The course of human development : 19th-century comparative linguistics from Schlegel to Schleicher

This essay describes early efforts in Germany to develop investigations of a people’s history, culture, religion, and language into the new science of “ethnography” in order to trace a connection between this project and later work done by theorists interested in connecting a philosophically inflected sense of a progressive or “universal” world history and the new science of comparative linguistics. While Friedrich Schlegel is positioned as the key figure for making this connection, it was August Schleicher who would prove to be more decisive in making the case for the positive role played by linguistics for recreating the history of mankind across its many great migrations.