Friedrich Max Muller and William Dwight Whitney as exporters of nineteenth-century German philology: A sociological analysis of the development of linguistic theory

This dissertation presents an institutional history of the linguistic theories of Friedrich Max Müller and William Dwight Whitney. These two scholars received their linguistic training in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century, but then exported those ideas into new institutional contexts for their careers, Müller going to Oxford in England and Whitney to Yale in America.; Max Müller is generally characterized as a pre-scientific, Romantic popularizer of linguistics in England whose ideas were quickly outmoded. Whitney has been remembered largely as a precursor to both the Neogrammarians and Ferdinand de Saussure. In neither case are these theorists' ideas about language examined from the perspective of the broader, more utilitarian definition of linguistics/philology within their career institutions.; By contrast, my analysis of Müller and Whitney as cross-cultural practitioners of linguistics highlights the role their changing institutional contexts played in the development of their theories. Both Müller and Whitney propounded a psychophysical theory of language taken largely from their German training, revealing that the shift between the organic and psycho-physical paradigms was much more gradual than traditionally supposed. In both cases I explore the continuities in their theories with their training roots in Germany, focusing particularly on the influence of Wilhelm von Humboldt's philosophy of language, and suggest cultural and cognitive differences in their career institutions as causes of discontinuities.; Outside Germany, Müller adapted his theory to meet the demands of his English audience, insisting upon the interdependence of language and thought in a sought-for refutation of Darwinism as applied to man. Whitney's political theory of language, in turn, belonged to the American tradition of Noah Webster, and his early inculcation in Scottish Common-Sense philosophy made him critical of German Romantic theories. Both of them viewed the study of language as closely bound to the study of man within a broader institutional understanding of linguistics than exists today. Thus, my history regards linguistics as a key to cultural and intellectual links between the German and English-speaking worlds while opening a new window on modern linguistics' place between the humanities and the social sciences.