Who's afraid of the ‘linguistic turn'? The politics of social history and its discontents∗

Quantifying the language of British politics, 1880-1910

“…Historians influenced by the turn have increasingly come to see language as constituting as important an aspect of politics as institutions, individuals and events, and some have gone further still. Under the general philosophical influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Johann Georg Harmann and Wilhelm Von Humboldt in the nineteen‐sixties and the post‐structuralism of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Hayden White (and others) in the nineteen‐seventies, historians of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century British politics have become increasingly interested in the relationship between word and deed: what J. L. Austin called ‘speech acts’. More broadly, they have come to focus on the subtleties of discourse: particularly the ways in which language affected all aspects of politics from popular party image and presentation, to the development and reinvention of ideologies, heroes and traditions.…”

Inventing Industrial Accidents and Their Insurance: Discourse and Workers’ Compensation in the United States, 1880s–1910s

“…Not simply a reflection of the material world, nor a process confined to the individual mind, discourse is an active social practice, as real or material as any other (Schottler 1989: 45;Sewell 1993). It is the basic method by which people "create propositional and evaluative accounts about themselves, their relations to others, and other social and material processes" (Steinberg 1991: 266;Volosinov 1986Volosinov [1929) and is made up of elements or signs that are transposable and generalizable, not fixed (Sewell 1992;Vernon 1994). As actors collectively seek to understand and evaluate their situations and experiences, the world around them and their places in it, they draw from many available elements and correlate them to produce meaning.…”

Defining Soldiers: Britain’s Military, c.1740–1815

“…The study of etymology is interesting and worth doing in its own right; but, in the light of the linguistic turn, it is also highly necessary, since historical actors could only make sense of themselves and their world with the terms that were available to them. 11 It also guards against anachronism, since historians' terms of art do not always reflect the way that these same terms are used in our sources. whereby their acquire such a slavish submission to COMMAND, be it just or unjust, that they readily undertake to execute those very measures and designs, which they themselves, perhaps, have previously condemned...…”