Abstract
This is an essay in intellectual history drawing generally and adaptively from that aspect of linguistic field theory which might conveniently be called rhetorical pragmatics. The result is to give a different emphasis to the study of the political literature of the seventeenth century and also to suggest some reconceptualisation of intellectual history itself. Field theory is that branch of modern linguistics which deals with the semantic organisation of distinct areas of experience. It concerns the relationships between groups of words forming a semantic field and an unpredicated content domain, or undifferentiated subject matter.1 A semantic field is thus something of a microcosm of the Saussurian notion of langue, the structurally related linguistic system which at any given time constitutes a resource for the language user.2 The selective use of langue is often referred to as parole, or langage, and pragmatics is the principal name given to its study. At least in part, this overlaps with rhetoric; for each deals with what people actually do with words for various purposes. Here, the later works of Wittgenstein and those of John Austin have been regarded as of seminal significance.3
I was walking along a farm-road close to Piltdown Common Fletching when I noticed that the road had been mended with some peculiar brown flints not usual in the district. On inquiry I was astonished to learn that they were dug up from a gravel-pit on the farm, and shortly afterwards I visited the place where two labourers were at work digging gravel for small repairs to the roads. Charles Dawson, in C. Dawson and A. S. Woodward, ‘On the Discovery of a Palaeolithic Human Skull and Mandible in Flint-bearing Gravel Overlying the Wealden at Piltdown (Fletching) Sussex’, The Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, Vol. 69 (1912).
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Notes
Valuable accounts are to be found in S. Ullmann, Semantics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972 edn), pp. 234f
E. Kittay, Metaphor: Its Cognitive Force and Linguistic Structure (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), Ch. 6.
F. de Saussure, Cours de linguistique general, 1916, (eds) C. Bally and A. Sachehaye, trans. B. Harris, Course in General Linguistics (Illinois: Open Court, 1983).
L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1968 edn)
J. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962)
on their significance in this area of linguistics, see S. Levinson, Pragmatics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 227f.
See at length, J. Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
Saussure did recognise language as a part of society and advocated the systematic study of sign systems (semiology) in society, ibid., Pt 1, Ch. 3, sect. 3; but the drift of his analysis is always towards making language explicable in linguistic terms. Semiology looks at society as if it were language, or draws no distinction between language as a sign system and the sign systems taken to constitute society. See also R. Koselleck, Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. K. Tribe (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985), p. 79 on the ‘precarious marginality’ of semantics to linguistics because of the involvement with the non-linguistic.
D. Davidson, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 183f.
J. Trier, Der Deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes (Heidelberg: Winter, 1931); see the discussion in Ullmann, Semantics pp. 244–50; and Kittay, Metaphor, pp. 223ff.
B. Berlin and P. Kay, Basic Colour Terms (California: University Press, 1969). Another phenomenon appropriate for field theory analysis can be found in Italian spoken in Australia. A simplified workplace subfield of terms (bottega, nuigazxino/shop; ufficio/office; fattoria/farm) has been brought about by the English context in which it is used. Fattoria is used for the English factory and so as to avoid the semantic elision between farm and factory, the English ‘farm’ has been introduced as farma. Michael Clyne, Community Languages in the Australian Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) is full of fascinating information of this sort.
M. Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), Ch. 3; ‘Present, Future and Past’, in On History and Other Essays (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983).
Conal Condren, The Status and Appraisal of Classic Texts: An Essay on Political Theory, Its Inheritance, and the History of Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
For example, J. T. Matthews, The Play of Faulkner’s Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), in which Faulkner’s language is so reified as to be an independent character in even an explanans for the author’s work.
R. Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), Chs 1 and 2; see the discussion between Waswo and J. Monfasini in Journal of the History of Ideas, 49 (1989), pp. 324f.
For interesting and often subtle examples, see Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). Michel Foucault is a figure who stands behind and is revered in such literature, and in much of his work we can see exactly what I have in mind and will touch on more below, namely the hypostatisation of a postulate of power.
Compare the contributions of J. G. A. Pocock and N. Rubenstein in A. Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
For a lucid overview of Begriffsgeschichte see M. Richter, ‘Begriffsgeschichte and the History of Ideas’, The Journal of the History of Ideas, 48 (1987), pp. 247–63
see also the rather touchy exchange between J. Rayner, ‘On Begriffsgeschichte’, Political Theory 16, 3(1988) pp. 496–501, and M. Richter, ‘Understanding Begnffsgesichte: A Rejoinder’, ibid., 17, 2(1989), pp. 296–301. R. Koselleck, Futures Past, provides a theoretical overview of the project. In this Introduction, I am attempting only and somewhat obliquely to respecify what both Begnffsgeschichte and other forms of intellectual and conceptual history minimally entail.
Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows (London: Methuen, 1949 edn), pp. 53–5, with apologies to the Rat, who, of course, does genuinely discover the surface signs to Badger’s subterranean home.
Michael Oakeshott, ‘The Activity of Being an Historian’, in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1962) on the difference between accounting for and giving an account of.
William Cavendish, letter of ‘Advice’, 1659–60, Bodleian Library, Clarendon MS 109; the MS is printed in Thomas Slaughter, Ideology and Politics on the Eve of the Restoration: Newcastle’s Advice to Charles II (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1984).
Richard More, A True Relation of the Murders (London, 1643).
G. Shulman, Radicalism and Reverence: The Political Thought of Gerrard Winstanley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), Pt 1.
See Conal Condren, ‘The Rhetorical “Foundations” of Leuiathan,’ History of Political Thought, XI (1990), pp. 703f for comment on the different senses of rhetoric relevant to Leviathan; R. Prokhovnik, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Hobbes’s Leviathan (New York: Garland, 1991), Ch. 1.
See especially Quentin Skinner, ‘Thomas Hobbes: Rhetoric and the Construction of Morality’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 76 (1991), pp. 1–61.
I make this extreme reduction for the purposes of clarification, although it is not too brisk a synopsis of much that has been written on Magna Carta to say that scholars have treated it as an ideological manifesto when they have not mistaken it for a constitutional law. It was never straightforwardly a legal document, as the impeccable J. C. Holt has shown; yet even he refers to it as a ‘party manifesto’: Magna Carta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976 edn), p. 204.
Jorge Larrain, The Concept of Ideology (London: Hutchinson, 1984 edn), pp. 19–20; Mark Goldie is more subtle, but his genealogy of ideology which embraces Bacon is still not the history of an underlying concept. It is, rather, an account of a series of similar accusatory tactics in public rhetoric. See ‘Ideology’ in T. Ball, J. Farr and R. Hanson (eds), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). See also R. Koselleck, Futures Past, pp. 185 and 195, where he paraphrases both Richard Hooker and Karl Marx in the vocabulary of ideology. What is literally true of one’s language requires a semantic redescription of the other’s. By this process is created the impression of a conceptual continuity in language.
W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964), pp. 105f
L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), para. 78f.
C. Wright Mills, ‘Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motif’, in M. Shapiro (ed.), Language and Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), pp. 13f.
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© 1994 Conal Condren
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Condren, C. (1994). Introduction. In: The Language of Politics in Seventeenth-Century England. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23566-7_1
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