Language, race, and history: The origin of the Whitney‐Müller debate and the transformation of the human sciences

Abstract

Practitioners of disciplines often create a history of their field that justifies their own theoretical perspective. In the introduction to his Course in General Linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure constructed such a history for the study of language. In doing so, he gave a very different evaluation of two of his immediate predecessors, William Dwight Whitney and Friedrich Max Müller, praising Whitney while relegating Müller to the outmoded past. These two scholars, however, were nearly exact contemporaries; they were trained similarly, and were interested in a similar set of linguistic issues. Beginning around 1870, Whitney and Müller engaged in an epic scholarly debate that raged for more than twenty years. The origin of this conflict was a controversy over Darwinian evolution, but their disagreement had deeper roots in the long-standing connection between language study and discussions of racial history. By intellectually distancing Whitney and Müller and writing their debate out of his history, Saussure emphasized the independence and objectivity of his new “scientific” linguistics and excluded the racial controversies that had been central to comparative philology during the nineteenth century.