| From the mid-seventeenth century forward, debates over disciplinary languages have been the most visible symptom of the struggle to create, strengthen, and defend expert cultures that move beyond ordinary understandings of the world. This linguistic discord holds particular interest because it arises at the same moment in history as attempts to forge a new lingua communis and a common reading public through the medium of print. My dissertation argues that their simultaneity is no accident. In chapters one and two, I show that the conflict between disciplinary jargon and the “language of common life” was central to the larger process that late-eighteenth-century economists called “the division of intellectual labor.” This division marked the increased specialization of the individual intellectual disciplines, as well as the growing distance between learned scholarship and a lay reading public. In the succeeding chapters, I trace the development of physics, moral philosophy, and poetry and their respective relationships to public culture, moving from those disciplines that developed the most highly specialized languages to those whose languages remained closest to that of common life. |
