The History of Historiography and the Challenge of the Linguistic Turn

Abstract

This exposition examines the relationship between the history of historiography and the linguistic turn, the latter being considered a challenge to the former. At first we attempt to define the meaning of “the viewpoint of the general history of historiography” by taking the history of historiography in its entirety from the Greeks to the present, thereby undermining the credibility of self-proclaimed “ruptures”, “epistemological cuts”, “revolutions”, “mutations” and “new histories” in the recent developments of the general history of historiography, and thus questioning the “scientific” status of historical discourse. In the second section we try to depict the linguistic turn and the nature of the “challenge” it poses to the history of historiography. In the third section, with examples from Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Peter Englund, we qualify the role of Hayden White in the formulation of this challenge and its consequences for the practice of the discourse history. The conclusion resumes the arguments of Siegfried Kracauer, Arnaldo Momigliano, Johan Huizinga, Carlo Ginzburg and Hayden White (his in 2011), which combine to reinforce the importance of considering the entirety of the general history of historiography when dealing with discourse history, conceived as part of an “intermediate domain” that aspires to a scientific status (the commitment with the truth), but which cannot break free from the construction of collective memory or the settling of accounts with the past, hence the approximate nature of historical knowledge.