Revolutionary Words: Perfect Languages and the Republican Imaginary around the Mid-Seventeenth Century

Most recent scholarship on early modern ideal languages has focussed on experimental attempts by natural philosophers to build a “universal language” consisting of semantically and grammatically unambiguous symbols. Such attempts, cultural historians have argued, evince a desire for total techno-scientific mastery over the world. While this essay gives some attention to the idea that early modern practices of natural-scientific naming involved an act of quasi-authoritarian subjection, the bulk of the article undertakes to spell out some of the egalitarian implications of mid-seventeenth-century thinking about language. Doing so will involve attending to a set of religious and political debates of the 1640s and 1650s which contributed to a republican imaginary and which endowed linguistic speculation with a distinctively radical aura. The works by Ranters and Levellers explored in this article offer strikingly different speculations regarding the forms which a perfect language may take: whereas Ranters such as Abiezer Coppe develop a revolutionary understanding of universality that negates existing linguistic forms and that exposes the continued adherence of mid-century republicanism to modes of charismatic (divinely inspired) spokesmanship, the more explicitly politicized works of the Levellers (notably by John Lilburne) give us a universalism that is tempered by the rootedness of historically grown vernacular linguistic forms.