BOOKS
THE WORM IN THE APPLE
FROM lOCKE TO SAUSSURE: ESSAYS ON THE STUDY OF lAN–
GUAGE AND INTEllECTUAL HISTORY.
By
Hans Aarsleff.
University
of Minnesota Press. $29.50.
On the evidence provided by this book, it is arguable
that Hans Aarsleff knows more about the history of language
theory between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than
anyone else is likely even to wish to know. His presentation of the
principal figures and issues in this history, which extends from
Locke to Saussure, is rich in both factual details and nuanced ar–
guments. Consisting for the most part of articles written over a
period of twenty years, the individual pieces are addressed to the
interests of specialists, and they raise a number of issues which
only specialists will be competent to address. For example: Did
John Locke really lay the groundwork for a genuine science of lan–
guage in his alleged perception of language as a specifically "so–
cial institution" ?Was the Lockean view of language the principal
basis for the more general theory of language of the eighteenth
century, aspects of which were shared by thinkers as diverse as
Leibniz, Turgot, Condillac, Herder, Goethe, Humboldt, the
French
ideologues,
and even Wordsworth? Was Condillac less
the sensationalist he is often considered to be, than the generalizer
of the Lockean view of language and the principal architect of the
second stage in the transformation of language study into a
science? Was there a decline in the scientific study of language
during the first half of the nineteenth century-the period
conventionally thought of as inaugurating the scientific phase of
this field, as evidenced by the rise during that time of philology?
Was philology itself less a contribution to a possible science of
language, than a subversion of the whole scientific enterprise?
And if so, was this subversive activity a result, in some way, of the
political reaction that followed the French Revolution? Was this
reaction, in turn, also a cause of the distorted notion and rejection
of the Enlightenment which marked the romantic period and
