Essential Chomsky

CURRENT AFFAIRS $19.95 U.S. CHOMSKY IS ONE OF A SMALL BAND OF NOAM INDIVIDUALS FIGHTING A WHOLE INDUSTRY. AND CHOMSKY THAT MAKES HIM NOT ONLY BRILLIANT, BUT HEROIC. NOAM CHOMSKY —ARUNDHATI ROY EDITED BY ANTHONY ARNOVE THEESSENTIAL C Noam Chomsky is one of the most significant Better than anyone else now writing, challengers of unjust power and delusions; Chomsky combines indignation with he goes against every assumption about insight, erudition with moral passion. American altruism and humanitarianism. That is a difficult achievement, —EDWARD W. SAID and an encouraging one. THE —IN THESE TIMES For nearly thirty years now, Noam Chomsky has parsed the main proposition One of the West’s most influential of American power—what they do is intellectuals in the cause of peace. aggression, what we do upholds freedom— —THE INDEPENDENT with encyclopedic attention to detail and an unflagging sense of outrage. Chomsky is a global phenomenon . —UTNE READER perhaps the most widely read voice on foreign policy on the planet. ESSENTIAL [Chomsky] continues to challenge our —THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW assumptions long after other critics have 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 —CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT, condemned to become commodities. THE NEW YORK TIMES —EDUARDO GALEANO HO NE OF THE WORLD’S most prominent NOAM CHOMSKY is Institute Professor of lin- Opublic 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 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 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 MSKY brings together selections from his most impor- available from The New Press), as well as tant writings since 1959—from his ground- Hegemony or Survival and Failed States. He lives breaking critique of B.F. Skinner to his in Cambridge, Massachusetts. bestselling works Hegemony or Survival and Failed States—concerning subjects ranging ANTHONY ARNOVE is the author of Iraq: The from critiques of corporate media and U.S. Logic of Withdrawal and the editor of Iraq Under interventionism to intellectual freedom and the Siege and, with Howard Zinn, of Terrorism and CHOMSKY 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. Chomsky is an unprecedented, comprehensive overview of Chomsky’s thought. www.thenewpress.com THE NEW PRESS THE NEW PRESS Cover design by Pollen, New York 27556 fm 12/11/07 3:08 PM Page i THE ESSENTIAL CHOMSKY 27556 fm 12/11/07 3:08 PM Page ii OTHER BOOKS IN THE NEW PRESS ESSENTIAL SERIES The Essential Gunnar Myrdal The Essential Foucault The Essential E. P. Thompson The Essential Wallerstein 27556 fm 12/11/07 3:08 PM Page iii THE ESSENTIAL CHOMSKY Noam Chomsky Edited by Anthony Arnove 27556 fm 12/11/07 3:08 PM Page iv Compilation and introduction © 2008 by Anthony Arnove Pages 417–19 constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this 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 of educational, cultural, and community value that are often deemed insufficiently profitable. www.thenewpress.com Composition by dix! This book was set in Fournier MT Printed in the United States of America 24681097531 27556 fm 12/11/07 3:08 PM Page v 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: A Skeptical 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. A World Without War 325 21. Reflections on 9-11 341 22. Language and the Brain 347 27556 fm 12/11/07 3:08 PM Page vi 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 27556 fm 12/11/07 3:08 PM Page vii 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.1 American 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.” 3 Chomsky 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 27556 fm 12/11/07 3:08 PM Page viii 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, solidarity, 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 independent 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 linguistics. 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.

Load more