Saussure

  • John E. Joseph
Oxford University Press: 2012. 800 pp. £30.00, $55.00 9780199695652 | ISBN: 978-0-1996-9565-2

“Any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats,” wrote George Orwell. Each serious study of a great scientist's life is bound to leave us reflecting on that truth, and linguist John E. Joseph's monumental Saussure is no exception.

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was one of the great nineteenth-century linguists, and Joseph's book, the first comprehensive biography, sheds brilliant light on his life and work. This rich account — sympathetic, respectful and sensitive to political and intellectual context — reveals how Saussure, a dazzling and driven scholar from a bourgeois Swiss family, blazed trails to new vistas of social science that opened out in the century after his death.

Ferdinand de Saussure was hugely influential in the social sciences, despite publishing little. Credit: AKG-IMAGES

Saussure emerges as a complex individual. As Joseph shows us, his virtuosity was counterbalanced by a series of unfortunate failures to get projects finished. That Orwellian 'inside story' hums away in the background of the book.

Two works of genius bookended Saussure's life. The first was a revolutionary monograph on Proto-Indo-European — the 'raw material' of modern languages from English to Sanskrit — self-published when he was just 21. Saussure's contribution was to deduce that ancient Indo-European must have contained certain sounds that had disappeared from more modern languages and so were undetectable in linguistic history. The prediction was confirmed much later in an analysis of Hittite documents from the thirteenth century BC.

The second work was a series of groundbreaking lectures that Saussure gave towards the end of his life, and which was later transformed, through notes taken down and edited by his students, into the great Course on General Linguistics, published in 1916. Much of Saussure's fame came from a book that he never wrote.

Modern linguists remember the wunderkind who followed his stunning early essay with a doctoral dissertation on Sanskrit just a year later. Saussure is also renowned as a key figure in the rise of structuralism, a method that profoundly influenced the social sciences by looking for a universal structure behind human behaviour and social activity. In linguistics, the method can be used to analyse the evolution of language by searching for patterns and symmetries in sounds.

But there were, as Joseph clearly recounts, setbacks. He shows how, after the publication of the monograph, Saussure's teachers at the University of Leipzig in Germany were stunned. They saw his dazzling, innovative reconstruction of Indo-European vowels as a brazen elaboration on what he had been taught in their courses. Fortunately, his doctoral dissertation was much more conventional, and he was granted a degree. When he left Germany, he was not much missed by his teachers.

Saussure then spent a decade teaching in Paris, publishing nothing except a few brief notes and unable to obtain a professorship. He spent a good deal of money he didn't have betting at the races, making up for his losses by winning at poker. Saussure eventually returned to Switzerland, where he was named a professor at the University of Geneva. He continued to teach, but never had many students.

Although Saussure filled scores of notebooks with his research, he never succeeded in producing a book that satisfied his own standards. His students produced a publication in his honour on his 50th birthday, but he died a few years later, unable to see any accomplishments in his life past what he did as a very young man. Yet, as Joseph shows, the Course on General Linguistics continues to have enormous influence on thinkers not only in linguistics, but also in anthropology, sociology and literary criticism.

Weighing up the truth about the whole person — life and work — is no easy thing. Saussure was never to have the satisfaction of understanding the vast reach of his own work. And although we do at least have that, we must sift through the evidence to make our estimation of the life and the man.