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Noam Chomsky WolfgangB.Sperlich Noam Chomsky Titles in the series Critical Lives present the work of leading cultural figures of the modern period. Each book explores the life of the artist, writer, philosopher or architect in question and relates it to their major works. In the same series Jean Genet Stephen Barber Michel Foucault David Macey Pablo Picasso Mary Ann Caws Franz Kafka Sander L. Gilman Guy Debord Andy Merrifield Marcel Duchamp Caroline Cros James Joyce Andrew Gibson Frank Lloyd Wright Robert McCarter Jean-Paul Sartre Andrew Leak Jorge Luis Borges Jason Wilson Noam Chomsky Wolfgang B. Sperlich reaktion books For my family to the left, Susan, Samantha and d’Arcy Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street ec1v 0dx, uk London www.reaktionbooks.co.uk 2006 First published 2006 Copyright © Wolfgang B. Sperlich All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in Great Britain cpi by /Bath Press Ltd, Bath British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data 1948 Sperlich, Wolfgang B., – Noam Chomsky. – (Critical lives) 1 2 . Chomsky, Noam . Linguists – United States – Biography I.Title 410.92 ’ isbn 1 86189 269 1 Contents 1 A Working Life 7 2 Linguist and Philosopher 26 3 Political Activist 66 4 Reading the Newspapers 121 References 146 Bibliography 154 Acknowledgements 159 Photo Acknowledgements 160 Chomsky at work. 1 A Working Life Not a few of mankind’s original thinkers have been colourful figures, led flamboyant lives and thus provided valuable material for many a biography filled with a salacious story or two. Take Friedrich Schiller, the German dramatic rebel and accidental academic. When giving his inaugural lecture at the University of 1789 Jena in , he saw that far more people had turned up than could be accommodated in the lecture hall. Rather than let his employers find something bigger nearby, the youthful Schiller seized the moment and marched with the crowd through the streets of Jena to the town hall. There he lectured to an enthusiastic crowd of thousands shouting ‘freedom’, subsequently enjoying the attention he received from the liberated ladies of the town. Other fighters for freedom and reason, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell, led eccentric lives that had the local establishments in uproar. Even a working-class hero like George Orwell could never quite divorce himself from hi s upper-class public school upbringing, or so his biographers tell us. All such activists – known and unknown – fought their battles to improve the lot of ordinary men and women, and quite a few advanced science and the arts along the way. Noam Chomsky is one of the most notable contemporary cham- pionsof the people. He is also a scientist of the highest calibre. But is he great material for a biography? Certainly not, if you ask the subject. An intensely private man, he is horrified to be consid- ered the main character in any story. He jokes about the notion 7 Chomsky at work in private. that people come to see him, listen to him, even adore him, when in fact he is the most boring speaker ever to hit the stage. He gets serious very quickly and tells his audiences that they have come to hear about the ‘issues’ of our time, issues that are important to them and, as it happens, to him. What is it that he knows and the people don’t? Wrong question, he would say. The people merely want to know the truth and they know it is hidden from them by a vast propaganda machine. His skill is to lift the veil and reveal the truth. Anyone can do it, says Chomsky, it only takes some dedicated research and logical reasoning. Two large problems of the world are known as Plato’s problem and Orwell’s problem, respectively. Chomsky describes them thus: Plato’s problem . . . is to explain how we can know so much, given that the evidence available to us is so sparse. Orwell’s problem is to explain why we know and understand so little, 1 even though the evidence available to us is so rich. 8