International journal
ISSN 2311-0759 (Online)
ISSN 2311-0740 (Print)


история советского языкознания

Voloshinov and Vossler: Allies without knowing it

Between both solutions to the crisis of positivism at the beginning of the 20th century, V. N. Voloshinov chose K. Vossler’s idealistic neophilology, entirely rejecting Saussurianism. Voloshinov transposed Vossler’s stylistic individual idealism into sociological concepts: “spirit” becomes “ideology”, “culture” becomes “superstructure”, and “idealistic neophilology” becomes “sociological poetics”. This terminological rearrangement has caused constant misunderstandings in the interpretation of the book “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language”.