ABSTRACT
Edward Sapir Political science, like poetry, is made of words. The human substance of the social sciences is as verbal in character as Stephane Mallarmé claimed was true of verse. All our perceptions, representations and interpretations of factual reality are manifested through the medium of language. We think with words. To the degree that the student of politics and society suffers from what Louis Massignon, the great French Orientalist, once called soif ontologique (ontological thirst), the social scientist should drink in language. This is a thirst that antilanguage cults, such as pure mathematics or symbolic logic, literally cannot satisfy. Language alone answers our need for a confident, indeed resolute, human sense of self-possession and grasp, not only of the objects that we seek to understand, but also of the enabling truths of ‘self’ and the ‘other’ which we nurture in the course of our intellectual vocation.
