The French Revolution signaled the beginning of a period of tremendous political
and cultural upheaval and transformation. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars and
the conservative retrenchment that followed France's defeat in 1815, nineteenth-
century Europe witnessed three other major periods of political revolution ( 1830,
1848, and 1870) and many more local outbreaks of resistance. Because the discourse
of liberal humanism was gradually transformed from a stance of opposition to one
of dominance, new critical discourses that would reconceptualize the operative no-
tion of culture and establish new critical stances seemed necessary.

The first new critical discourse to emerge in the nineteenth century was that of
hermeneutics. The term was derived from the Greek verb hermēneuein (to inter-
pret or understand), which was based on the name of the priest of the Delphic or-
acle, who was in turn named for the messenger-god Hermes. Aristotle Organon
on logic included a treatise entitled Peri hermēneias, thus according this area a
long-standing intellectual pedigree; but Aristotle's enterprise was simply to put
forward general principles for formulating statements that can be evaluated as
true or false. It was not until the eighteenth century that hermeneutics attained
the much broader and more complex meaning that would permit it to be classi-
fied as a modern critical discourse.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the forerunners of modern
hermeneutics were principally concerned with issues of biblical exegesis and in-
terpretation, especially as practiced within the Protestant tradition. However, the
development of modern philology and historiography came to exert important
influences on biblical hermeneutics, so that the interpretation of sacred texts
gradually became subject to some of the same critical methods and constraints
applied to texts generally. For example, as early as 1761, J. A. Ernesti had already
argued that the only criteria governing the correctness of the interpretation of any
text were the uses of words, their historical circumstances, and the intention of
the author in using them.

By the end of the eighteenth century, under the influence of Enlightenment ra-
tionalism, the link between interpretation and critique had already been forged.
The so-called lower criticism of biblical writings involved the use of external and

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