ABSTRACT
Although biblical exegesis and rhetoric, from which modem hermeneutics derived its first principles, are ancient arts, an effort to establish hermeneutics as a universal science, and especially to extend its principles to the science of society, is of decidedly recent origin. Romantic hermeneutics is an extension of romantic philosophy. It should be clear that social institutions are not immune to the hermeneutical analysis, that social facts are perfectly amenable to the interpretative understanding. The project of sociological hermeneutics is fundamentally that of rediscovery and emancipation—rediscovery of authorship and emancipation from the oppressive weight of obsolete institutions. The realization that man is a producer as much as the product of society was first formulated by the romantic thinkers in response to the promise and the threat of the French Revolution. A great accomplishment of the French Revolution was the doubt it cast over the divine nature of the social order and man's place in it.
