ABSTRACT
Saussure founded the modern discipline of linguistics, but as the perhaps unwitting heir of de Tracy, he also gave a decisively modern turn to the evolving theory of ideology. Although he never used the word, Saussure defined language as ideology; or rather, he renamed as “linguistics” what had, until then, been an inquiry into the relation between ideology and representation. After Saussure, it became all but impossible to think of ideology without thinking of language, and of language as Saussure defined it.
