Rhetorical Naturalisation in the History of Philology: August Schleicher, Friedrich Max Müller and Their Critics

Abstract

An intellectual history of the humanities can only fulfil its true critical purpose if, in examining debates from the past, it can say something important about the present. This essay examines an episode in the history of nineteenth-century philology – in German: Sprachwissenschaft, or what Friedrich Max Müller termed ‘The Science of Language’ – an episode that appeared to reach its resolution towards the end of that century, but which still contains implications that are of relevance today. The decisive issue in this debate is whether philology should be regarded as a natural science that proceeds according to empirically verifiable laws. Two of the key actors in this debate – August Schleicher (1821–1861) in Germany and Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) in Britain – sought to mobilise their own versions of Darwinian natural selection to claim that something like a ‘Science of Language’ can be formulated in a way analogous to evolutionary biology.1