translation and rephrasing of statements—making
these statements clearer without changing their content. Why actually existing
language is muddled or how one goes about making it clearer will be a topic of
continual dispute, leading to various, even irreconcilable versions of linguistic
philosophy. But the basic goal and the procedure stay the same: to bring to the
surface a lucidity that is lurking within language, needing only to be coaxed out.
Of course, the lucidity will itself be a matter of words—no matter what a prop-
osition is, it will require symbols for expression—and eventually many of the
analytic philosophers will decide that we don’t need different words, but a sharper
64 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1989), Parts V and VI.
understanding of the words we usually employ. But this conundrum—being

caught within language, having only words and symbols at one’s disposal, but
feeling that the words and symbols are somehow a problem—will permanently
afflict the discipline.
What is at stake in this drive towards clarification? First is intersubjectivity: the
drive to clarity entails, at least at its beginning, a stripping away of every intersub-
jective, temporal element in discourse, every trace in it of a definite time and place,
as if intersubjectivity itself were an obstacle to communication. To put it a different
way: philosophy will, yet again, take up arms against everything rhetorical in
language, those features of language that turn the naked assertion into a concrete
effort to be persuasive (and therefore to persuade someone in particular, on a definite
occasion). Second is the relationship of professional expertise to democracy, because
a language clarified by professional philosophers is a substitute for the objectivity
of the public sphere. The clarifying, logical analysis of statements by professional
philosophers offers itself as a substitute source of objectivity, at a point in political
history when many European nations are extending the franchise and fearing the
consequences. Finally, there is belief in language itself. When Wittgenstein and his
fellow philosophers surrender the project of logical analysis for a different kind of
clarification, one which depends on the making and deciphering of analogies, they
ground their practice on the assumption that language always ‘works’: that it is
itself successful at representing and communicating and fails only when external
circumstances disturb its inner workings.
Chapter 4 returns to Saussure and the contention that ‘language in general’ is
a social institution, but a uniquely conservative one. To produce this version of
‘language’ he had to strike a precarious balance between grounding language in
the agreement of those who used it (and nothing else) and ensuring that agree-
ment was neither conscious nor liable to reasoned dispute. The ambiguities of his
position come to the fore when his claim that language is a social institution is
taken up enthusiastically by linguists working in the newly created Soviet Union.
In Chapter 4 I focus on three particular linguists, all of whom consider whether,
from the perspective of Saussure’s work, a linguistic revolution is possible. One,
S. I. Kartsevskii, does not want such a revolution and believes Saussure tells us
why it is not possible. Another, G. O. Vinokur, both desires it and believes Saussure
has provided tools for its realization. A third, Lev Iakubinskii, shares Vinokur’s
enthusiasm but sees Saussure’s linguistics as an obstacle. The problem is not one
of misinterpretation, for this varied reception reveals the striking inconsistency of
Saussure’s conception of the community and its laws.
The sense that language was constantly productive and mutable, that it was a
source of constant innovation and change, coexisted uneasily with the stability
promised by theories of linguistic consent. Comparative philology had sought to
rationalize that productivity by subsuming it under natural laws. In Chapter 5
I borrow Walter Benjamin’s description of the ‘narcotic historicism’ of nineteenth-
century Paris (expressed in its arcades, panoramas, wax museums, and architecture)
and apply it to comparative philology, suggesting that, in effect, it creates ‘museums’
of language. One can then follow this comparison through and view some forms
of twentieth-century modernism as attempts to liberate the force bound up in
historicist forms. In this context, one can interpret Saussure, Bakhtin, and Benjamin
as each unleashing the productivity and creativity of language that had been
explained (and confined) in the phonetic laws discovered in the previous century.
Bakhtin does so by counterpoising heteroglossia with myth; Saussure does so by
invoking a model of linguistic change modelled on urban life and the republican
social contract; Benjamin does so in his theory of translation, which aims to recover
a native linguistic energy from the diversity of actually existing languages. In their
different ways, these paeans to linguistic productivity draw attention to another
feature of mass democracy: its urban character.
In Part II, ‘Myth’, I focus on a notable tendency of ‘language as such’ that alarms
most intellectuals, but excites a few: its penchant for ‘word magic’ and myth, words
and phrases packed with an immediate force and power, a force that seems to
inhere in the words themselves. In the case of myth and magic, the reference to the
perilous state of Europe is not mediated or analogical but direct: mythic, magical
discourse created confusion in the public, diverted the power of reason and created
a dangerous, ‘charismatic’ kind of mass politics. Or else—as those excited by it
claimed—mythic language was the only hope of reviving a politics that had been
robbed of life by bureaucratic haggling and the manoeuvres of parliament, the
force that might inspire the popular masses and lead them to active participation
in the life of the nation.
Chapter 6 is devoted to those hostile to myth, who believe that myth must be
defeated and who have a strategy for defeating it. The strategies are varied: Ogden
and Richards turn to science, Frege to logic, Orwell to a particular kind of prose,
Bakhtin to the novel, and Saussure to language itself. Antipathy to myth and word
magic is sometimes framed in explicit political terms (in Ogden and Richards,
Orwell, and Bakhtin) and sometimes not. My claim is that myth figures as a ten-
dency of ‘language as such’ that must be vigilantly monitored and countered with
alternative forms of discourse; lurking within the fear of myth is nervousness about
demagoguery within popular democratic politics.
Chapter 7 is given over to the enthusiasts of myth, who argue that, on the con-
trary, it represents the lifeblood of language without which any polity is doomed.
We begin with a discussion of Ernst Cassirer’s theory of myth, before turning to
the Russian Formalists and Futurists—ready to resurrect the word—and conclude
with Walter Benjamin’s insistence on the power and magic of pure language. For
Walter Benjamin, for Viktor Shklovskii and many of his Futurist brethren, the
‘word as such’ has to be rescued from the deadening ‘bourgeois’ language of the
present. Language is out of whack, but what has distorted it is precisely its misuse
as a mere tool of communication (the aforementioned ‘abyss of prattle’), against
which one has to defend language as naming. The problem is not, according to
these writers, that myth threatens the liberal polity, but that liberalism itself,
embodied in the deadening language of public life, threatens democracy. Following
this chapter is an excursus on two figures who present a kind of linguistic turn in
reverse: Georges Sorel and Antonio Gramsci. For they are political thinkers who make
linguistic ideas, ideas of myth in particular, central to their political strategies.
Sorel will look to myth as an alternative form of organizing and motivating the
political masses; Gramsci will look to Sorel as a source for ideas about popular
mobilization, which he, however, will embody not in an instantaneous call to
arms, but in the institutional struggle for hegemony.
Chapter 8 returns to ‘linguistic philosophy’, but now a different kind, represented
by the middle and late work of Wittgenstein and the writing of J. L. Austin. In what
came to be called, rightly or wrongly, ordinary language philosophy, myth emerged
not from charismatic demagogues but from the fervid minds of scientistic intellec-
tuals. Wittgenstein and Austin share the conviction that ‘language as such’ is the
antidote to the metaphysical entanglements that arise when, in Wittgenstein’s
famous phrase, ‘language goes on holiday’.65 The claim, however, is that language as
such is language unhindered, ‘our common stock of words’, as Austin put it, as
used in the mundane practical matters of life.66 But, as we will see, this ordinary
version of ‘language as such’ is not simply present to the naked eye and ear, but is
only available as the end result of strategies of philosophical clarification, which make
language a manifestation of life. The chapter therefore focuses on Wittgenstein’s
idea of the perspicuous representation and Austin’s techniques of drawing out
distinctions. Unlike the other chapters in this book, this one pays attention to
pleasure, in particular the pleasure Wittgenstein and Austin get from a clarifying
look at ordinary life. That language always works turns out not to be a mere fact, but
also a source of satisfaction for some philosophers. But as we’ll see, in Wittgenstein’s
case the satisfaction one draws from seeing language at work is weakened by an
undercurrent.
The Conclusion examines the situation after the Second World War. There we
see how the social democratic settlement in Western Europe gives birth to the new
linguistic turns known as structuralism. We explore this by looking at how Roland
Barthes combines ideas from Saussure with a project for a radical analysis of French
everyday life in the Mythologies.
Why does any of it matter? The pat answer is that it always matters whether or
not we understand the history whose work we inherit. I don’t subscribe to all of
Benjamin’s philosophy of history, but he’s entirely right to claim that for the his-
torian ‘even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious’.67 But
there are specific reasons why this particular issue matters. It was, indirectly, a
struggle over what a democratic society would look like: what would hold it
together, how its collective agreements would be established and maintained,
how it might be more than a set of empty procedures. It was, directly, a debate
on what role language would play in the political crises and problems of the
time: whether it was itself a unifying force, whether it existed ‘consensually’,
what role its mythic forms should play in political life and what role everyday
language—as opposed to technical jargons—should play. In essence, this was a
65 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, revised 4th edn., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe,

P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), §38 (23e).
66 J. L. Austin, ‘A Plea for Excuses’, in Philosophical Papers, 3rd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1979), 182.
67 Walter Benjamin, Thesis VI, ‘On the Concept of History’, in Selected Writings: Volume 4,
1938–1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott and others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 391.
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CHAPTER IX
“O CAPTAIN! MY CAPTAIN!”
NoPresident.
one had suffered more deeply during the war than the
His purpose never faltered. Even at the moment when
success seemed farthest distant, his resolve stood firm; cost what it
might the Union must be preserved. When almost every other man
despaired of the Northern cause, Lincoln’s invincible faith in the right
and justice of their purpose sustained his country.
To attain that purpose thousands of lives had to be sacrificed; but
the purpose was worth the loss of thousands of lives. Yet Lincoln’s
heart bled for every one of them.
Lincoln visited all the divisions of his army in turn
All day long he received visits from distracted relations, mothers

and wives asking him to pardon their sons or husbands in prison as
deserters or captured from the enemy; asking for tidings of their
beloved ones at the front. His generals complained that he
undermined the discipline of the army by pardoning what he called
his “leg” cases—cases where men had run away before the enemy.
“If Almighty God gives a man a cowardly pair of legs, how can he
help their running away with him?” said Lincoln.
The story of William Scott is a case which shows the way in
which Lincoln used to act. William Scott was a young boy from a
Northern farm, who, after marching for forty-eight hours without
sleep, offered to stand on guard duty for a sick comrade. Worn out,
he fell asleep, and was condemned to be shot for being asleep on
duty in face of the enemy. Lincoln made it his custom to visit all the
divisions of his army in turns, and, as it happened, two days before
the execution he was with the division in which Willie Scott was, and
heard of the case. He went to see the boy, and talked to him about
his home and his mother. As he was leaving the prison tent he put
his hands on the lad’s shoulders, and said—
“My boy, you are not going to be shot to-morrow.... I am going to
trust you and send you back to your regiment. But I have been put to
a great deal of trouble on your account. I have come here from
Washington, where I had a great deal to do. Now, what I want to
know is, how are you going to pay my bill?”
Willie did not know what to say: perhaps he could get his friends
to help him, he said at last.
“No,” said Lincoln, “friends cannot pay it; only one man in the
world can pay it, and that is William Scott. If from this day on William
Scott does his duty, my bill is paid.”
William Scott never forgot these words. Just before his death in
one of the later battles of the war, he asked his comrades to tell
President Lincoln that he had never forgotten what he had said.
All the time, people who did not know the President threw on his
shoulders all the blame for the long continuance of the war. Until the
last year of the war, the newspapers abused him continually. The
horrible loss of life in Grant’s last campaign was laid to his charge.
Only those who came to the President to ask his help in their own
suffering, understood what his suffering was; he suffered with each
of them—he suffered with the South as well as the North. After
Antietam, he had said, “I shall not live to see the end; this war is
killing me.” The crushing burden he had borne so long and patiently
had bent even his strong shoulders.
But it had not been borne in vain. The time seemed at last to
have come when all America would understand how much they
owed to the patient endurance of the President. And there was work
still to be done which needed all his wisdom. The South was
conquered. It had to be made one with the North. The pride of the
conquerors had to be curbed, the bitterness of the conquered
softened.
Lincoln returned from Richmond to Washington, in his heart the
profound resolve “to bind up the nation’s wounds” as he, and only
he, could do it.
April 14 was Good Friday, and a day of deep thankfulness in the
North. In the morning Lincoln held a Cabinet meeting, at which
General Grant was present. The question of reconstruction, of
making one whole out of the divided halves, was discussed. Some of
the Cabinet were anxious to wreak vengeance on the South, to
execute the leaders of the rebellion. Such was not Lincoln’s view.
“Enough lives have been sacrificed. We must extinguish our
resentments if we expect harmony and union.”
His noble patriotism could still say to the South, “We are not
enemies, but friends.” His life was now even more precious to the
South than to the North.
After the Cabinet meeting, Lincoln spent some time in talking with
his son Robert, who had returned from the field with General Grant,
under whom he had served as a captain. In the afternoon he went
for a drive with Mrs. Lincoln. His mood was calm and happy: for the
first time for four years he could look forward peacefully to the future,
and to the great tasks still before him.
In the evening he went to the theatre with his wife and two young
friends: the play was “Our American Cousin.” The President was
fond of the theatre—it was one of his few recreations: his
appearance on this night was something of a public ceremony;
therefore, although he was tired when evening came, he went
because he knew that many people would be disappointed if he did
not. The President had a box to the left of the stage. Suddenly, about
the middle of the last act, a man appeared at the back of the box, a
knife in one hand and a pistol in the other, put the pistol to the
President’s head and fired; then wounding Major Rathbone, the only
other man in the box, with his knife, he vaulted on to the stage. As
he leapt his spur caught the flag hanging from the box and he fell,
breaking his leg. Nevertheless he rose instantly, and brandishing his
knife and crying, “Sic semper tyrannis!”—“The South is avenged!”
fled across the stage and out of sight.
The horrified audience was thunderstruck. The President lay
quite still: the bullet had passed right through his head. The wound
was mortal. He was carried to a house across the street, where he
lay, quite unconscious, till the morning, surrounded by his friends,
their faces as pale and haggard as his own. About seven, “a look of
unspeakable peace came upon his worn features.” Stanton, the War
Secretary, rose from his knees by his side, saying, “Now he belongs
to the ages.”
There was profound sorrow through the whole of America; sorrow
that checked all rejoicings over the victory of the North. Thus,
indirectly, Lincoln’s death helped the reconciliation between North
and South, though nothing could counterbalance the loss of his wise
guidance.
Washington was shrouded in black: even the poorest inhabitants
showing their sorrow in their dress. The body was taken to
Springfield, Illinois, to be buried; and all the towns on the way
showed their deep mourning and respect. Now, and not till now, did
Americans begin to understand what a man they had lost.
“He knew to bide his time,

And can his fame abide,
Still patient in his simple faith sublime
Till the wise years decide.
Great captains with their guns and drums
Disturb our judgment for the hour,
But at last silence comes:
These all are gone, and, standing like a tower,
Our children shall behold his fame,
The kindly, earnest, brave, far-seeing man,
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,
New birth of our new soil, the first American.”
So James Russell Lowell wrote of Lincoln when the celebration of

Independence Day in the year of his death revived the vivid sense of
loss.
The passage of years have only made clearer how great he was.
Perfectly simple, perfectly sincere, he thought out for himself an
ideal, and spent the whole of his life and all his strength in pursuing
it.
He loved America, not because it was powerful and strong, but
because it had been based on a great idea—the idea of liberty: his
work for America was to realise that idea. He never thought of his
own personal success: he wanted to be President because he saw a
great work to be done and believed that he could do it. He never
became rich: his own tastes remained entirely simple. He was said
to have worn the same top-hat all his life.
The first thing that struck any one about Lincoln was his
extraordinary appearance. He always dressed in black, with a big
black tie, very often untied, or in the wrong place: his clothes looked
as if they had been made to fit some one else, and had never been
new. His feet were enormous; so were his hands, covered on state
occasions with white kid gloves.
In cold weather he used to wear a large grey shawl instead of an
overcoat. One day, before he was made President, some friends
were discussing Lincoln and Douglas, and comparing their heights.
When Lincoln came into the room some one asked him, “How long
ought a man’s legs to be?”
“Long enough to reach from his body to the ground,” said Lincoln
coolly.
Lincoln might look uncouth or even grotesque, but he did not look
weak: he was the most striking figure wherever he went. No one who
saw him often, no one who went to him in trouble, or to ask his
advice, thought long of his appearance. Those who had once felt the
sympathy of his wonderful, sad eyes, thought of that only. Those
who really knew him, knew him to be the best man they had ever
met.
Lincoln was often profoundly sad, and then suddenly boisterously
gay. He enjoyed a joke or a funny story immensely: he often used to
shock thoughtless people by telling some comic story on what they
thought an unsuitable occasion; but he told it so well that however
much they might disapprove they were generally forced to laugh.
Always rather a dreamer, he was fond of poetry. He knew long
passages of Shakespeare by heart, especially Hamlet, Macbeth, and
Richard III. The Bible he had known from his childhood; of Burns he
was very fond.
Lincoln’s rise to power, as even so short an account as this will
have shown you, was not due to any extraordinary good fortune or
any advantages at start. He taught himself all that he knew; he made
himself what he was.
It was his character more than anything else that made him great.
His early struggles had taught him that self-reliance which enabled
him to persevere in a course which he thought right in spite of
opposition, disloyalty, and abuse; they taught him the toleration
which made him slow to judge others, generous to praise them, little
apt to expect them to understand or praise him. He stood alone.
Not till he had gone did his people realise how much he had
given them; how much they had lost in him. He gave them, indeed,
the most priceless gift a patriot can give his country—the example of
sincere, devoted, and unselfish service.
THE END
Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson & Co.
Edinburgh & London
Transcriber’s Notes:
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paragraph have been moved to avoid
interrupting the paragraph flow.
On page 65, “yes,” has been changed to ‘yes,’
to conform to standard usage.
All other variant spellings, punctuation and
hyphenation have been left as typeset.
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Preface and Acknowledgements

1 ‘[T]he observable social bond is composed of language “moves”’, Jean-François Lyotard,

viii Preface and Acknowledgements

Preface and Acknowledgements ix

x Preface and Acknowledgements

Note on Translations and References xiii

1. Introduction: Linguistic Turns as Social Theory 1

Note on Translations and References

2 Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950

turn—some combination of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein,

Introduction: Linguistic Turns as Social Theory 3

4 Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950

Introduction: Linguistic Turns as Social Theory 5

6 Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950

bring to bear on the discussions of philosophers—he had had to go beyond language,

LANGUAGE AND THE CRISIS OF DEMOCRACY

What kinds of social ruptures? Studies of European modernism—its literature,

Introduction: Linguistic Turns as Social Theory 7

8 Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950

‘were viewed without enthusiasm by the governments that introduced them’,

Introduction: Linguistic Turns as Social Theory 9

20 Schmitt, ‘Parliamentarism and Democracy’, 17. 21 Mazower, Dark Continent, 41.

10 Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950

LANGUAGE AND THE PEOPLE IN

Introduction: Linguistic Turns as Social Theory 11

29 Anna Morpurgo Davies, History of Linguistics, Volume IV: Nineteenth-Century Linguistics

12 Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950

32 Morpurgo Davies, Nineteenth-Century Linguistics, 139.

Introduction: Linguistic Turns as Social Theory 13

as inflection, an inflecting, therefore, deliberate but not brought to perfection—a

14 Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950

That kind of collective activity finds no echo in the work of comparative

Introduction: Linguistic Turns as Social Theory 15

activity of the entire sum of individuals in their reciprocal relations’.45 Having

16 Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950

managed to gain’.51 Unsurprisingly, belief in the national character of language

51 Bréal, ‘Language and Nationality’, 215.

Introduction: Linguistic Turns as Social Theory 17

and more worrying, ‘language in general’. The realization comes in an oft-quoted

18 Linguistic Turns, 1890–1950

physiological, physical, or mental forces’.59 No substance, no readily available object:

59 Ferdinand de Saussure, ‘Notes for a Book on General Linguistics, I (1893–1894)’, in Writings in

Introduction: Linguistic Turns as Social Theory 19

turn will feature an appeal to a modernist, universal object, or rather, to a linguistic

63 Saussure, ‘Sign systems—Community’, in Writings in General Linguistics, 203.

Note on Translations and References xiii

1. Introduction: Linguistic Turns as Social Theory 1