Saussure associates langue with collective social realities; it is the system created by society and existing, almost identically, in every member of a linguisitic community. He associates parole , in turn, with individual expressions within the system. The system is impervious to change: “changes are never made to the system as a whole,” though each individual change in parole might have “repercussions” for the system.

This distinction is crucial for Saussure, and it seems analogous to the notion of an illegitimate ahistorical “social” that, according to Milbank, is a fundamental assumption of sociology.