Noam Chomsky

Lore & Background

Chomsky was born to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia. He developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania, and during postgraduate work at the Harvard Society of Fellows developed the theory of transformational grammar, earning his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as a significant figure with his landmark work Syntactic Structures. From 1958 to 1959 he was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He created or co-created universal grammar theory, generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program, and played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism, particularly criticizing B. F. Skinner.

An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, Chomsky rose to national attention in 1967 for his anti-war essay 'The Responsibility of Intellectuals.' He was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard Nixon's list of political opponents. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, he articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent, and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. His defense of unconditional freedom of speech, including that of Holocaust denial, generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s. His commentary on the Cambodian genocide and the Bosnian genocide also generated controversy. An anti-Zionist, he considers Israel's treatment of Palestinians to be worse than South African–style apartheid and criticizes U.S. support for Israel.

Reader's Guide

Chomsky is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive revolution in the human sciences, contributing to a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. His work in linguistics fundamentally remodeled the study of language, moving it away from behaviorist approaches and establishing generative grammar as a central paradigm. Beyond linguistics, his political activism and writings have made him a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism, and mass media. The propaganda model he developed with Edward S. Herman remains influential in media studies. Chomsky's ideas continue to be highly influential in anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. His legacy is that of a scholar who bridged technical linguistic theory with broad social critique, maintaining a consistent voice on the American Left for over six decades.

Did You Know?

• Chomsky wrote his first article at age 10 about the 1939 fall of Barcelona and the suppression of the Spanish anarchosyndicalist movement.
• He was placed on President Richard Nixon's list of political opponents.
• His doctoral thesis on transformational grammar was privately distributed on microfilm before being published in 1975.
• Chomsky's parents' first language was Yiddish, though it was taboo to speak it at home.

Notable Quotes (Wikiquote)

"Avram Noam Chomsky (born 7 December 1928) is an American linguist, analytical philosopher, cognitive scientist, political analyst, human rights activist and anarcho-socialist." — Noam Chomsky "Syntactic investigation of a given language has as its goal the construction of a grammar that can be viewed as a device of some sort for producing the sentences of the language under analysis." — Noam Chomsky "The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Arthur Dorfman, reply by Noam Chomsky, New York Review of Books, April 20, 1967." — Noam Chomsky "The Legitimacy of Violence as a Political Act? Noam Chomsky debates with Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, et al." in New York, December 15, 1967; Republished at chomsky.info, accessed May 23, 2014." — Noam Chomsky