An integrated analysis of the themes of demography, commercialization and agrarian social structure makes possible an assessment of their role as determinants of the direction and nature of socio-economic change over the long term in colonial and post-colonial Bengal. Some of the conclusions to emerge have broader theoretical and comparative relevance.

Dramatic changes in the river system of rural Bengal should modify the belief of historians of the longue durée that geographical structures represent constants in historical time. While the Bengal delta may well have been prone to extraordinary ecological turbulence, recent research is making clear that colonial India as a whole was subjected to substantial environmental change in the nineteenth century largely as a result of human agency in the form of state interventions. Demographic trends set broad parameters within which rural production occurred, but showed no concordance with output after the mid nineteenth century. Even in the early phase it is important not to elevate correlations to the status of causal relationships. From the 1820s fluctuations in the wider economic systems cast a stronger influence on the regional agrarian economy than movements of population. Changes in prices and the availability of credit flowing from supra-regional economic systems based on capitalism had a significant bearing on even the subsistence concerns of peasant labour. Peasants who had resorted to cash-cropping were especially vulnerable to downturns and periodic crises in the world economy. Population increase generally provided a positive impulse to innovation in agricultural techniques but was blocked or aborted by social and political obstacles embedded in the complex layers of property and possessory rights to the land which underpinned the agrarian power structure.

In 1978 Eric Stokes, the doyen of agrarian historians at Cambridge, welcomed ‘the return of the peasant to South Asian history’. He berated historians and political scientists for their ‘laggardliness’ in recognizing that ‘the balance of destiny in South Asia rests in peasant hands’ but expressed satisfaction that ‘among the students of the colonial revolution in South Asia the city slickers [we]re at last quitting town’. The difficulties in achieving a meaningful intellectual engagement with peasant history stemmed partly from the misperception of a discontinuity between state structures and politics on the one hand and agrarian economies and societies on the other that had been one of the most lasting legacies of nineteenth-century theorists and comparative sociologists. Besides, there was the vexing problem of sources associated with studying social groups who left few written records of their own and were mere objects in the enquiries of external observers, especially colonial officialdom. During the 1970s and 1980s new empirical research and innovative methodologies enabled not only an historical reconstruction of agrarian economy, society and politics and their interrelations in various regions of colonial India but, through a critical evaluation if not deconstruction of colonial texts, restored to the peasantry their subjecthood in the making of history.

A study of the historical experience of the labouring classes in the Indian countryside during colonial rule is of vital importance and general relevance to historians in two ways. First, the nature and extent of the ‘colonial revolution’ in South Asia cannot be grasped without addressing the question of agrarian transformation.

Division I of Being and Time contains the complete account of early Heidegger's quarrel with and departure from the philosophical tradition. In spite of the attempts by many, beginning with Husserl, to incorporate Heidegger's insights into a more traditional framework, that departure was a radical one. For Heidegger the tradition that began in ancient Greece finds what may be its ultimate expression in Husserl's phenomenology.

As Føllesdal and his successors have argued, Husserl's phenomenology can be understood as the joint product of two influences. From Brentano he took the insight that the defining characteristic of consciousness is its intentionality - that is, its “of -ness” or directedness toward some object. But the model he uses for understanding this intentionality or directedness is essentially the same as Frege's model of linguistic reference, with the basic notion of meaning or sense (Sinn) suitably generalized so as to apply to all acts of consciousness, linguistic and nonlinguistic. As Figures 1 and 2 suggest, just as Frege distinguishes the sense of a linguistic expression from its referent, so Husserl distinguishes the meaning of a conscious act from the object it is about. For both, the meaning is that in virtue of which we can refer to or intend objects.

In 1975, just a year before his death, the publication of a complete edition of Heidegger's works began. This edition will eventually comprise not only all of his previously published writings, but also a considerable number of unpublished manuscripts from various periods in his philosophical career and the lecture series that he presented at the universities of Marburg and Freiburg in the twenties, thirties, and forties. Since the first volume of this edition appeared, a considerable number of these lecture series have been published, and they constitute a resource of the first importance for anyone interested in the evolution of Heidegger's thought. This is especially the case for those lecture series that fall into the period in which Heidegger was working out the position he presented in Being and Time (1927), as well as those presented in the years immediately thereafter. In a recent study of Heidegger's thought I draw extensively on these new publications, and it is the main thesis of that study that I present in this essay.

As my title indicates, that thesis has to do with the unity of Heidegger's thought; by this I mean the unity of his thought through the “turning,” or Kehre, that is usually supposed to separate the thought of the later period from that of Being and Time. It has become common practice among interpreters of Heidegger's philosophy to base themselves mainly on the writings that follow this turning, and even to push the divorce of the later from the earlier writings to the point of consigning Being and Time to a suppositious "Cartesian and Kantian" period in Heidegger's philosophical career.

One common view of the history of twentieth-century Continental philosophy is as follows. At the beginning of the century Edmund Husserl, disturbed by what he saw as the increasing relativism and historicism of Western culture, introduced the phenomenological method as a way to ensure that philosophy would arrive at final, incontrovertible truths. Phenomenology means primarily description - description of the things presented in our experience and description of our experience of them. The phenomenological movement was heralded by Husserl's cry, “Back to the things themselves!” Because phenomenology “brackets” or suspends belief in, all metaphysical constructs in order to focus solely on what shows up as it presents itself in our experience, its findings are supposed to be apodictic, beyond all possible doubt.

According to the standard story, the early Heidegger came along and raised questions about the viability of Husserlian phenomenology by taking an “interpretive” turn. What is most important about Heidegger's hermeneutic ontology, so the story goes, is his recognition of the significance of the finitude, worldliness, and historicity of our human predicament - the recognition that our access to things is always colored and preshaped by the sense of things circulating in our historical culture. The story then concludes with poststructuralists and various postmodern thinkers detecting a nostalgia for metaphysics even in such Heideggerian concepts as worldliness, finitude, and history. Jacques Derrida especially points out that Heidegger still seems to be trapped in essentialism and totalization, twin sins of the very “metaphysics of presence” that his hermeneutic approach was supposed to displace.

It may remain forever a matter of debate how much truth there is in the old claim that every important thinker has essentially one fundamental idea. In the case of famous philosophers, its vindication may oblige us to summarize the “one great idea” in such broad terms as to make it almost meaningless. What can probably be claimed with more justification is that for most great minds there has been one question that guided their thinking or research. This certainly applies to Martin Heidegger, and the question that fascinated him throughout his long philosophic life can be stated simply: what is the meaning of being? Ontology, in the widest possible sense, was his main concern throughout his life. This does not mean, of course, that he was forever looking for an answer to the same old question. As his thinking evolved, the meaning of the question changed; but Heidegger to the end of his life remained convinced that the “questionability” of the Seinsfrage was the main thrust of his life's work (cf. GA i 438).

As the twentieth century draws to a close, it is increasingly clear that Heidegger will stand out as one of the greatest philosophers of our times. His writings have had an immense impact not only in Europe and the English-speaking world, but in Asia as well. And his influence has been felt in areas as diverse as literary theory, psychoanalysis, rhetoric, ecology, and theology. The recent explosion of interest in Heidegger has come as a surprise to even his most ardent admirers. In the fifties and sixties it was still possible to consign Heidegger to the “Phenomenology and Existentialism” bin of the philosophy curriculum, treating him as the student of Husserl and precursor of Sartre. His talk about angst, guilt, death, and the need to be authentic seemed to place his work well outside the range of topics making up the mainstream Anglo-American curriculum. Though he was read in France, he was largely ignored in the English-speaking world.

Heidegger's importance lies partly in the fact that he is perhaps the leading figure among that small list of twentieth-century philosophers who have helped us emerge, painfully and with difficulty, from the grip of modern rationalism. Others on the short list would include Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. But one might claim some preeminence for Heidegger, in that he got there first. In the case of Merleau-Ponty, the breakthrough plainly built on Heidegger's work.

The emergence these philosophers helped us toward has, alas, been only partial and is still very contested; indeed, it is always menaced with being rolled back - hence the continuing relevance of their works, some of which appeared more than half a century ago.

In this essay, I shall discuss Heidegger, though with a side-glance at the others from time to time. I shall try to formulate the way in which his thinking takes us outside the traditional epistemology, using the notions of engaged agency and background.

What Gustav Bergmann christened “the linguistic turn” was a rather desperate attempt to keep philosophy an armchair discipline. The idea was to mark off a space for a priori knowledge into which neither sociology nor history nor art nor natural science could intrude. It was an attempt to find a substitute for Kant's “transcendental standpoint.” The replacement of “mind” or “experience” by “meaning”was supposed to insure the purity and autonomy of philosophy by providing it with a nonempirical subject matter.

Linguistic philosophy was, however, too honest to survive. When, with the later Wittgenstein, this kind of philosophy turned its attention to the question of how such a “pure” study of language was possible, it realized that it was not possible - that semantics had to be naturalized if it were to be, in Donald Davidson's phrase, “preserved as a serious subject.” The upshot of linguistic philosophy is, I would suggest, Davidson's remark that “there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what philosophers . . . have supposed. . . . We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language users master and then apply to cases.“ This remark epitomizes what Ian Hacking has called “the death of meaning” - the end of the attempt to make language a transcendental topic.