“History,” “meaning” and “culture” have long since become foundational concepts in the far- reaching debate over historicization. With the possibilities of the German language—particularly the construction of compound nouns—these same concepts have been integrated into certain overly indulgent terms for self- description in the cultural sciences: I need only mention “history- of- meaning” (Sinngeschichte), “history- of- culture” (Kulturgeschichte) and, in even more excessive case, “meaning- of- history” (Geschichtssinn). The salient feature of such words is that their very usage presents as resolved the problems that still require explanation; namely, the provocation of a historicization of unifying perspectives on matters of history, society and knowledge, which also does not spare the supposed solicitors of historical meaning. The historical disciplines of the cultural sciences, along with their starting points in the sociology of knowledge, are not only a part of what they describe but are also chiefly sciences within a society that remains to be comprehended. While explanatory models from sociology of knowledge have become common practice in the cultural sciences, their attempt to define themselves as a discipline seems to have reached a dead end. This stems from a form of self- description engendered by the philosophy of history, a discipline that was definitively established by the time of the 1755 earthquake in Lisbon, semantically developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Königsberg, Tübingen and Berlin and subsequently resurrected out of the ruins of the two world wars after a preliminary crisis in the debate from 1900 to 1920—much to the reassurance of the public and producers of meaning in the cultural sciences. Only with the turn of world history in 1989 and the current problems of legitimation in the cultural sciences did matters that had long gone overlooked come to light: the cultural sciences are part and parcel of a functionally differentiated society. Hence, they add even more plurality to the manifold views of reality and produce no uniform orientation of knowledge. In contrast, an orientation in the sociology of knowledge makes reference to the social production of knowledge, and thereby to society's knowledge about itself, without recourse to a final justification in something beyond society and the members of the highly educated middle- class who might espouse such rationales.