Geschichtswissenschaft und Diskursanalyse

While in many humanities the reference to semiotics, discourse theory and deconstruction has long since become an intellectual matter of course, the linguistic turn in historical studies is still suspected of robbing historians of their sense of reality. Leading representatives of the discipline believe themselves to be "on the brink of the abyss", fear "the end of history as a science" and write a "Defense of History". The new book by Philipp Sarasin takes up this extremely polemical debate on the foundations of the science of history. In eight articles, some of which are still unpublished, the epistemological principles of discourse-analytical historiography are examined and their potential in the field of cultural history empirically sounded out.