Okay, I think I've managed to push down the quease from James McGilvray's hagiographic introduction adequately to proceed. This is an interesting part of Chomsky's oeuvre: easy to see from the perspective of the nativist true believer as a minor conceit, a noble if indulgent delving into the glimmers of proto-knowledge that foreran the real scientific work of the present; easier to malign from the outside, from the position of the cog-sci guy or the sociolinguist or the intellectual historian or the seventeenth-century specialist or the philosopher of language, as an exercise in selective reading of the past, an egomaniacal attempt to reorient the history of the study of language and thought around Chomsky himself, the font of linguistic science.

Neither of these approaches is reasonable. The former starts to seem sleazy if anything; certainly it’s untenable—although by the time Chomsky has done deploying McGilvray, in a 50-page introduction to a 50-page work, to smear any and all detractors as “empiricists” (he makes it a dirtier word than “goatfuckers”), you can forgive people for getting confused. The nativist tradition sees linguistics as a biological science and language as evidence for the shape of the brain, excluding most of what relates to linguistic creativity and the social uses of language as unsystematizable and therefore unscientific (I’m not sure where I stand on that), and for them “scientific” is seemingly the end-and-be-all of value—the humanities being more of a childish joke appertaining to stuff we haven’t figured out how to do science about yet (and I know I’m not down with that). These were not Descartes’s opinions or concerns, and he was not even really a generativist: language was uninteresting to him for the most part, and his dualism stopped him from seeing the mind as something we could investigate through logic or data, but conceptually, he can stand as a high-profile brain to sponsor Chomskyanism based on the fundamental, but not so fargoing, commonality of the Cartesian freedom of thought (and language) from external stimuli.

But the detractors in their legions don’t have it quite right either. There is a lot of good in the treatment of some thinkers who are legitimately preceding a Chomskyan tradition (is it churlish to suggest again rather that he is following in theirs?). Really this should be called Port-Royal Linguistics, since the Port-Royal grammarians were generativists who saw grammar as truth and believed in a deep structure undergoing transformations into sound in different ways in different languages—but who’s heard of the Port-Royal Grammar? ‘Sno way to self-promote. And Humboldt, who comes in for a lot of praise, is a more plausible predecessor, although Chomsky doesn’t quite get the whole story with him, the relativism and confusion that went along with his mystical nativism. There are threads here. But he hardly even touches “the empiricists”—which must include Locke and Condillac and perhaps to stretch a point Herder (although Herder comes in for qualified praise here), and certainly in no way demonstrates the existence of a coherent tradition of “everyone he disagrees with.” So as intellectual history it fails, and as rationalist philosophy it fails, but as a collection ofspecific, delimited insights on a group of thinkers idiosyncratically connected by some of their ideas on language (aggregated here under the awkward term “rationalist–romantics”), it has interest, and would get more credit for that if Chomsky weren’t so ready to make big claims and denigrate those who disagree. ( )