274 ANALYZING DATA
and Schumacher as involving the position of one commonplace in particular in their public ar-
ticulations: the commonplace of “Western Civilization.” Although Adenauer and Schumacher
agreed on the basic proposition that Germany belonged, culturally, to the Western world (Artner
1985, 43–44; Herbst 1989, 7, 110), Schumacher drew few of the conclusions for German foreign
policy and German identity that Adenauer did. Hence, the relevant historical context within which
to situate Schumacher’s accusation is a debate about Germany’s identity and future: Would a
social democratic Germany try to fulfill its democratic mission and pursue reunification without
binding ties to any of its occupiers, or would a “Christian-Western” Germany join the emerging
“Western” institutions and cooperate with some of its conquerors in an effort to reduce the bur-
dens of the occupation? The relative centrality of the commonplace “Western Civilization” to
each position, and the ways that this commonplace was used to help concretize the meaning of
other notions, is critical to any explanation of the events in question—and, in fact, to an explana-
tion of their eventual outcome.Specific Histories: Genealogical InvestigationThe second step in analyzing rhetorical commonplaces is to investigate the histories of the
commonplaces involved in a given situation. This investigation should be genealogical, seeking
“to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion... to identify the accidents, the minute
deviations—or conversely, the complete reversals—the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty
calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us” (Foucault
1977, 146). Unlike approaches to the history of thought that seek to read the historically devel-
oped categories of mature modes of analysis backward into history and tell a tale about their
emergence as a more or less rational process, a genealogical approach remains sensitive to the
completely unintended nature of many important discursive shifts.^17
Rhetorical commonplaces provide potentials for action. These potentials derive from the spe-
cific history of the notion: how it has been deployed in the past, which affinities and antipathies it
has acquired in a particular context, and what precedents exist for its deployment under present
circumstances. This specific history does not provide us with any kind of “essence” of the com-
monplace, but simply conveys a sense of the historical possibilities—particularly those on which
actors drew in the situation under investigation. It is these possibilities that are “tapped” when the
commonplace is deployed in subsequent legitimation struggles. For the case at hand, the genea-
logical question concerns the prominence and specific history of “Western Civilization” as a
concept, because my textual ethnography indicated its importance to the debates. To illustrate the
approach, I will briefly trace the development of this important concept.
It is not the case that there was always something called “the West,” which people simply
began to think about differently in the late-nineteenth century; rather, “the West” in the form in
which we know it today did not exist, and could not have existed before the discursive shifts that
took place during this period. In fact, “Western Civilization” in its contemporary form is one of
the rhetorical commonplaces tossed up by the general mutation in discourse during the nineteenth
century that brought an end to simple progressivist accounts of “civilization” in which all societ-
ies would inevitably converge on the series of universal values understood to have been first
disclosed in Western Europe.^18 This general mutation owed much to Hegel’s (1988) dialectical
combination of universal progress with the essential separateness of cultural “worlds,” especially
as Hegel’s followers generally selected either universality or particularism as the principal les-
sons that they took from his work. Those selecting cultural particularism (the more conservative,
anti-Marxist “right-Hegelians”) stood on Hegel’s assertion that the civilization of the contemporary