Introduction

Maybe we should blame it all on Noam Chomsky.I am not referring here to his efforts to reduce the study of language to a purely cognitive domain in which only quasimathematical relations between formal structures are worthy of study.While its roots certainly run much deeper, pragmatics was formed in part by a reaction against Chomsky's foundational fiction: "linguistic theory is concerned primarily with an ideal speaker-hearer in a completely homogeneous speech-community" (1965:3).If marginalizing context, dialogue, interaction, and history was the prime issue here, we could just as easily decry the power of Ferdinand de Saussure's (1959Saussure's ( [1916]]) Course in General Linguistics in marginalizing the study of what he called parole for half a century.But, conversation, indexicality, implicature, performativity, contextualization, and language ideologies have become key analytic concepts that drive research in pragmatics and adjacent fields.It is rather the chasm that separates Chomsky's political analysis, which has placed him in the international limelight as a public intellectual, and the exceedingly conservative stance he takes on the study of language.And when I say conservative here I do mean politically conservative-what else should we call a denial that difference, conflict, institutions, social inequality, and history shape language, an attempt to root social and political analysis out of linguistics, and the claim that scholarly endeavors exist apart from the politics of contemporary society?For those of us who do not share Chomsky's view of language, it is easy to dismiss his often stated claim (the question comes up nearly every time he gives a public lecture) that his work in linguistics and politics have nothing to do with one another.But the buck can't stop with Chomsky, in that the potential contribution of many of the insights provide pragmatics with an alternative theoretical agenda for revealing the power of language in shaping politics and the political constitution of language lies unexploited if not, in some cases, suppressed.The contributors to this special issue came together at the 1996 International Pragmatics Conference in Mexico in order to explore the value-for both pragmatics and political analysis-of deeming these foci to be fundamentally inextricable and mutually informing rather construing them as modes of inquiry that are in complementary