ABSTRACT
Language, we are told by Saussure, is first and foremost a social fact, indeed, it is a form of society, and we are all too familiar with the kind of society we find in Saussure. Familiar, not only because we may have read the Course in General Linguistics more times than we would care to admit, or because the concept of langue has passed into the common parlance (if you’ll pardon the irony) of cultural analysis, but because this kind of society is one that seems to surround us in our daily existence. It is, we know, rule-governed and yet at the same time arbitrary, one which admits a free choice which none the less seems insignificant from the perspective of the whole. Saussure will claim that language ‘offers the most striking proof’ that ‘a law accepted by a collectivity is a thing to which one submits and not a rule freely consented to’,1 and one can think of no better description of a bureaucratized liberal society. Yet it also a society, which, we are assured, is the result of some sort of contract: it is somehow our society, though we can never quite recall when we agreed to it; it was, at any rate, a very long time ago.
