In the first comprehensive biography of Ferdinand de Saussure, John E. Joseph restores the full character and history of a man who is considered the founder of modern linguistics and whose ideas have influenced literary theory, philosophy, cultural studies, and virtually every other branch of humanities and the social sciences. Josephs study immediately installs itself as a standard work not only for Saussure specialists but also for anyone interested in the development of linguistics and its interfaces with philosophy, literary studies, semiotics and cultural criticism. His credentials, as someone who haspublished extensively on the history of linguistics, are unquestionable, and the sedulousness of the scholarship is evident on every page ... Above all, however, the structure of this critical biography is both astute and generous, bringing Saussures life and thought into judiciously assessed interrelationships with the genealogies of family, of Genevan society, of Genevan linguistics, and of linguistics and structuralism since. It affords cohesion to a momentous study of a key figure in Western thought