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Geneva School

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Not to be confused with Genevan School.
Ferdinand de Saussure

The expression Geneva School refers to (1) a group of linguists based in Geneva who pioneered modern structural linguistics; (2) a group of literary theorists and critics working from a phenomenological perspective; and (3) a group of economists and political economists working on principles of neoliberalism.

Geneva School of Linguistics

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The most prominent figure of the Geneva School of Linguistics school was Ferdinand de Saussure. Other important colleagues and students of Saussure who comprise this school include Albert Sechehaye, Albert Riedlinger, Sergei Kartsevski and Charles Bally.

The most significant linguistic book connected with this school is Cours de linguistique générale, the main work of de Saussure, which was published by his students Charles Bally and Albert Sehechaye. The book was based on lectures with this title that de Saussure gave three times in Geneva from 1906 to 1912. Sehechaye and Bally did not themselves take part in these lecture classes, but they used notes from other students. The most important of these students was Albert Riedlinger, who provided them with the most material. Furthermore, Bally and Sehechaye continued to develop de Saussure's theories, mainly focusing on the linguistic research of speech. Sehechaye also concentrated on syntactic problems.

Charles Bally

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In addition to his edition of de Saussure's lectures, Charles Bally also played an important role in linguistics. He lived from 1865 to 1947 and was, like de Saussure, from Switzerland. His parent were Jean Gabriel, a teacher and Henriette, the owner of a cloth store. Bally was married three times: first with Valentine Leirens, followed by Irma Baptistine Doutre, who was sent into a mental institution in 1915 and Alice Bellicot.

From 1883 to 1885 he studied classic language and literature in Geneva. He continued his studies from 1886 to 1889 in Berlin where he was awarded a PhD. After his studies he worked as a private teacher for the royal family of Greece from 1889 to 1893. Bally returned to Geneva and taught at a business school from 1893 on and moved to the Progymnasium, a grammar school, from 1913 to 1939. At the same time, he worked as PD at the university from 1893 to 1913. Finally from 1913 to 1939 he had a professorship for general linguistic and comparative Indo-German studies which he took over from Ferdinand de Saussure.

Besides his works about subjectivity in the French Language he also wrote about the crisis in French language and language classes. Today Charles Bally is regarded as the founding-father of linguistic theories of style and much honored for his theories of phraseology.

Works by Charles Bally:

  • Traité de stylistique française, 1909
  • Le Langage et la Vie, 1913
  • Linguistique générale et linguistique française, 1932

Recommended Literature about Bally's theories:

  • G. Redard, Bibliographie chronologique des publications de Charles Bally, in Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 36, 1982, 25-41
  • W. Hellmann, Charles Bally, 1988
  • S. Durrer, Introduction à la linguistique de Charles Bally, 1998

Geneva School of Literary Criticism

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The expression "Geneva School" (French: groupe de Genève) is also applied to a group of literary critics in the 1950s and 1960s, of which the most important were the Belgian critic Georges Poulet, the French critic Jean-Pierre Richard, and the Swiss critics Marcel Raymond, Albert Béguin, Jean Rousset and Jean Starobinski. The critics Emil Staiger, Gaston Bachelard, and J. Hillis Miller are also sometimes associated with this group.

Growing out of Russian Formalism and Phenomenology (such as in the work of Edmund Husserl), the "Geneva School" used the phenomenological method to attempt to analyse works of literature as representations of deep structures of an author's consciousness and his or her relationship to the real world. Biographical criticism was however avoided, as these critics focused primarily on the work of art itself – treated as an organic whole and considered a subjective interpretation of reality (the German concept of Lebenswelt) – and sought out the recurrent themes and images, especially those concerning time and space and the interactions between the self and others.[1]

Geneva School of Economics

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Historian Quinn Slobodian proposed in 2018 the existence of a so-called Geneva School of economics to describe a group of economists who rallied around the Geneva Graduate Institute in Switzerland in the 1930s as they fled the rise of totalitarianism in Europe.[2][3][4][5][6][7] The Geneva School describes the intellectual project of Ludwig Von Mises, Wilhelm Röpke, Jacob Viner and Michael A. Heilperin, who formed an intellectual community with employees of the Geneva-based General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and of the League of Nations such as Gottfried Haberler.[8][9] Slobodian describes them as "ordo-globalists" who promoted the creation of global institutions to safeguard the unimpeded movement of capital across borders.[10][11] The Geneva School combined the "Austrian emphasis on the limits of knowledge and the global scale with the German ordoliberal emphasis on institutions and the moment of the political decision."[12][13][14][15] Geneva School economists were instrumental in organizing the Mont Pelerin Society, a neoliberal academic society of economists and political philosophers that assembled in nearby Mont Pélerin.[16]

See also

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Notes and references

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  1. ^ For this section, see Eagleton 1983, pp. 58–60.
  2. ^ Ebeling, Richard M. (May 2024). "Une oasis de liberté dans une Europe totalitaire" (PDF). Liberal Institut.
  3. ^ "(PDF) The Historic Roots of the Neoliberal Program". ResearchGate. Archived from the original on 2022-12-11. Retrieved 2024-12-13.
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference Magness was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ "IHEID and Neoliberalism: Reflecting on the Institute's neoliberal history and practice | IHEID". www.graduateinstitute.ch. Retrieved 2023-12-17.
  6. ^ Mirowski, Philip; Plehwe, Dieter (2009-06-19). The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-03318-4.
  7. ^ Dyson, Kenneth (2021-01-21). Conservative Liberalism, Ordo-liberalism, and the State: Disciplining Democracy and the Market. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-259621-5.
  8. ^ Buliamti (2024-11-19). "OTR—Neoliberalism—A Creative Destruction Disease". Cospolon. Retrieved 2024-12-14.
  9. ^ "A New Narrative for Neoliberalism". Aspen Institute Central Europe (in Czech). Retrieved 2024-12-14.
  10. ^ Klabbers, Jan (2020-02-01). "Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism". European Journal of International Law. 31 (1): 369–371. doi:10.1093/ejil/chaa022. ISSN 0938-5428.
  11. ^ "Neoliberalism's World Order". Dissent Magazine. Retrieved 2024-12-13.
  12. ^ "A New Narrative for Neoliberalism". Aspen Institute Central Europe (in Czech). Retrieved 2024-12-14.
  13. ^ Klabbers, Jan (2020-02-01). "Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism". European Journal of International Law. 31 (1): 369–371. doi:10.1093/ejil/chaa022. ISSN 0938-5428.
  14. ^ "(PDF) The Historic Roots of the Neoliberal Program". web.archive.org. 2022-12-11. Retrieved 2024-12-13.
  15. ^ "Neoliberalism's World Order". Dissent Magazine. Retrieved 2024-12-13.
  16. ^ Innset, Ola (2021-11-15). "An Army of Fighters for Freedom. The social environment of the first Mont-Pèlerin Society conference". Revue d'économie politique. 131 (5): 753–776. doi:10.3917/redp.315.0035. ISSN 0373-2630.

Further reading

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  • Robert Magliola. Phenomenology and Literature: An Introduction. Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 1977; 1978.
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