Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought

Cartesian Linguistics began as a manuscript written while Noam Chomsky was a 35-year old fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. Some of the material in it was presented as a part of the Princeton University Christian Gauss Lectures on Criticism early in 1964 and published in 1966. An intellectual tour de force, CL is not an easy text to read, but it is certainly a rewarding one. It begins by describing the sort of linguistic creativity that is found in virtually every sentence produced by any person, including young children. The focus soon shifts, however, to the kind of mind that is required to make this 'ordinary' sort of creativity possible. And to some extent - primarily through commentary on Wilhelm von Humboldt - Chomsky hints at what the implications of such a mind might be for politics and what he calls in his "Language and Freedom" (Chomsky, 1987) "the ideal form of social organization.