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.
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.
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:
Recommended Literature about Bally's theories:
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]
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]
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Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders of semiotics, or semiology, as Saussure called it.
Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach, primarily in the social sciences, that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns that underlie all the things that humans do, think, perceive, and feel.
Neoliberalism is both a political philosophy and a term used to signify the late-20th-century political reappearance of 19th-century ideas associated with free-market capitalism. The term has multiple, competing definitions, and is often used pejoratively. In scholarly use, the term is often left undefined or used to describe a multitude of phenomena. However, it is primarily employed to delineate the societal transformation resulting from market-based reforms.
Horace Bénédict de Saussure was a Genevan geologist, meteorologist, physicist, mountaineer and Alpine explorer, often called the founder of alpinism and modern meteorology, and considered to be the first person to build a successful solar oven.
The Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), founded in 1947, is an international academic society of economists, political philosophers, and other intellectuals who share a neoliberal or classical liberal outlook. It is headquartered at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, United States. The society advocates freedom of expression, free market economic policies, and an open society. Further, the society seeks to discover ways in which the private sector can replace many functions currently provided by government entities.
Wilhelm Röpke was a German economist and social critic, one of the spiritual fathers of the social market economy. A professor of economics, first in Jena, then in Graz, Marburg, Istanbul, and finally Geneva, Röpke theorised and collaborated to organise the post-World War II economic re-awakening of the war-wrecked German economy, deploying a program referred to as ordoliberalism, a more conservative variant of German liberalism.
The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle is a language and literature society. It started in 1926 as a group of linguists, philologists and literary critics in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis and a theory of the standard language and of language cultivation from 1928 to 1939. The linguistic circle was founded in the Café Derby in Prague, which is also where meetings took place during its first years.
Course in General Linguistics is a book compiled by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye from notes on lectures given by historical-comparative linguist Ferdinand de Saussure at the University of Geneva between 1906 and 1911. It was published in 1916, after Saussure's death, and is generally regarded as the starting point of structural linguistics, an approach to linguistics that was established in the first half of the 20th century by the Prague linguistic circle. One of Saussure's translators, Roy Harris, summarized Saussure's contribution to linguistics and the study of language in the following way:
Language is no longer regarded as peripheral to our grasp of the world we live in, but as central to it. Words are not mere vocal labels or communicational adjuncts superimposed upon an already given order of things. They are collective products of social interaction, essential instruments through which human beings constitute and articulate their world. This typically twentieth-century view of language has profoundly influenced developments throughout the whole range of human sciences. It is particularly marked in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology.
Philip Mirowski is a historian and philosopher of economic thought at the University of Notre Dame. He received a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan in 1979.
Gottfried Haberler was an Austrian-American economist. He worked in particular on international trade. One of his major contributions was reformulating the Ricardian idea of comparative advantage in a neoclassical framework, abandoning the labor theory of value for an opportunity cost concept.
Structural semantics is a linguistic school and paradigm that emerged in Europe from the 1930s, inspired by the structuralist linguistic movement started by Ferdinand de Saussure's 1916 work "Cours De Linguistique Generale".
Charles Bally was a Swiss linguist who was a representative of the Geneva School of linguistics.
The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, also known as Geneva Graduate Institute, is a graduate-level research university in Geneva, Switzerland dedicated to international relations and development studies.
Synchrony and diachrony are two complementary viewpoints in linguistic analysis. A synchronic approach considers a language at a moment in time without taking its history into account. In contrast, a diachronic approach, as in historical linguistics, considers the development and evolution of a language through history.
Structural linguistics, or structuralism, in linguistics, denotes schools or theories in which language is conceived as a self-contained, self-regulating semiotic system whose elements are defined by their relationship to other elements within the system. It is derived from the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and is part of the overall approach of structuralism. Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, published posthumously in 1916, stressed examining language as a dynamic system of interconnected units. Saussure is also known for introducing several basic dimensions of semiotic analysis that are still important today. Two of these are his key methods of syntagmatic and paradigmatic analysis, which define units syntactically and lexically, respectively, according to their contrast with the other units in the system. Other key features of structuralism are the focus on systematic phenomena, the primacy of an idealized form over actual speech data, the priority of linguistic form over meaning, the marginalization of written language, and the connection of linguistic structure to broader social, behavioral, or cognitive phenomena.
The Copenhagen School is a group of scholars dedicated to the study of linguistics, centered around Louis Hjelmslev (1899–1965) and the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen, founded by him and Viggo Brøndal (1887–1942). In the mid twentieth century the Copenhagen school was one of the most important centres of linguistic structuralism together with the Geneva School and the Prague School. In the late 20th and early 21st century the Copenhagen school has turned from a purely structural approach to linguistics to a functionalist one, Danish functional linguistics, which nonetheless incorporates many insights from the founders of the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen.
Albert Sechehaye was a Swiss linguist. He is known for editing Ferdinand de Saussure's lectures, Course in General Linguistics.
Julie Tetel Andresen is an American linguistic historiographer and romance novelist who is a professor at Duke University, where she has taught since 1986. Her primary appointment is in the Department of English. She has secondary appointments in the Departments of Cultural Anthropology and Slavic and Eurasian Studies. She is chair of the Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics.
John A. Davenport was an American journalist and writer, the editor of Barron's, a longtime editor of Fortune and a career-long exponent of the moral and economic case for free markets and Rhodesia.
Sergei Iosifovich Kartsevski was a Russian linguist who was a representative of the Geneva and Prague school of linguistics.
