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one discourse among many but rather the carrier of the only en–
lightenment we can realistically hope for. He speaks continually
of the "coherence and consistency" of the tradition of which he is
the historian. And he has in fact constructed a genealogy-in the
older, pre-Foucaultian sense of the term-for the modern science
of linguistics which, by his lights, Saussure founded on the basis
of work that preceded him by two centuries.
There is, however, a more general argument interwoven into
Aarsleff's richly textured study of the high points of the story he
would offer as an alternative to the conventional account of the
rise of a science of language. This argument appears in the guise
of a sustained criticism of "essentialism," a term which in his
usage seems to cover such diverse cultural phenomena as mysti–
cism, organicism, vitalism, naturalism, radical skepticism, and
metaphysical idealism.
It
is his twofold argument, consisting of a
defense of science, on the one side, and the denigration of essen–
tialism, on the other, that gives to Aarsleff's book its relevance
to
many of the conflicts current in recent debates over the nature of
the human sciences.
Essentialism-I surmise from Aarsleff's representations of
its many forms-is the belief that things have essences, that these
essences can be apprehended by means of perception, intuition, or
revelation, that these essences can be represented adequately in
words, and that such words can convey the essences of the ideas we
have about things. The centrality of language theory to any scien–
tific conception of truth derives from the fact that the manner in
which we apprehend the relations among ideas, words, and things
will determine the nature of our notion of the
kind
of knowledge
we can have of reality.
If,
as the Adamicist theory of language has
it, there was once (or ever could be) anything like a body of words
perfectly adequate to the representation of the things they desig–
nate, then in principle the ideas we have about things could be
made perfectly adequate to our perception of these things. Since,
however, in Aarsleff's view, perceptions can be worked up into
ideas only by way of verbal representations of things, the way in
which one views words (or language or signs in general) will be
crucial to any notion we might form of the epistemic status of
ideas themselves. And since, also in his view, words (and language
and signs in general) are, in their culturally significant aspects at
least, social entities, products of purely social conventions, and
