Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONmany, which was by far the most vigorous centre of diffusion for thehistorical approach. It is not fortuitous that Karl Marx was a German.The ostensible stimulus for philology was the conquest of non-Europeansocieties by Europe. Sir William Jones's pioneer investigations intoSanskrit (1786) were the result of the British conquest of Bengal;Champollion's decipherment of the hieroglyphs (his main work on thesubject was published in 1824), of Napoleon's expedition to Egypt;Rawlinson's elucidation of cuneiform writing (1835) reflected theubiquity of the British colonial officers. But in fact philology was notconfined to discovery, description and classification. In the hands chieflyof great German scholars such as Franz Bopp (1791-1867) and thebrothers Grimm it became the second social science properly sodescribed; that is to say the second which discovered general lawsapplicable to so apparently capricious a field as human communication.(The first was political economy.) But unlike the laws of politicaleconomy those of philology were fundamentally historical, or ratherevolutionary.*Their foundation was the discovery that a wide range of languages,the Indo-European, were related to one another; supplemented bythe obvious fact that every existing written European languagehad plainly been transformed in the course of the centuries and was,presumably, still undergoing transformation. The problem was notmerely to prove and classify these relationships by means of scientificcomparison, a task which was then being widely undertaken (forinstance, in comparative anatomy, by Cuvier). It was also, and chiefly,to elucidate their historic evolution from what must have been a commonancestor. Philology was the first science which regarded evolutionas its very core. It was of course fortunate because the Bible is relativelysilent about the history of language, whereas, as the biologists andgeologists knew to their cost, it is only too explicit about the creationand early history of the globe. Consequently the philologist was lesslikely to be drenched by the waters of Noah's flood or tripped by theobstacles of Genesis 1 than his unhappy confrere. If anything theBiblical statement 'And the whole earth was of one language, and onespeech' was on his side. But philology was also fortunate, because ofall the social sciences it dealt not directly with human beings, whoalways resent the suggestion that their actions are determined by anythingexcept their free choice, but with words, which do not. Consequentlyit was left free to face what is still the fundamental problem of* Paradoxically, the attempt to apply the mathematical-physical method to linguisticsconsidered as part of a more general 'communications theory' was not undertaken until thepresent century.286