ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapter we considered the possibility that there is a fundamental connection between the language faculty and the social, in fact political, nature of human beings. Language is not the only way humans interact with one another, but it is the most distinctive and most developed. When humans interact by way of language there are many things they can be doing – philosophising, flirting, informing, preaching or quarrelling, for example – but since this book is about language and politics, we shall focus on the type of interaction that has the sort of social dimension that intuitively we would call political.
