Through his lectures, posthumously collected as Cours de linguistique générale (1916; translated as Course in General Linguistics, 1959), Ferdinand de Saussure inaugurated modern linguistics and inspired in a generation of scholars the hope that the humanities could be unified and given a rigorous scientific foundation. Saussure theorized that language and other "semiological," or sign-based, systems of meaning are not founded on preexisting distinctions in nature, mind, or history but are socially determined. Saussure's principle that individuals have negligible influence on the intrinsically social and formal aspects of language contributed to later theories that language and discourse construct every aspect of human life.

Saussure was born on 26 November 1857 in Geneva, Switzerland, to the zoologist and entomologist Henri de Saussure and the Countess de Pourtalès. Saussure's great-grandfather, Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, was an eminent philosopher and scientist. Saussure adumbrated his career at the...