ABSTRACT
Rousseau (1964) [1756] I use the second paragraph of Rousseau’s second Discourse as an epigraph, and adapt its title, because I want to call attention to a link between his concerns and ours. Like him, we think knowledge of human nature essential and pursue it; like him, we think the present condition of mankind unjust, and seek to transform it. These two concerns, for example, provide the frame for Noam Chomsky’s recent Russell lectures. Unlike Chomsky, but like Rousseau, moreover, some linguists are beginning to attend to a conception of linguistic structure as interdependent with social circumstances, and as subject to human needs and evolutionary adaptation. And like Rousseau, our image of the linguistic world, the standard by which we judge the present situation, harks back to an earlier stage of human society. Here Rosseau has the advantage over us. He knew he did this, and specified the limitations of it (see the end of note h to the Discourse). Many of us do it implicitly, falling back on a ‘Herderian’ conception of a world composed of traditional units of languageand-culture, for lack of another way of seeing the resources of language as an aspect of human groups, because we have not thought through new ways of seeing how linguistic resources do, in fact, come organized in the world. We have no accepted way of joining our understanding of inequality with our understanding of the nature of language.
