An ironic addendum to the discussion of Chomsky is that early in his linguistics career, the
liberals hated him too. Chomsky's work looks at language as having both a
d-structure (which used to be called
deep structure) and an
s-structure (formerly
surface structure). D-structure refers to the nature of the relations between objects of thought, while s-structure is the relation between elements of language in a sentence. "I would like to kiss you" and "you are the subject of my desire for hot kissing action, baby" have the same d-structure, since they involve the same elements -- you, me, and kissing -- and the same relation between them. S-structure differences include
passive vs.
active voice,
subjunctive vs.
indicative mood, and so on.
Chomsky claimed that the
neurological representation of d-structure was the same in all humans, and that there were certain
universal similarities among all
natural languages because of this. Liberals at the time found this to be an
affront to
cultural relativism, because it suggested that there was one "right" way to order thought, and cultural
diversity was an illusion.
My personal view is that this supports relativism, since knowing that all languges have the same purpose and reflect the same
underlying structure makes it hard to think of any one as superior. But there's a long history of people rebelling against the idea of human
absolutes, at least when they're first introduced.
With the passage of time and the increasing evidence of biological/evolutionary contributions to human behavior, it appears that the
left has accepted ideas like Chomsky's as less politically-charged than they first appeared.