The Essential Chomsky

529 Pages·2008·1.94 MB·English

by  Noam Chomsky

NOAM CHOMSKY
NOAM
CURRENT AFFAIRS $19.95 U.S.
CHOMSKY IS ONE OF A SMALL BAND OF
CHOMSKY
INDIVIDUALS FIGHTING A WHOLE INDUSTRY. AND
THAT MAKES HIM NOT ONLY BRILLIANT, BUT HEROIC.
THE EDITED BY ANTHONY ARNOVE
—ARUNDHATI ROY
Noam Chomsky is one of the most significant Better than anyone else now writing,
E
challengers of unjust power and delusions; Chomsky combines indignation with
he goes against every assumption about insight, erudition with moral passion.
S THE
American altruism and humanitarianism. That is a difficult achievement,
—EDWARD W. SAID and an encouraging one.
—IN THESE TIMES S ESSENTIAL
For nearly thirty years now, Noam
Chomsky has parsed the main proposition One of the West’s most influential E
of American power—what they do is intellectuals in the cause of peace.
aggression, what we do upholds freedom— —THE INDEPENDENT
N
with encyclopedic attention to detail
and an unflagging sense of outrage. Chomsky is a global phenomenon . . .
—UTNE READER perhaps the most widely read voice T
on foreign policy on the planet.
[Chomsky] continues to challenge our —THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW I
assumptions long after other critics have A
gone to bed. He has become the foremost Chomsky’s fierce talent proves once
gadfly of our national conscience. more that human beings are not L
—CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT, condemned to become commodities.
THE NEW YORK TIMES —EDUARDO GALEANO
C
ONE OF THE WORLD’S most prominent NOAM CHOMSKY is Institute Professor of lin-
public intellectuals, Noam Chomsky has, in guistics at MIT and the author of numerous
more than fifty years of writing on politics, phi- books, including For Reasons of State,American H
CHOMSKY
losophy, and language, revolutionized modern Power and the New Mandarins, Understanding
linguistics and established himself as one of Power,The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human
O
the most original and wide-ranging political and Nature, On Language, Objectivity and Liberal
social critics of our time. The Essential Chomsky Scholarship, and Towards a New Cold War (all
M
brings together selections from his most impor- available from The New Press), as well as
tant writings since 1959—from his ground- Hegemony or Survivaland Failed States.He lives
breaking critique of B.F. Skinner to his in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
bestselling works Hegemony or Survival and S
Failed States—concerning subjects ranging ANTHONY ARNOVE is the author ofIraq: The
from critiques of corporate media and U.S. Logic of Withdrawaland the editor of Iraq Under
K
interventionism to intellectual freedom and the Siege and, with Howard Zinn, of Terrorism and
political economy of human rights. With a War and Voices of a People’s History of the
foreword by Anthony Arnove, The Essential United States.He lives in Brooklyn, New York. Y
Chomskyis an unprecedented, comprehensive
overview of Chomsky’s thought.
www.thenewpress.com
THE NEW PRESS
THE NEW PRESS Cover design by Pollen, New York
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THE ESSENTIAL CHOMSKY
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OTHER BOOKS IN THE NEW PRESS ESSENTIAL SERIES
The Essential Gunnar Myrdal
The Essential Foucault
The Essential E. P. Thompson
The Essential Wallerstein
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THE ESSENTIAL
CHOMSKY
Noam Chomsky
Edited by Anthony Arnove
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Compilation and introduction © 2008 by Anthony Arnove
Pages 417–19 constitute an extension ofthis copyright page.
All rights reserved.
No part ofthis book may be reproduced, in any form,
without written permission from the publisher.
Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to:
Permissions Department, The New Press, 38 Greene Street, New York, NY 10013.
Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2008
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Chomsky, Noam.
The essential Chomsky / Noam Chomsky ; edited by Anthony Arnove.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59558-189-1 (pbk.)—ISBN 978-1-59558-322-2 (hc.)
1. Linguistics. 2. World politics—20th century. 3. Language and languages—Philosophy.
I. Arnove, Anthony, 1969– II. Title.
P125.C468 2008
410—dc22 2007043510
The New Press was established in 1990 as a not-for-profit alternative to the large,
commercial publishing houses currently dominating the book publishing industry.
The New Press operates in the public interest rather than for private gain,
and is committed to publishing, in innovative ways, works ofeducational, cultural,
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www.thenewpress.com
Composition by dix!
This book was set in Fournier MT
Printed in the United States ofAmerica
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
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Contents
Foreword vii
1. A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior 1
2. Preface to Aspects of the Theory of Syntax 31
3. Methodological Preliminaries 33
4. The Responsibility of Intellectuals 39
5. On Resistance 63
6. Language and Freedom 75
7. Notes on Anarchism 92
8. The Rule of Force in International Affairs 105
9. Watergate:ASkeptical View 134
10. The Remaking of History 141
11. Foreign Policy and the Intelligentsia 160
12. The United States and East Timor 187
13. The Origins of the “Special Relationship” 198
14. Planning for Global Hegemony 223
15. The View Beyond:Prospects for the Study of Mind 232
16. Containing the Enemy 257
17. Introduction to The Minimalist Program 277
18. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind 285
19. Intentional Ignorance and Its Uses 300
20. AWorld Without War 325
21. Reflections on 9-11 341
22. Language and the Brain 347
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vi CONTENTS
23. United States—Israel—Palestine 368
24. Imperial Grand Strategy 373
25. Afterword to Failed States 403
Acknowledgments 415
Permissions 417
Notes 421
Select Bibliography of Works by Noam Chomsky 485
Index 491
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Foreword
From his early essays in the liberal intellectual journal the New York Review
of Books to his most recent books Hegemony or Survival, Failed States, and
Interventions, Noam Chomsky has produced a singular body of political criti-
cism.1American Power and the New Mandarins(1969), his first published col-
lection of political writing (dedicated “To the brave young men who refuse to
serve in a criminal war”), contains essays that still stand out for their insight
and biting wit nearly four decades later. “It is easy to be carried away by the
sheer horror of what the daily press reveals and to lose sight of the fact that
this is merely the brutal exterior of a deeper crime, of commitment to a social
order that guarantees endless suffering and humiliation and denial of elemen-
tary human rights,” Chomsky wrote in that book, setting himself apart from
the vast majority of the war’s critics who saw it as a “tragic mistake,” rather
than as part of a long history of U.S. imperialism.2
Since 1969, Chomsky has produced a series of books on U.S. foreign policy
in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, all while maintaining his com-
mitments to linguistics research, philosophy, and to teaching. And through-
out, he has consistently lent his support to movements and organizations
involved in efforts for social change, continuing a tradition of intellectual and
active social engagement he developed early in his youth.
Avram Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia on December 7, 1928,
and raised among Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His father,
William Chomsky, fled from Russia in 1913 to escape conscription into the
Tsarist army. His mother, Elsie Simonofsky, left Eastern Europe when she was
one. Chomsky grew up during the Depression and the international rise of
the fascist threat. As he later recalled, “Some of my earliest memories, which
are very vivid, are of people selling rags at our door, of violent police strike-
breaking, and other Depression scenes.”3Chomsky was imbued at an early
age with a sense of class solidarity and struggle. While his parents were, as he
puts it, “normal Roosevelt Democrats,” he had aunts and uncles who were
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viii FOREWORD
garment workers in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, com-
munists, Trotskyists, and anarchists. As a child, Chomsky was influenced by
the radical Jewish intellectual culture in New York City, where he regularly
visited newsstands and bookstores with anarchist literature. According to
Chomsky, this was a “working class culture with working class values, soli-
darity, socialist values.”4
After having almost dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania, where
he had enrolled as an undergraduate when he was sixteen, Chomsky found
intellectual and political stimulation from linguist Zellig Harris. Chomsky
gravitated toward the unusual intellectual milieu around Harris. Harris taught
seminars on linguistics that involved philosophical debates, reading, and in-
dependent research outside the standard constraints of the university struc-
ture. Chomsky began graduate work with Harris and, in 1951, joined
Harvard’s Society of Fellows, where he continued his research into linguis-
tics. By 1953, Chomsky had broken “almost entirely from the field as it ex-
isted,” and set down a path that would lead him to reexamine the rich insights
of the seventeenth-century linguistics of the Port-Royal school and the
French philosopher René Descartes, and the later work of the Prussian
philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, on the “creative aspect of language
use.”5 Though Chomsky would at times downplay or deny the connection,
his political and linguistic work have both built on the philosophical tradition
that he has traced back from contemporary strains of anarchism through
“classical liberalism” to the Enlightenment and the early rationalists of the
seventeenth century.
While Chomsky, who joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in 1955 at the age of twenty-six, received tremendous early
recognition for his linguistic work, he began to make a wider political mark
when he started writing long, detailed essays denouncing the war and the role
of mainstream intellectuals who supported it for the New York Review of
Booksand then for left journals such as Liberation, Ramparts, New Politics, and
Socialist Revolution (later Socialist Review). These essays brilliantly docu-
mented and condemned the actions of the U.S. government in Indochina and
connected the war effort to the history of U.S. imperialism more generally.
Chomsky became one of the most important and respected critics of the U.S.
war effort, earning a place on President Nixon’s infamous “enemies list.”
From this point on, he was the subject of intense vilification by various apolo-
gists for the system, much as he would later be subjected to repeated attacks
for his critical writings on Israel. In these early essays, we see Chomsky devel-
oping the basic themes of his best work: rigorously detailed analyses of U.S.
planning documents, declassified records, official statements, and hard-to-
find sources; merciless critique of liberals, establishment intellectuals, and
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FOREWORD ix
media commentators who provided a cover for U.S. imperialism; and an
analysis that showed that the war in Vietnam was not the result of “mistakes,”
“honest misunderstanding,” “attempts to do good gone awry,” or of incom-
petent officials who could just be replaced by better ones. Rather, the war
against Indochina was a product of systematic, deeply rooted features of the
capitalist state.
Not just an intellectual critic of the war against the people of Indochina, he
participated in direct action to back up his beliefs. Chomsky took part in early
tax resistance efforts in early 1965 and one of the first public protests against
the war, in Boston in October 1965, at which protesters were outnumbered by
counterdemonstrators and police, and became an important day-to-day or-
ganizer in the movement. These commitments extended well beyond Vietnam
to involvement in the Central American solidarity movement, protest against
the 1991 and 2003 U.S. interventions in Iraq, and much more. Chomsky has
continued to speak out, write, give interviews, sign petitions, and reach out in-
dividually wherever he has felt he might be able to make a difference. And yet,
he has also maintained his passionate engagement with his students and others
in the field of linguistics, an area where he has continued to challenge and re-
vise his own theories and work.6
People around the world take inspiration from Chomsky’s example, and
rightly so. He reminds a world that sees the United States through the lens of
Fox News or that primarily knows the United States through its blunt instru-
ments of foreign control that the people of the country have far different val-
ues and ideals than its political elite. He speaks within a vital but often
neglected tradition of dissent and from a standpoint of solidarity with people
around the world who are engaged in struggles for justice and social change.
On his trips to countries such as Colombia and Nicaragua, usually with his
lifetime partner Carol Chomsky, he travels more to learn from the struggles of
others than to teach or instruct, but his words still carry the immense power
that criticism and analysis at its best can exemplify: the power of people to un-
derstand the world in order to better understand how to change it.
Anthony Arnove