In a 1970 essay, linguist and political activist Noam Chomsky wrote this sentence:
Language is a process of free creation; its laws and principles are fixed, but the manner in which the principles of generation are used is free and infinitely varied.
This idea comes after Chomsky's deep dive into what freedom means and how it intersects with language. He spends a good part of his analysis on the theories of human freedom of philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and Wilhelm von Humboldt to conclude that the study of language can offer some understanding of how freedom can exist within a system of rules. Language is, as Chomsky put it, a product of human intelligence and, therefore, a possible starting point for collective striving toward freedom and social justice. Remarkable!
The question for us to answer, more than a half-century after Chomsky posed it, is how do we operate within such a flawed system and arrive at an equal freedom?
