The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris

(Book Review)

Started: May 7, 2021
Finished: June 1, 2021

Summary

This is the story of what happens when linguists quarrel.  It tells the story of two conflicts: The first is the Chomskyan Revolution that occurred in linguistics in the late 1950s.  The second is the civil war within that revolution in the late 1960s, when the younger generation of linguists wanted to push Chomsky’s model further than Chomsky was willing.
The book is intended to be partly a cultural history, partly a popular science.  I found the narrative parts of the book fascinating. (But then, I’m biased--I’ve long been fascinated by the enigmatic Noam Chomsky.)  The technical linguistic parts of the book, however, are a bit more difficult to get through, especially in the later chapters, at least for a non-specialist reader like myself.  So I can’t claim to have understood the book entirely, but I was very interested in the parts of the book that I did understand. (149 words)

[That's me attempting to be concise.  If you want my usual long-winded version, continue on to The Full Review]

The Full Review

Why I Read This Book/ My History With This Book
This book was recommended by my sister.
In 2017, I was back in the States on a visit, and I was reading The Kingdom of Speech by Tom Wolfe, which, (among other ramblings) is an account of the clash between linguists Noam Chomsky and Daniel Everett.
I got to chatting about that book with my sister.  My sister, who has studied linguistics extensively, had never heard of Tom Wolfe's The Kingdom of Speech.  (Which somewhat surprised me because I remembered the book had made quite a stir on the various linguistic related blogs that I was following at the time (*1).  But perhaps it's an indication of how little serious academics where paying attention to Tom Wolfe's silly little book.)

But, on the subject of Noam Chomsky and vicious infighting in the linguistics department, my sister had another book to recommend to me: The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris.

This is, as my sister explained to me, a book about the fighting between Noam Chomsky and other linguists during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

I knew nothing about it, except that I thought I vaguely remember hearing about this controversy from a New Yorker profile I once read on Chomsky.
I've just searched for that article now, and upon re-reading it, I'm now sure this was indeed where I had first heard of the issue. The New Yorker 2003: The Devil’s Accountant By Larissa MacFarquhar. 

 To quote from some snippets of it:

...Chomsky has fought many battles over the years, political and linguistic, but perhaps the most ferocious was the fight in the late sixties and early seventies that became known as the linguistics wars...

...In 1966, Chomsky went on sabbatical to Berkeley for a year, and, without his gravitational presence, this movement, which was later known as “generative semantics,” flourished....

...They were only a little younger than Chomsky, but they were from a different generation, the sixties counterculture...

...In 1967, Chomsky came back from Berkeley and immediately went on the attack. The generative semanticists found the conflict very upsetting: Chomsky was their hero, and here he was, seemingly destroying their theory for the sake of it. He seemed to them to be fighting dirty, purposely misunderstanding their arguments. Chomsky, of course, denied that he was doing any such thing—he felt he was just correcting error, as usual. The situation was too emotional to be an ordinary academic disagreement, and soon it grew nasty... (*2)

So, with my curiosity piqued, I went to the bookstore to order a copy of the book.  
This book was published in 1993, but it's still in print.  It's the type of specialized book that isn't on the shelves of a normal bookstore, but it can be special ordered easily enough.  It did cost me $50, which was rather expensive for a softcover book this size.  (I suspect this book is commonly used as required reading in linguistic courses, which is probably why its so expensive--the publishers know they can charge more for textbooks.)  The bookstore employee, I recall, was upset that I was paying so much money for a book, and grumbled about it as he put in my order.  But I didn't particularly begrudge the money.  I'm a slow enough reader that I knew I was going to get hours of reading out of a book like this--when you think about it on a per hour basis, $50 isn't so bad.

When the book arrived, I could tell just by flipping through it that it was going to be some fairly technical reading.  The pages of the book were filled with linguistic diagrams and sentence trees.

p.92-93

I was, at the time, trying to make my way through Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction , and I figured I would finish that book first, so that I would have some background in the general theory first before I read about the arguments surrounding the theory.
Well, it ended up taking me forever to get through Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction (as I detailed in my review).  During which time, The Linguistics Wars sat unread on my shelf.  But I finally finished Chomsky's Universal Grammar in May, and then I could move on to The Linguistics Wars. (*3)

And here I am with the review.

The Review
Style, Focus, and General Readability

This is a book on the history of linguistics.  As such, it is in part a linguistics textbook, and in part a narrative story.
The parts of this book which I found so fascinating were the narrative drama: the clash of personalities, the descriptions of drama in academia, and the political aspects of it all.  (Because this all took place in the late 60s and 70s, the Vietnam War and counterculture were influencing everything that went on.)  These are the parts of the book that stuck in my memory, and which I am inclined to gush on and on about now that I'm finished with the book.

However, this book is at the same time a linguistics textbook.  Whole chapters are devoted to describing various linguistic theories (chapters on Chomsky's Deep Structure, or the Generative Semantics model, for example).
So, the ideal reader of this book has to be ready to take on both the narrative and the linguistic theory.
In the Preface, Randy Allen Harris says that his intent is to write a popular science for both the linguist and the lay person:

This book--a "popular science" look at linguistics by way of narrating an influential dispute in the sixties and seventies--attempts to clarify what linguists do, why they do it, and why everyone else should care about what they do.
My hope is that linguists will find this book useful, since many of them have a shaky or partisan view of their own recent history, but my greater hope is that non-linguists will find an entertaining and informative account of the science of our most profound and pervasive human attribute, language. (vii)

And indeed, it is obvious that Harris intends this book to be something else than a dry academic textbook.  The book is infused with jokes. (A typical example: When talking about how Herbert Spencer criticizes the science of linguistics, Harris writes "But the attitude Spencer displays--something we might call linguiphobia if that term didn't conjure up a fear of certain sexual practices or pasta cuts--has not abated"  (p.vii)).  
At the same time, however, Harris's range of vocabulary reads like someone who has spent a lot of time in academia.  He (mostly) avoids using specialist technical terms, but he does use an academic vocabulary that assumes a well-read audience.  (I had to check the dictionary a few times while reading this book.)

And, despite Harris's intent to target non-linguists, I have to admit I found the linguistic side of this book hard going at times.
The beginning of the book was well written.  In the opening chapters, I thought Harris did a good job of holding the hand of the reader, and walking them through all the linguistic knowledge that they would need to know in order to understand the narrative.  
In fact, if anything, the opening chapters of this book are almost a little bit too eager to avoid getting bogged down in the technical linguistic details.  Harris talks about what a big deal it was when Chomsky and his collaborator Halle devastated the Bloomfieldian model by attacking the concept of the phoneme in 1959, but he never describes how Chomsky and Halle disproved the phoneme--he just says that Halle presented a paper which disproved the phoneme (somehow) and that this was a really big deal at the time.  Presumably Harris was afraid of overwhelming his reader with too much technical detail, but I thought this was a section where a little bit more detail was needed--just a brief summary of the linguistic argument would have been nice, so that the reader can have a rough idea of what Chomsky and Halle were doing.

However, even though the book starts out well, the commitment to keep the linguistics simple and accessible to non-specialists becomes less and less true the further into the book you read.
By Chapter 5 (Generative Semantics: The Model) I started to notice there were a few paragraphs here and there that I didn't understand.  It didn't stop me from understanding the chapter as a whole--I just kept reading, and pretty soon I would get to a part that I could understand again, but it was a sign of a problem which would get worse.
By Chapter 7 (The Vicissitudes of War), which describes all the arguments going back and forth between the two groups, I had to admit to myself that I was understanding almost none of the linguistic arguments.  I could still follow the narrative--i.e. I still knew who was upset at who--but I couldn't follow the actual linguistic arguments that were being advanced.
Now, whether this is the fault of the book, or whether this is the fault of my own limited intellect is not for me to judge.
So, I went to the review section at Amazon.com and Goodreads to see what other people were saying about the book.  I was pleased to see I wasn't the only one who had some trouble with it.

* Written in a chatty but unfocused and messy style, this book is 50% scholarly history and 50% gossip. There is nothing wrong in principle with this mix, which could make for a very entertaining story. Except that the scholarly stuff is poorly explained so that the nonspecialist has no idea what the words and concepts mean, 

*  As a non-specialist reader, I found the going increasingly difficult in the second half of the book, which revolves principally about a several years' war between the interpretivists (Chomsky et al) and the generative semanticists (Lakoff et al). The chapters dealing with the meat of this conflict were a little less transparent on the substance of the ideas at stake, and seemed (to this reader) to presuppose some (if not considerable) expertise on the part of the reader. 

*  The book is certainly not suitable for people outside the field because it involves too much linguistic theory, so in a sense the book fails to do what it wants to do. 

* Admittedly, some of the work in this field is rather dense, but the book could have been a lot clearer and more sprightly.

Now, I admit it, those quotations are selective.  (Other reviewers had no problem with this book).  But the point is that I'm not alone on this.  Other people struggled with the book as well.
Also, in the later chapters, when author Randy Allen Harris is really immersed in the nitty-gritty of the debate, he starts to forget that he is writing a popular science for non-specialists, and starts throwing around linguistic concepts without defining them.   For example, on page 185, he talks about the influences of H.P. Grice's work on conversational implicature on Generative Semantics, but never bothers to define what that work is.
Now, as it happens, I already knew about Grice's Maxims (thanks to books like An Introduction to Language, The Language Instinct, and Youtube series The Ling Space).  But I wouldn't have known about it if I hadn't been trying to read about linguistics.  And it's not (I don't think) something you can expect the average reader to know.

But then, just as I thought I was beginning to lose the plot of the book, Chapters 8, 9 and 10 get away from the heavy linguistic analysis, and go back to focusing on the personal and cultural side of the argument, and I was able to follow the narrative again.

All in all, this is a very impressive book that Randy Allen Harris has pulled off.  In order to write intelligently about this, he not only had to read all the literature of the period (and understand it), but also interview hundreds of people and put together a narrative of what actually happened.  
Harris's bio (according to the back cover) says that "he holds several degrees in communications, experimental linguistics, and English literature, and has published widely in all three fields."  I guess that's the kind of resume you would need to pull off a book like this!

The History
I'm going to summarize the events of this book.  It seems a little bit silly to put a spoiler warning on a non-fiction book, but there is nonetheless a certain pleasure in discovering this history at the pace that the author intends and with the framing that the author gives it.  Some of that may be ruined by reading my summary, so ***SPOILER WARNING***.

The book starts with a brief history of linguistics that starts all the way back with the ancient Greeks, and brings us up to the 20th Century.  It moves at a lightening quick speed (Harris calls it  "our Grand Prix review of linguistic history" p.16) but Harris manages to pull out an important theme that repeats throughout the history of linguistics.  Language and meaning is inherently subjective and fuzzy, but linguists throughout history have always wanted to develop approaches that would treat linguistics as a hard science--language is a natural object, and the linguist can study it in the same way that any other natural scientist studies natural objects.

But the exact methodology by which linguists achieve this aim has changed a lot over the centuries.  Harris recounts that each generation of linguists viewed the previous generation as not sufficiently objective, and each new generation tried to make linguistics a true science.

(This is one of the reoccurring jokes throughout the book.  "just as the middle class is always rising, linguistics is always becoming a science" Harris writes (p.16)).

In Europe, this search for objectivity took the form of historical linguistics.  (i.e. --going back to the old manuscripts to try to track how language has changed over time--Jacob Grimm being one of the famous historical linguists.)
However in the early 20th Century, the North American linguists went their own way.  North American linguists realized that there were a huge amount of Native American languages, and many of them were beginning to die out, and that these languages had not yet been recorded and archived.  So the North American linguists became concerned with what was called the "Amerindian Imperative"--the linguist's duty was to go out into the field, record as much of the language as they could, and try to create a grammar. 

This movement was led by Leonard Bloomfield, who devised taxonomic system for linguists to use when cataloguing languages, starting with the smallest units and then working up into more complex categories.  First, they would start with the phonetics (the acoustic wavelengths of sound created by speakers of the language).  Then, these phonetic sounds are classified into the phonemes of the language (i.e. the way a speaker perceives the sounds of a language--for example, an English speaker would divide the acoustic wavelengths for /r/ and /l/ into two separate phonemes, but a Japanese speaker would collapse them into a single phonemic category.)  Then the phonemes would be put together into words, and then the words could be put together into sentences.  
In order to keep linguistics as a respectable hard science, Bloomfield didn't want linguists mucking about with muddy subjects like how people convey thoughts into words, or what to do about the ambiguity of meaning.  That was all the job of other disciplines like sociology, philosophy, or psychology.  A linguist's job was simply to record and categorize the sounds and words of a language.

The good news is that under Bloomfield's influence, linguistics in North America obtained a new respectability in the scientific circles.

But as Harris writes on page 28:

The bad news amid all this promise, however, was the pronounced gaps in this work--the mind, meaning, thought; in short, the good stuff.
Lo, in the east, Chomsky arose.

The Linguistics Wars actually chronicles two separate wars.  Or perhaps more accurately, it chronicles a revolution, and then the subsequent civil war inside that revolution.

The first conflict is the Chomskyan revolution against the Bloomfieldians.  Chomsky arrived on the scene in the late 1950s, and rocked the linguistic world with his Syntactic Structures, which explored how elements in a sentence move and transform as the function of the sentence changes (e.g. active to passive, statement to question, affirmative statement to negative statement, independent clause to relative clause, etc).  Chomsky was also interested in figuring out what the core elements of the sentence were if you stripped away all the transformations--what Chomsky called the "Deep Structure."  And he hinted that the true meaning of a sentence could be found in its Deep Structure
It horrified the old guard Bloomfieldians, but it excited the younger generation of linguists, and the revolution was on.  Chomsky and his allies viciously attacked the old Bloomfieldian model at linguistic conferences, and insulted the intelligence of anyone who disagreed with them.

Chomsky was undeniably brilliant--Harris quotes from several contemporary linguists who were completely in awe of Chomsky's ability to think of new theories and solutions.  And he was a very skilled oral debater.  But he was also combative, and Harris pauses the narrative at this point to question whether Chomsky's personality was singlehandedly responsible for bringing in the combative atmosphere that was to characterize the study of syntax for the next generation.  Chomsky seemed to thrive on polemics, and Chomsky characterized the old guard Bloomfieldians as "the bad guys" in almost Manichean terms.  Perhaps this, Harris wonders, is the original reason why the subsequent Linguistics Wars would also be viewed by both sides in terms of good guys versus bad guys.

But as much as Chomsky criticized the Bloomfieldians, he too had been trained up in the Bloomfieldian system, and he still retained their influence in at last one key respect.  Chomsky did not want to get stuck talking about words and the problem of meaning.  He hinted at the promise of meaning with his "Deep Structure" model, but he never followed through on it.

So, when Chomsky was away on Sabbatical in 1966, the younger linguists started to expand Chomsky's model into a new paradigm that would actually tackle the problem of the meaning of words--generative semantics.
But when Chomsky came back in 1967, he attacked the model.  And the linguistics wars began.

At first, Chomsky did not seem to have much of a theoretical basis for his attacks.  His arguments didn't really make a whole lot of sense, and he seemed to be trying to destroy generative semantics just for the sake of it.  But Chomsky was a born polemicist and a skilled oral debater, and he was still able to appear to demolish the generative semanticist model, even if they thought he was misrepresenting their arguments.  And the generative semanticists hated him for it.

But on the other side, the generative semanticists were arrogant and disrespectful towards Chomsky.  Harris records an observer's recollection that generative semanticist George Lakoff told Chomsky he should come to Lakoff's lectures, 

[Lakoff] was combative and impolite ... [He] would go to Noam's class and sit at the front of the room.  One time Noam said something, and George said, "I have been saying the same thing. Noam asked "Where did you write about it?" And George responded, "I have been lecturing about these things, and if you are interested, you should come to my class". (p.153, brackets in Harris's quotation)

Harris goes on to note:

The level of gall required for anyone, let alone a junior lecturer, to tell the inventor of the field to attend his classes if he wanted to stay current goes right off the chutzpah meter. (p.153)

But then, Harris goes on to question the accuracy of the anecdote.  Did this really happen, or was someone just misremembering?

And here we get to the problem with this story.  All the really juicy stuff is anecdotal, and by the time Harris got around to chronicling it, it is all misremembered or in Rashomon like conflicting accounts.  The back and forth that was in the academic journals is, of course, still well-preserved.  (And subsequently much of Harris's book is just a recounting of what is in the academic journals).   But the personal drama is a lot more murky.  Harris has interviewed lots of people for this book, and alludes to what he calls "folklore" of this period.  Various people claim to remember screaming at academic conferences.  Apparently at one academic conference, Chomsky's graduate student and George Lakoff spent several minutes yelling obscenities at each other in front of everyone.  Someone else even remembers Chomsky and Lakoff physically wrestling for the microphone at one event. Is any of it true?  Well who knows?  Harris mentions these anecdotes briefly, but then dismisses them just as quickly.

The stories range quite widely in color and credibility, and it is difficult to take many of them at face value.  They have grown epic in the retelling: the stupidity of the antagonists, the forbearance of the protagonists, the simplicity and clarity of the point under dispute, are all surely exaggerated. (p.155)

 (It's probably an elementary point to make, but it strikes me how much has changed since the 1960s.  We've gotten so used to everything being recorded.  Nowadays Chomsky's linguistic lectures, and the debates at linguistic conferences, would all be up on Youtube for everyone to see.  But because this all happened back in the 1960s, it wasn't recorded.  And as Harris demonstrates, we can deduce from all these anecdotes that, whatever happened, emotions were certainly running very high during this period.  But we can't really put much faith in the specific things that people claim to remember.)

What is well documented, however, is that the media eventually got ahold of the story.  There was, coincidentally, a popular book out at the time recounting the fighting between Freud and his former disciple (A), so the public was predisposed to eat up this kind of drama, and once the media got ahold of the squabbling in the linguistics department, they framed it as the drama of Freud and Trausk being played out all over again.  The New York Times even did a story on it.

(Harris writes about The New York Times story, but isn't able to quote the whole thing.  But thanks to the miracle of the modern Internet, you can read the whole thing online at the New York Times archive: Former Chomsky Disciples Hurl Harsh Words at the Master, Sept. 10, 1972. (*4))

And, in the midst of all this, there was also the Vietnam War and the Counterculture movement.  Chomsky had by this time become one of the leading voices of the anti-Vietnam War movement, and with his anti-war work, he was essentially working two full time jobs all throughout this period, which affected how much time he was able to give to the conflict.  It's suggested that the conflict might have been softened if Chomsky had just met in person with the Generative Semanticists, but Chomsky didn't have time to meet with the generative semanticists because he was busy being giving talks on Vietnam and being interviewed by Time Magazine.  (And it's never stated explicitly by Harris, but it might well be the case that part of the reason Chomsky's arguments against generative semantics were initially so flimsy was because his attention was focused elsewhere on the Vietnam War.)
But the generative semanticists were also passionately against the war in Vietnam, and their opposition to the war was all throughout their published papers.  In a linguistics paper on syntax, they would use their example sentences to attack Nixon and Johnson (e.g. Lakoff's "In a very real sense, Nixon is a murderer.")  Harris recounts a back and forth between one of the generative semanticists and Cambridge University Press when the generative semanticist refused to remove critical references to Nixon, Agnew and others from her linguistic book.  

But at the same time, the generative semanticists passionately hated Chomsky.  And this makes for some ironies, as Harris points out on pages 199-200:

The political elements of the generative semantics style, however, throw something of a monkeywrench into the simple anti-Chomskyan account of their ethos.  The generative semanticists opposed the war in Vietnam, and Chomsky was one of its most outspoken critics. A simple analysis of this twist in the Oedipal story might put the political explicitness of many generative semanticists into the trying-to-out-Chomsky-Chomsky file...(p.199)

...It is, first, extremely difficult to out-Chomsky Chomsky on political issues... He was (and remains) a more tireless, dedicated political rhetor than any of the generative semanticists; in fact, it is only mildly hyperbolic to say he is more tireless and dedicated to political concerns than all of the generative semanticists combined. ... The generative semanticist were more explicit than Chomsky, in linguistic articles, about their political concerns.  But they were not, by even the wildest stretch of the term, more political... (p.200)

But another irony is that although Chomsky was more politically active than any of the generative semanticists, within the field of linguistics he was now beginning to be viewed as a conservative.  His research used primarily English (which many linguists now saw as ethnocentric, and an abandonment of the Amerindian Imperative).  He wasn't concerned with the growing interest in the sociopolitical dimensions of language.  And  he was very old fashioned and formal in his academic papers, unlike the generative semanticists who were attempting to bring counterculture into academia.

The generative semanticists embraced using obscenities, references to counterculture and drugs, and a lot of jokes in their academic papers.  Which then led into a whole debate (which Harris explores briefly) about whether or not it's ever appropriate to use jokes in a scientific paper.   (And interestingly enough, the very formal and stylistically conservative Chomsky actually defended the generative semanticists on this point(*5).)

To return to the linguistic controversy:
For a while, it looked like the Generative Semanticists would win out.  The younger linguists were excited about their model, and Chomsky's criticism of them didn't seem very substantial.

And yet, in the end, Chomsky's views won out.  The very flimsy proposals that Chomsky initially put forward were later developed into a fruitful program in the 1970s, and lead to the Chomskyan grammar that we know today (and which was described in Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction (*6).)  Generative Semantics, meanwhile, ended up spinning out in several different directions, and eventually stopped being a coherent movement.

So Much More To Talk About

In the section above, I've tried to give a brief summary of why this book is interesting.  But it strikes me now that I haven't even touched on half of the interesting stuff that is in this book--I didn't talk about Chomsky's take down of B.F. Skinner, for example.  Or the parody of Chomsky that George Lakoff wrote which did serious harm to his cause because too few people were in on the joke.  Or the irreverent antics of the Generative Semanticists in 1968 at the Chicago Linguistic Society.  I haven't even talked about the Generative Semanticists yet. I've mentioned George Lakoff, but there were actually 3 others--Paul Postal (*7), Haj Ross, and James McCawley who, along with George Lakoff, styled themselves The 4 Horsemen of Generative Semantics.  All of them have their own unique personality and backstory, and it's all in the book.
There's a lot more interesting stuff in this book than I can write in this review, is what I'm saying.  So if any of what I'm describing here sounds remotely interesting to you, go ahead and check out this book.

On Chomsky

Having so far praised this book, I should caution that it may be a niche taste.  Or in other words, I may have been predisposed to like this book because of my fascination with Noam Chomsky.

I've long been fascinated with Chomsky (see on my blog HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE and many other posts.)  Of course, much of this fascination is ideological.  Like many progressives, I love Chomsky because he is such a great articulator of the progressive worldview.  But even beyond that, there is also cult of personality around Chomsky.  

Chomsky has been described as a charismatic figure.  I admit this was a description that surprised me when I first heard it. Chomsky had always struck me as a sort harmless old grandfather type figure, who was famous for giving long speeches in which he droned on and on in the same monotonous pitch.  But, as others have pointed out, there is a tone of authority in that monotonous droning which sucks people in, and makes you feel like Chomsky has all the answers.  (And I've been guilty as guilty as anyone of getting sucked in.)
The Linguistics Wars shows, among other things, that Chomsky's charismatic show of authority is not just for his political speeches.  He dazzled the entire linguistic community with his display of charismatic authority in the early 1960s.  In the late 1960s, he became a divisive figure in linguistics, but half of the linguistic community was still in thrall to his cult of personality. (*8)  I found it a fascinating history of a fascinating figure.

Author Randy Allen Harris tries to explore Chomsky's personality on pages 77-80, and finds it a curious contradiction--his incredible graciousness, combined with an arrogance and a combativeness.  (The combativeness is always masked behind Chomsky's gentle-sounding soft-spoken voice, but it's there if you listen to the content of what Chomsky says.)  
Harris also reports that Chomsky is a complete mystery to his colleagues--he never socializes with them, never goes out to lunch, never has people over to his house.  He comes off in some of these descriptions as almost as an emotionless robot. 
Except, as everyone in Harris's book acknowledges, he clearly feels very deeply for the oppressed and downtrodden of the world.
He is, when all is said and done, a very enigmatic and fascinating figure.  And that fascination was a large part of what made this book so interesting. (*9)

Other Notes
* As mentioned above, I believe this book is still in print (if you go through the trouble of special ordering it).  But it was originally published in 1993, and is now slightly dated.  References to The Simpsons (who were at the height of their cultural relevance in 1993) abound.  Also a lot of figures from the 1960s are name-dropped without explanation, as if the reader remembers who these figures are--figures like Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, David Dellinger. Memories of the 1960s were probably stronger in 1993 than in 2021.  (Although actually, all of these figures were just portrayed in the new movie The Trial of the Chicago 7.  So maybe now they are temporarily back in the public consciousness.)
But more relevant to the content, the book ends with a sort of epilogue analyzing the legacy of both Chomsky and Generative Semantics.  I would suspect that this legacy looks different now than it did in 1993, although not being in the field, I wouldn't know exactly how it has changed.

* It turns out that, like me, author Randy Allen Harris is a fan of Revolutions of 1848 by Priscilla Robertson.  References to Priscilla Robertson's Revolutions of 1848 pop up not once, but several times in The Linguistics Wars.  (3 times, in 3 different sections, by my count.)  Harris uses various quotes from Revolutions of 1848 to make analogies to what is happening in The Linguistics Wars.  To take just one example, when writing about how George Lakoff made a number of public relations blunders in his representation of Generative Semantics, Harris writes on page 227:

Radzetsky is reported to have told his troops retaking Sardinia for the Hapsburgs in 1848, "Spare the enemy generals--they are too useful to our side" (Robertson, 1952:354), Lakoff was such a general.

* Victoria Fromkin, whose book An Introduction to Language I read and reviewed on this blog, also pops up in this book.  She is quoted in a section recounting the early excitement of the Chomskyan Revolution against the Bloomfieldians, and she says that the weekly lectures by Robert Stockwell, an early Chomskyan convert, "more resembled the storming of the Winter Palace than scholarly discussions" (as quoted on page 72).

* George Lakoff co-authored a book The Metaphors We Live By, which I've not read, but which is often quoted by other linguists.  For example, Michael Lewis quotes it approvingly in The Lexical Approach.  So I had been vaguely familiar with the name Lakoff, but didn't know anything him prior to reading this book.   After reading this book, I have a much greater appreciation for who he is and his place in linguistic history. 

* And I just noticed that one of my professors from the University of Melbourne, Jean Mulder, is listed in the acknowledgements as one of the people that the author thanks for reading and commenting on earlier drafts.  (I know that this is only of interest to me, but I thought it was really neat to see someone I actually know from real life popping up in the book.  Although I doubt that Jean Mulder remembers me, she was very friendly and personable when I took her - class, and she would often stay after class to chat with us.)

* Even though I wasn't able to follow all of the linguistic theory being explained in the book, one thing was clear--the more both sides delved into English syntax, the more both sides found examples of English grammar they were unable to explain.

And this also reminds me of something connected to my time at the University of Melbourne, specifically something a professor said when explaining the mystery of language acquisition--even though linguists don't yet know all the rules of English grammar, a 5 year old child still intuitively knows all the rules.  So how could the child possibly have learned all these rules?  Well, that's the mystery of language acquisition.

I've thought about this quote a lot in the years since, especially when mentoring new teachers in TESOL.  Sometimes a new teacher will feel frustrated because they don't know all the rules of English grammar, and I'll say, "linguists haven't even figured out all the rules of English grammar yet".  
This book is a perfect example of how much there is about English grammar that linguists still can't explain.  (Which, to my mind, supports Krashen's theories.  You can't possibly teach all the English grammar to a student.  But you can give them lots of comprehensible input, and much of the grammar will be acquired through the input.)

* So, this is one of those books where a lot of the actual content is buried in the endnotes.  You'll be reading along, you'll come to a little number at the end of the sentence, and then you'll have to flick to the back of the book to read the endnote to get more information.
The endnotes are almost always important or interesting information, so you don't want to skip them.  But it's a pain in the neck to constantly be flipping back and forth between the chapter that you're reading and the notes at the end.  (I found this especially annoying since I tend to get most of my reading done during my lunch break.  So I'd be trying to hold my sandwich in one hand, keep track of my place in the chapter with the other hand, and flip to the endnotes at the back at the same time.)  
I wish that the endnotes could somehow have been more integrated into the text, but I can understand that because of the conventions of style, Harris had to put them to the back.  I just wish we lived in a world where the conventions of style were different, and I didn't have to deal with so many endnotes at the back of the book (*10).

Footnotes (docs, pub):

(*1) On the chattering that Tom Wolfe's book was causing on linguistic blogs at the time: In particular I remember E.J. Spode's review being shared a lot on Twitter and blogs.  Which, if you haven't read it yet, is a really good read.

(*2) On The Devil’s Accountant By Larissa MacFarquhar: I'd actually love to quote the whole section, but I have to limit myself to a few snippets, because that's all I think I can reasonably quote and still claim fair use.  But in the original article, Larissa MacFarquhar devotes 5 whole paragraphs to the linguistics wars, and her description of it is interesting.  I'd recommend checking out the whole article.
I first heard about this New Yorker article sometime around 2009 or so, when I was watching a Youtube video of Chomsky on Book TV CSPAN 2.  (The actual TV appearance is from 2003, but I didn't see it on Youtube until around 2009 or 2010.)  In that interview, a caller asks Chomsky what he thought of The New Yorker piece.  He said that it was a typical attack piece by the mainstream media meant to discredit an enemy, and that it should be read with caution.  And so I'd pass along Chomsky's caveat.  It should be read, but read with caution.  (The overall tone of the piece is undeniably hostile to Chomsky).    And yet, it's an interesting piece nonetheless.  And well-written, at least on the level of prose-style.

The anti-Chomsky bias is, however, right there even in the brief bits I quoted.  It makes it sound like the generative semanticists were devoted disciples who felt completely betrayed when their master turned against them.  The version told in Randy Allen Harris's book hints that at least one of them, George Lakoff, was actively courting the fight.  He wasn't a dutiful disciple, he was actively trying to topple Chomsky's model, and he said so.

Noam Chomsky interview on his Life and Career (2003)

(*3) The 4 Years This Book Sat On My Shelf: I mentioned this book in on my April 25, 2018 Vlog, The Books on My Shelf Part 3: The Books I Haven't Even Started.  Watch from 11:44

As I mentioned in the video, I loaned out The Linguistics Wars to a friend/co-worker of mine who had ambitions to do an advanced degree in linguistics.  "This seems like the kind of book that might be really useful to you," I told him, "and I'm not going to get around to it for a while, so you might as well read it in the meantime."  He then kept it for several months.  He kept assuring me he was still reading it, and enjoying it during that time.  (He must have been a slow reader just like me).  And eventually he got it back to me.  He said he really enjoyed it.

I told him I was going to read it someday, but I wanted to finish Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction first so I had the background for it.  He told me that was unnecessary.  The Linguistics Wars explains all the technical points as it goes, he said, so no background reading is necessary.
My sister, when I saw her again in 2019 and confessed that I still hadn't started The Linguistics Wars, told me the same thing.
And I think they were both right in the end.  Having read Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction helped me with a bit of the technical part of The Linguistics Wars, but not a lot.  Partly because Chomsky's theories have changed so much over the years that the current state of Chomsky's grammar theories are very different to what Chomsky's theories were in the 1960s.  

Indeed, much of the changes which resulted in Chomsky's current theories, it turns out, were sparked by the linguistics wars.  So if anything, I probably should have read The Linguistics Wars first.

(*4) Regarding the New York Times article being available online: And in fact, if you're interested in reading more of this material online, the 1972 vitriolic exchange of letters between Chomsky and George Lakoff in the New York Review (which is also recounted in The Linguistics Wars) is also available online.  (Randy Allen Harris mentions this exchange in his book, but he can't quote the letters in full.)  But George Lakoff's letter is HERE, and Chomsky's reply is HERE.  (The article that Lakoff was responding to is, unfortunately, behind the paywall.)

(*5) On Writing Jokes in Scientific Papers: This is one of many topics in the book that I don't have time to explore fully in a review.  But I do think Chomsky's response was interesting.  Even though he opposed the generative semanticists, he defended their right to use jokes in their papers.  Chomsky is quoted on page 211 as saying:

Science is like any other human activity.  You don't have to put a straightjacket on it.  If people like to give papers with jokes, that's fine.  It's neither good nor bad. Maybe it's more fun to listen to their papers, I don't know.  But it shouldn't [affect one's evaluation of] their results. (Chomsky quoted in Harris page 211.  Brackets in Harris.)

Sounds reasonable to me. 

(*6) On Chomsky's grammar developing in the 1970s: In fact, as Randy Allen Harris explains, it turns out that the whole trace theory, which I talked about in my review of Chomsky's Universal Grammar: An Introduction, developed during this period.  

(*7) Take, for example, Paul Postal.  The way he is, as described in The Linguistics Wars, he comes off as the least flamboyant of the 4 horsemen.  And yet, he has a very interesting journey.  He starts out as a vicious attack dog for the Chomskyans against the Bloomfieldians.  (One of his attacks against the Bloomfieldians was so nasty that it got voted stricken from the record at a Linguistic Society meeting. ) But then Postal ended up as one of Chomsky's adversary in the Generative Semantic debate.  In the 2003 New Yorker article I linked to above, they give this little quote: 

Paul Postal, these days a professor at N.Y.U., still loathes Chomsky with an astonishing passion. “After many years, I came to the conclusion that everything he says is false,” Postal says. “He will lie just for the fun of it. Every one of his arguments was tinged and coded with falseness and pretense. It was like playing chess with extra pieces. It was all fake.” 

If you go to Paul Postal's Wikipedia page, it contains a link  to a 2006 blogpost he wrote criticizing Chomsky's leftist politics.   Apparently somewhere along the line, Postal left the counterculture values of the Generative Semantics movement to become a hardcore rightist.
So this is one of many little rabbit holes you can go down with the issues and personalities involved in this book.  I don't have time to go into all of them, but there's a lot of fascinating stuff like that in this book.

(*8) On Chomsky as being a charismatic figure: In this interview here (at around the 1:32) mark, Steven Pinker says: "Linguistics is an eccentric field in some ways, partly because it was so polarized by a charismatic figure [Noam Chomsky] and his opponents that it didn't proceed in the ordinary direction of making the theory more precise, more testable." 

(*9) On the enigmatic Noam Chomsky: I'm reminded (again) of this Salon.com article: When Chomsky wept, which shows similar themes.  First of all, Chomsky's complete indifference to normal human interactions:

I was also struck by his self-deprecation. He had a near-aversion to talking about himself -- contrary to most of the "Big Foot" journalists I had met. He had little interest in small talk, gossip or discussion of personalities, and was focused almost entirely on the issues at hand. He downplayed his linguistic work, saying it was unimportant compared to opposing the mass murder going on in Indochina. He had no interest whatsoever in checking out Vientiane's notorious nightlife, tourist sites or relaxing by the pool. He was clearly driven, a man on a mission. He struck me as a genuine intellectual, a guy who lived in his head.

...which at first makes you think he's incapable of normal human emotions, but then later on in the article, we see how much he is affected by the suffering of the oppressed:

I was thus stunned when, as I was translating Noam's questions and the refugees' answers, I suddenly saw him break down and begin weeping. I was struck not only that most of the others I had taken out to the camps had been so defended against what was, after all, this most natural, human response. It was that Noam himself had seemed so intellectual to me, to so live in a world of ideas, words and concepts, had so rarely expressed any feelings about anything. I realized at that moment that I was seeing into his soul.

(*10) Complaining about the endnotes: Yes, I know. I know.  But the fact that I'm hypocritical doesn't invalidate the legitimacy of the complaint.  It's still annoying in Harris's book.  Whether or not it's equally annoying when I do it is another question.

Weekly Reading Vlogs:  

May 9, 2021  The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris p.0-16
May 16, 2021 The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris p.16-84
May 23, 2021 The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris p.84-168
May 30, 2021 The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris p.168-250
June 6, 2021 The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris p.250-260
June 13, 2021 The Linguistics Wars by Randy Allen Harris p.1-14

Video Review  (Playlist HERE)
Video Review HERE and embedded below: