Russell (1961: 20):
Modern philosophy begins with Descartes, whose fundamental certainty is in the existence of himself and his thoughts, from which the external world is to be inferred. This was only the first stage in a development, through Berkeley and Kant, to Fichte, for whom everything is only an emanation of the ego. This was insanity, and, from this extreme, philosophy has been attempting, ever since, to escape into the world of everyday common sense. With subjectivism in philosophy, anarchism in politics goes hand in hand.
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The dominant linguistic movement of the latter half of the 20th Century was the Formal Linguistics of Noam Chomsky.
In terms of philosophy, Chomskyan Formal Linguistics is Cartesian in orientation: it is not language that is modelled, but a speaker's knowledge of language; it is not language that constitutes data for theory-building, but a speaker's intuitions about language. [Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought 1966]
In terms of politics, Chomsky presents himself as an anarchist. [Manufacturing Consent 1992]
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