Noam Chomsky (1928 - )

Fri Dec 07, 1928

Image

Avram Noam Chomsky, born on this day in 1928, is an American linguist and anarchist political thinker, notable for his critiques of American imperialism and capitalist media. “Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.”

Sometimes called “the father of modern linguistics”, Chomsky is a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He holds a joint appointment as Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Laureate Professor at the University of Arizona, and is the author of more than 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media.

Ideologically, Chomsky is a libertarian socialist. An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he identified as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals”.

Associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard Nixon’s Enemies List. Chomsky, along with Howard Zinn, was also on a list of American citizens that could be arrested without probable cause in the event of a national emergency.

In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later theorized a propaganda model of mass media in their work “Manufacturing Consent” (1988).

“Any dictator would admire the uniformity and obedience of the U.S. media.”

- Noam Chomsky