Legal history and intellectual history 31 contained systems of signs whose meanings are determined by their relations to each other” rather than by their correspondence to external referents.*^ The enthusiasm with which in recent years most intellectual historians have taken this “turn” has not, however, eliminated methodological controversy in the field. On the contrary, disputes over method are sharper now than ever. Most of the active participants in the debates fall into four rough categories. To depict these four groups as distinct “schools” would be an exaggeration. But they are coherent and stable enough to warrant description as alternative approaches. The first of the four groups consist of those intellectual historians strongly Influenced by Structuralism.Of the relatively few authors who took this tack, by far the most sophisticated and notorious was Michel Foucault." Foucault’s ideas are impossible to summarize briefly, but most of his work (particularly his early work) exemplified and defended the following methodological principles: All human thought is structured by language. The historian’s job is to map the deep structure of the linguistic system that provided the vocabulary and consequently organized the thought of the members of a culture (or of a discipline within a culture) in the past. Each linguistic and conceptual system will have “its own peculiar objects of study (empiricites) and its own unique strategy for determining the relationships (positivites) existing among the objects inhabiting its domain” — as well as its own devices for repressing or obscuring things about which one cannot speak. Extant histories wildly exaggerate the continuities between the languages and outlooks of different epochs; those accounts must be displaced by studies highlighting the “disjunctures,” the radical discontinuities, in the history of consciousness. Extant histories also misleadingly direct readers’ attention to the “social, economic, and political contexts” of texts or the biographies of their authors. None of these is illuminating. A text is useful only as a symptom; it enables the See Martin Jav, “Should Intellectual History Take a Linguistic Turn? Reflections on the Habcrnias-Gadamcr Debate,” in Dominick LaCapra and Steven Kaplan, eds.. Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and Neze Perspectives (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982), 86; John Toews, “Intellectual History after the Linguistic Turn,” American Historical Reviezv 92 (1987): 881-82; Michael Ermath, “Mindful Matters: The Empire’s New Codes and the Plight of Modern Eiuropcan Intellectual l Ustorv,” Journal of Modern History 57 (1985): 507. This is not the place to attempt a synopsis of Structuralism. Useful studies include: Terrence f4awkes. Structuralism and Semiotics (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1977); Philip Pettit, The Concept of Structuralism: A Critical Analysis (Berkeley, Calif.: Univ. of California Press, 1975); Robert E. Scholes, Structuralismin Literature: An Introduction (NewHaven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1974). " E'oucault himselt consistently denied that he was either a structuralist or an historian. See, c.g., “History, Discourse, and Discontinuity,” Salmagundi 20 (1972): 235; The Archaeology of Knozi'ledge (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 11. However, at least his early work is generally - and rightly - regarded as both structuralist and a form of intellectual history. See, c.g., David Hoilinger, “Historians and the Discourse of Intellectuals,” in Higham, Nev.' Directions, supra n. 6, 58.
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