Avram Noam Chomsky celebrates his 96th birthday today. You may know his name from his political activism, writing, and speaking, but he’s also a founder of a whole scientific field: cognitive science. He’s also a major figure in analytic philosophy and is known as “the father of modern linguistics.” He’s an institute professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and also a laureate professor of linguistics at the University of Arizona. If that wasn’t enough for one person, he’s also written over 150 books and is one of the most cited authors alive.
Chomsky’s interest in politics and linguistics both came to him early; he was born in Philadelphia in 1928 and frequented alternative bookstores in New York City where he found books about anarchism. He graduated form the University of Pennsylvania, and earned his doctorate from Harvard by developing his theory of transformational grammar. As soon as he earned his doctorate, in 1955, he began teaching at MIT. Two years later his work Syntactic Structures helped revolutionize the study of language.
Chomsky spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he was pretty productive, creating the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy (it’s a hierarchy of types of grammar) and the “minimalist program,” which is important if you study linguistics. Or so I’ve read.
It wasn’t until 1967 that Chomsky achieved national attention for his political views, when he published the essay The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the New York Review of Books. He probably took it as a badge of honor when Richard M. Nixon political enemies list. Since then he’s been an outspoken critic of US foreign policy, capitalism, mass media, and both Israel and the US in regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Chomsky has continued to be both a serious scholar and a public intellectual for decades. He’s been the de-facto spokesperson for American linguistics ever since being the leading speaker at the 1962 International Congress of Linguists. And his writings about politics have included the book American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), At War with Asia (1970), For Reasons of State (1973) and more. In a more historical context, Chomsky has fiercely condemned Nazism and totalitarianism, but was so committed to freedom of speech that he defended an historian who advocated denial of the Holocaust. That was the Faurisson Affair, and the controversy over his role damaged Chomsky’s reputation.
Chomsky technically retired from MIT in 2002, but remained active in research and teaching. He has also supported a Turkish publisher who got in trouble for publishing one of his books — Chomsky insisted on becoming a co-defendant and got the charges thrown out. He began splitting his time between the US and Brazil in 2015, and moved there full-time in 2023.
There are metric tons of more material by and about Noam Chomsky; loads more than I can cover here. But the small amount of his writing that I’ve read (not the highly technical linguistics material, which I don’t have the background to understand) is both readable and worthwhile. My advice is to give it a try.
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