BOOKS
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hence ultimately arbitrary in their meanings, it follows for him
that the whole project of either purifying language or discovering
a universal grammar must be considered nugatory, not to say
sinister in its motivations. The indictment of this project extends
from mystical believers in a purely Adamic or divinely revealed
language, to the Port Royalists of the seventeenth century, down
to certain positivists in our own epoch-and includes by implica–
tion Russell and Chomsky especially, not
to
mention Heidegger,
the structuralists (with their absurd notion that " language speaks
man" ), and the poststructuralists (with their frivolous notion of
language as "freeplay" ).
I hasten to stress that this indictment is not drawn up openly
by Aarsleff in this book, except for the single instance of an essay
which subjects Chomsky'S account of "Cartesian linguistics" to
such a devastating critique that nothing is left of it in the end. For
the most part, not even the historical studies by contemporary
theorists of language in the essentialist tradition are cited. Aarsleff
shows his contempt by simply ignoring them. They are at best
treated as he treats Hegel, whom he mentions but once-in a par–
enthetical phrase. So AarsleH's book is not only a history, a puta–
tively
true
account of the
real
story of the establishment of a science
of language, but also-like all histories-a story with a moral.
It
is a defense of science, and a warning of what happens when sci–
ence becomes corrupted by essentialist impulses. No doubt about
it, whatever the merits of this work
as history
(and they are many),
it is also a book of our current cultural moment, a shot aimed at all
those theorists of the human sciences who base their ideas on a
partial or distorted understanding of the nature of language or on
a misuse of the true science of language founded by Locke.
In its broadest implications, then, AarsleH's book can be con–
sidered a contribution to the current discussions of the nature of
language; the relations between language, thought, and culture;
the possibility of a science of society; and the problem of the super–
structure which wracks contemporary Marxist theory. One can
predict that the nature of its reception will be determined in large
part by the positions that prospective reviewers hold on these
issues. This should not, however, obscure the fact that Aarsleff has
advanced important-and massively documented-arguments for
a revision of the intellectual history of the eighteenth and nine–
teenth centuries. His onslaught on the authority of philology and
