In Babel's shadow

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This comprehensive cultural history explores the language sciences in nineteenth-century Germany, highlighting the significant yet overlooked impact of language study on modernity. The author situates German language scholarship within the contexts of European nationalism, race and ethnicity, humanistic methodologies, and scriptural interpretation. Tuska Benes examines how the German nation was defined as a linguistic community and traces the "linguistic turn" in contemporary social sciences back to the late eighteenth century, rooted in a German tradition that critiques knowledge production through language. The volume reveals how nineteenth-century philologists viewed language as a marker of ethnic descent, creating influential myths about cultural origins tied to their mother tongue. This origin paradigm reinforced the historical and ethnic focus of German nationhood, affecting theologians, cultural critics, philosophers, and racial theorists. Additionally, the text contextualizes the relevance of linguistics in modern cultural studies, asserting that the cultural significance of language in twentieth-century French philosophy has its roots in earlier theological reflections. Benes connects the German tradition's insights on language to the works of structuralist and poststructuralist thinkers like Ferdinand de Saussure and Friedrich Nietzsche. This volume demonstrates how comparative philology positioned language as a vita