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Politics and the Cartesians But no matter how valuable they were to Chomsky as he rediscovered the study of language, it is not solely through their power to illuminate contemporary linguistic concerns, theories of deep and surface structures, and questions concerning the acquisition and use of language (which Chomsky also discusses in Cartesian Linguistics) that the Cartesians enter Chomsky's realm of influences. There is a political connection as well. Plenty of political issues were commanding public attention at this time. The United States supported a military coup in Brazil in 1964, the same year it initiated bombing raids on Laos. The following year, a constitutionalist coup occurred in the Dominican Republic against the country's military dictatorship, and once again the United States sent in troops. A few months later, a pro-American general led a military coup in Indonesia, precipitating the slaughter of over half a million people. As the work of the Cartesians (and of Humboldt, in particular) demonstrates, both social and political theory must be addressed in any worthwhile attempt to determine the best way to allow the creative impulses of man free rein. In other words, once we accept the Cartesian perspective on language, the next step is to support natural rights and to oppose authoritarianism. In the course of the Barcelona conference, Chomsky remarked: the principles of people like von Humboldt and Adam Smith and others were that people should be free. They shouldn't be under the control of authoritarian institutions. They shouldn't be subjected to things like division of labor, which destroys them, and wage labor, which is a form of slavery. They should, rather, be free. Now, back in the eighteenth century the forms of centralized authority that people saw in front of their eyes were the feudal system, the Church and the absolutist State, and so on. They didn't see the industrial corporation because it wasn't around. ("Creation") In a dramatic bid to link Cartesian ideals with anarchism, Chomsky then insists: if you take their principles and you apply them to the modern period, I think you'd come pretty close to the revolutionary principles that animated Barcelona in the 1930s. And I think that is about as high a level as human beings have achieved in trying to achieve these principles, and I think that they were the right ones. Not to say that everything was done was right, but . . . the idea of developing the kind of society that Orwell saw and described . . . with popular control over all institutions, economic, political and so on . . . is the right direction to move. This is not a new idea; in fact, its roots are as old as classical liberalism. ("Creation") In light of these remarks, so-called radical political theory is a misnomer. Radical theory is, in Humboldt's sense, or in Chomsky's sense, aítruism: human beings require liberty and a nurturing environment in which to express their humanity. On artists, for example, Humboldt writes that, when free of external control, "all peasants and craftsmen could be transformed into artists, i.e., people who love their craft for its own sake, who refine it with their self-guided energy and inventiveness, and who in so doing cultivate their own intellectual energies, ennoble their character, and increase their enjoyments" (Humanist 45). On freedom of thought: "Let no one believe . . . that the many are so exhausted byíactivities dictated by the need for earning a living, that freedom of thought is useless to them, or even disturbing. Or that they can best be activated by the diffusion of principles handed down from on high, while their freedom to think and to investigate is restricted" (Humanist 33). Humboldt's vision, shared, in various ways, by other Enlightenment thinkers, is another kind of leitmotif in Chomsky's work. It surfaces, for example, in his commentary on language and freedom. In a lecture he delivered to the University Freedom and the Human Sciences Symposium in January of 1970, Chomsky explored the language-freedom bond in relation to historical texts, notably works from the Enlightenment period. Citing Rousseau (especially his Discourse on Inequality [1755]), Kant, Descartes, Cordemoy, Linguet, and, of course, Humboldt, Chomsky describes how Enlightenment thinkers anticipated a society set up to encourage rather than stifle human potential. Humboldt is particularly important here, because he forges a link between characteristic human traits, an appropriate social setting, and the language that sets man apart from animals. He also "looks forward to a community of free association without coercion by the state or other authoritarian institutions, in which free men can create and inquire, and achieve the highest development of their powers"; "far ahead of his time, [Humboldt] presents an anarchist vision that is appropriate, perhaps, to the next stage of industrial society" (Chomsky Reader 152). Chomsky, in fact, looks forward to a day when these various strands will be brought together within the framework of libertarian socialism, a social form that barely exists today though its elements can be perceived: in the guarantee of individual rights that has achieved its highest form ­ though still tragically flawed ­ in the Western democracies; in the Israeli kibbutzim; in the experiments with workers councils in Yugoslavia; in the effort to awaken popular consciousness and create a new involvement in the social process which is a fundamental element in the Third World revolutions, coexisting uneasily with indefensible authoritarian practice. (Chomsky Reader 152) This is where common sense meets intellectual history, anarchism meets creative output, pedagogical practice meets contemporary linguistic theory, and the kibbutz meets Enlightenment thinking. Humboldt and other Enlightenment thinkers don't join the intellectual milieu surrounding and influencing Chomsky, they were always already there, waiting to be reilluminated.