MAKING SENSE OF MAKING SENSE 273occurs on both sides of the Schumacher/Adenauer debate helps to elucidate the contours of agency
in postwar Germany, in that the notion clearly shapes both sides of the argument.
There is no automatic, formalizable process for the disclosure of commonplaces and their
relationships (Ganter and Wille 1996). The frequency of words and phrases, as in quantitative
content analysis, is insufficient to establish the commonplace character of a particular locution,
since notions relevant to the framing of particular questions may not be repeated all that often
during the course of a debate (Hopf 2004). Procedures like “predicate analysis” (Milliken 1999)
and the description of “plot units” and narrative “functions” (Alker 1996), while providing enor-
mously subtle readings of linguistic data, have no defensible claim to have exhausted the texts
under analysis.^16 Indeed, in principle any piece of textual data—such as, in this case, the steno-
graphic reports of a raucous Bundestag session—can be cut up in multiple ways depending on the
categories used in the analysis.
Hence, the construction of analytical mappings of the “topography” of available commonplaces
is necessarily ideal-typical in the Weberian sense discussed above. One does not formulate an
ideal type out of thin air; it emerges only through an immersion in the empirical data and is
principally to be evaluated in terms of its utility in making sense of the empirical situations from
which it is abstracted and derived (M. Weber 1999a). Weber is quite clear that there are as many
ways to oversimplify a situation for analytical purposes as there are value orientations that ana-
lysts bring to their work. A rhetorical topography serves as an interpretive tool, and is produced
through an encounter between the theoretical concerns of the analyst and the textual record of
debates and discussions relevant to some specific issue.
There are various techniques for generating a rhetorical topography, but the one that I have
found most helpful in my own work might be best characterized as a form of “textual ethnogra-
phy.” The practice is a form of disciplined reading in which one engages in a kind of “participant-
observation” of the textual records of some legitimation struggle, jotting “field notes” as one
reads—much as one would when studying the social practices of some group of people (Emerson,
Fretz, and Shaw 1995, 36–37). One does not read the textual record without presuppositions;
rather, one comes to the textual record familiar with secondary source material about the episode
in question, as well as with a set of theoretical and philosophical commitments that serve as
preliminary suppositions about the issues at stake. The textual “field notes”—I type them in the
same data file where I record illustrative quotations, usually putting them in bold-faced type to
make it easier to find them later—record one’s developing sense of the rhetorical commonplaces
being deployed in the situation. After reading through the relevant documents, a serious effort to
systematize the “field notes” will tend to produce a rhetorical topography:
As creator of the notes in the first place, the ethnographer has been creating and discovering
the meaning of and in the notes all along... when an ethnographer thinks he has “a substan-
tial amount of data” on a topic, it is not so much because of something inherent in the data;
rather it is because the ethnographer has interpreted, organized, and brought the data to bear
on the topic. (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995, 59)In addition, because the “field notes” are linked to specific illustrative quotations from the
documents, the resulting rhetorical topography can be justified empirically through the mobiliza-
tion of direct quotations.
Space does not permit a detailed presentation of the evidentiary basis for the commonplaces
that I have identified in my previous work on postwar German reconstruction (P.T. Jackson 2002b,
2006). But drawing on this work I would characterize the central difference between Adenauer