The Idealist Reaction

Abstract

Although the Neogrammarians never achieved exclusive authority within linguistics, they quickly established themselves as a linguistic elite and dominated the field both in Germany and abroad for a number of decades. The Neogrammarians and their students occupied many chairs of philology and comparative linguistics in the German universities, edited the most prestigious journals in the field, and, accordingly, functioned as a reference group for other linguists. This meant that even those who disagreed with the Neogrammarian philosophical and theoretical views or methodological assumptions formulated their own views in relation to Neogrammarian doctrine. During the early years of this century, the critique of the Neogrammarians was expressed in the idea systems of two very different schools of thought in linguistics: the Neo-Idealist school of Karl Vossler and the structuralist school of Ferdinand de Saussure, later known as the Geneva school. The presence of these two very different reactions to a dominant doctrine presents us with an opportunity to test our contention that shared idea systems constrain but do not determine future cognitive options within a field, and to raise questions about the continuities engendered by the fact that innovations within institutitionalized fields of knowledge can be interpreted as reactions to the tensions and contradictions uncovered in the dominant doctrine.