Fence sitting for a better view: Finding a middle ground between materialism and the linguistic turn in the epistemology of history

Abstract

Over the past several decades the social sciences have experienced an expansion of historical research. Much of this historical work is linked to the new social history that has significant materialist roots in cultural Marxism and the Annales school. In the past several years this epistemology has been challenged by members of the linguistic turn who draw on poststructuralism and deconstructionism. They seek to debunk what they see as the metanarratives of this materialist ontology, and produced an alternative historiography center on the analysis of discourse. The author argues that the linguistic turn raises important issues, but many of its practitioners hypostatize discourse and create an alternative essentialism. To explicate these problems the study uses as an exemplar the recent work of historian Patrick Joyce. The author alternatively proposes a discourse analysis drawing on Bakhtinian literary theory, which focuses on the social construction of meaning through language. This alternative recognizes the material and social foundations of meaning construction and retains a conception of agency while bringing discourse into historical explanation. © 1997 Sage Publications, Inc.