Noam Chomsky
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Speaking at a conference about humanity's prospects for survival in Amherst, MA, April 17, 2017
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Avram Noam Chomsky
December 7, 1928
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
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| Education | University of Pennsylvania |
| Spouse(s) |
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| Era | Contemporary philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Analytic philosophy |
| Institutions | Harvard University Massachusetts Institute of Technology University of Arizona |
| Thesis | Transformational Analysis (1955) |
Main interests
| Linguistics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, cognitive science, political criticism |
| Signature | |
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Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, political activist, and social critic. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also 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 over 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.
Born to middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He began studying at the University of Pennsylvania at age 16, taking courses in linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. From 1951 to 1955, he was appointed to Harvard University's Society of Fellows. While at Harvard, he developed the theory of transformational grammar; for this, he was awarded his doctorate in 1955. Chomsky began teaching at MIT in 1957 and emerged as a significant figure in the field of linguistics for his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which remodelled the scientific study of language. From 1958 to 1959, he was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. Chomsky is credited as the creator or co-creator of the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, and the Chomsky hierarchy. He also played a pivotal role in the decline of behaviorism, being particularly critical of the work of B. F. Skinner.
Chomsky vocally opposed U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, believing the war to be an act of American imperialism. In 1967, he attracted widespread public attention for his antiwar essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and was placed on Richard Nixon's Enemies List. While expanding his work in linguistics over late 1960s and 1970s, he also became involved in the so-called linguistics wars with generative semantics. In the 1980s, Chomsky helped develop the government and binding theory. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later co-wrote Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, which articulated the propaganda model of media criticism and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. Additionally, his defense of freedom of speech—including free speech for Holocaust deniers—generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the early 1980s. In the 1990s, Chomsky started the minimalist program. Since retiring from active teaching (becoming emeritus in 2002), Chomsky has continued his vocal political activism by opposing the War on Terror and supporting the Occupy Movement.
One of the most cited scholars in history, Chomsky has influenced a broad array of academic fields. He is widely recognized as a paradigm shifter who helped spark a major revolution in the human sciences, contributing to the development of a new cognitivistic framework for the study of language and the mind. In addition to his continued scholarly research, he remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, neoliberalism and contemporary state capitalism, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mainstream news media. His ideas have proved highly significant within the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements. Some of his critics have accused him of anti-Americanism.
Early life
Childhood: 1928–45
Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His mother Elsie (nėe Simonofsky) emigrated from Belarus to the United States in 1906, while his father William Chomsky left Ukraine for the United States in 1913.William was appointed to the faculty at Gratz College in Philadelphia in 1924. Elsie also taught at Gratz. Much later William Chomsky was appointed professor of Hebrew at Dropsie College from 1955–77.
What motivated his [political] interests? A powerful curiosity, exposure to divergent opinions, and an unorthodox education have all been given as answers to this question. He was clearly struck by the obvious contradictions between his own readings and mainstream press reports. The measurement of the distance between the realities presented by these two sources, and the evaluation of why such a gap exists, remained a passion for Chomsky. Biographer Robert F. Barsky, 1997Noam was the Chomsky family's first child. His younger brother, David Eli Chomsky, was born five years later in 1934. The brothers were close, although David was more easygoing while Noam could be very competitive. Chomsky and his brother were raised Jewish, being taught Hebrew and regularly discussing the political theories of Zionism; the family was particularly influenced by the Left Zionist writings of Ahad Ha'am. As a Jew, Chomsky faced anti-semitism as a child, particularly from the Irish and German communities living in Philadelphia.
Chomsky described his parents as "normal Roosevelt Democrats" who had a center-left position on the political spectrum; he was exposed to far-left politics through other members of the family, a number of whom were socialists involved in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. He was substantially influenced by his uncle who owned a newspaper stand in New York City, where Jewish leftists came to debate the issues of the day. Whenever visiting his uncle, Chomsky frequented left-wing and anarchist bookstores in the city, voraciously reading political literature. He later described his discovery of anarchism as "a lucky accident", because it allowed him to become critical of Stalinism and other forms of Marxism–Leninism.
Chomsky's primary education was at Oak Lane Country Day School, an independent Deweyite institution that focused on allowing its pupils to pursue their own interests in a non-competitive atmosphere. It was there, at age 10, that he wrote his first article, on the spread of fascism, following the fall of Barcelona to Francisco Franco's fascist army in the Spanish Civil War. At age 12, Chomsky moved on to secondary education at Central High School, where he joined various clubs and societies and excelled academically but was troubled by the hierarchical and regimented teaching methods. During the same time period, Chomsky attended the Hebrew High School at Gratz College. From the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics.
University: 1945–55
From 1951 to 1955, Chomsky was named to the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, where he undertook research on what would become his doctoral dissertation. Having been encouraged by Goodman to apply, Chomsky was attracted to Harvard in part because the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine was based there. Both Quine and a visiting philosopher, J. L. Austin of the University of Oxford, strongly influenced Chomsky. In 1952, Chomsky published his first academic article, "Systems of Syntactic Analysis", which appeared not in a journal of linguistics but in The Journal of Symbolic Logic. Highly critical of the established behaviorist currents in linguistics, in 1954 he presented his ideas at lectures at the University of Chicago and Yale University. He had not been registered as a student at Pennsylvania for four years, but in 1955 he submitted a thesis setting out his ideas on transformational grammar; he was awarded a Ph.D. for it, and it was privately distributed among specialists on microfilm before being published in 1975 as part of The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. Possession of this Ph.D. nullified his requirement to enter national service in the armed forces, which was otherwise due to begin in 1955. George Armitage Miller, a professor at Harvard, read Chomsky's Ph.D. thesis and was impressed; together he and Chomsky published a number of technical papers in mathematical linguistics.
The work of anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker (left) and democratic socialist George Orwell (right) significantly influenced the young Chomsky.
On visits to New York City, Chomsky continued to frequent the office of the Yiddish anarchist journal Freie Arbeiter Stimme, becoming enamored with the ideas of contributor Rudolf Rocker, whose work introduced him to the link between anarchism and classical liberalism. Other political thinkers whose work Chomsky read included the anarchist Diego Abad de Santillán, democratic socialists George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, and Dwight Macdonald, and works by Marxists Karl Liebknecht, Karl Korsch, and Rosa Luxemburg. His readings convinced him of the desirability of an anarcho-syndicalist society, and he became fascinated by the anarcho-syndicalist communes set up during the Spanish Civil War, which were documented in Orwell's Homage to Catalonia (1938). He avidly read the leftist journal politics, remarking that it "answered to and developed" his interest in anarchism, as well as the periodical Living Marxism, published by council communist Paul Mattick. Although rejecting its Marxist basis, Chomsky was heavily influenced by council communism, voraciously reading articles in Living Marxism by Antonie Pannekoek. He was also greatly interested in the Marlenite ideas of the Leninist League, an anti-Stalinist Marxist–Leninist group, sharing their views that the Second World War was orchestrated by Western capitalists and the Soviet Union's "state capitalists" to crush Europe's proletariat.
Early career: 1955–66
Chomsky befriended two linguists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Morris Halle and Roman Jakobson, the latter of whom secured him an assistant professor position there in 1955. At MIT Chomsky spent half his time on a mechanical translation project and half teaching a course on linguistics and philosophy. He had been recruited to MIT by Jerome Wiesner, an influential scientist who was also involved in getting the US's nuclear missile program established. Having brought such missile research to MIT, Wiesner then became a nuclear strategy adviser to both Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy before returning to MIT to oversee research programmes at the Institute. Despite its military involvement, Chomsky has described MIT as "a pretty free and open place, open to experimentation and without rigid requirements. It was just perfect for someone of my idiosyncratic interests and work." In 1957 MIT promoted him to the position of associate professor, and from 1957 to 1958 he was also employed by Columbia University as a visiting professor. That same year, Chomsky's first child, a daughter named Aviva, was born, and he published his first book on linguistics, Syntactic Structures, a work that radically opposed the dominant Harris–Bloomfield trend in the field. The response to Chomsky's ideas ranged from indifference to hostility, and his work proved divisive and caused "significant upheaval" in the discipline. Linguist John Lyons later asserted that it "revolutionized the scientific study of language". From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.In 1959 Chomsky published a review of B. F. Skinner's 1957 book Verbal Behavior in the academic journal Language, in which he argued against Skinner's view of language as learned behavior. Opining that Skinner ignored the role of human creativity in linguistics, his review helped him to become an "established intellectual", and he proceeded to found MIT's Graduate Program in linguistics with Halle. In 1961 he was awarded academic tenure, being made a full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics. He went on to be appointed plenary speaker at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, held in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which established him as the de facto spokesperson of American linguistics. He continued to publish his linguistic ideas throughout the decade, including in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1966), Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar (1966), and Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (1966). Along with Halle, he also edited the Studies in Language series of books for Harper and Row, and extended the theory of generative grammar to phonology in The Sound Pattern of English (1968).
He continued to receive academic recognition and honors for his work, in 1966 visiting a variety of Californian institutions, first as the Linguistics Society of America Professor at the University of California, and then as the Beckman Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His Beckman lectures were assembled and published as Language and Mind in 1968. In this period, military scientists were also interested in Chomsky's linguistics. As former Air Force Colonel, Anthony Debons, said: "much of the research conducted at MIT by Chomsky and his colleagues [has] direct application to the efforts undertaken by military scientists to develop ... languages for computer operations in military command and control systems." Between 1963 and 1965, Chomsky was a consultant for a military-sponsored project "to establish natural language as an operational language for command and control." One of Chomsky's students who also worked on this project, Barbara Partee, says that this research was justified to the military on the basis that "in the event of a nuclear war, the generals would be underground with some computers trying to manage things, and that it would probably be easier to teach computers to understand English than to teach the generals to program."
These scientists eventually found Chomsky's theories unworkable for their computer systems. Other subsequent difficulties with the theories led to various debates between Chomsky and his critics that came to be known as the "Linguistics Wars", although they revolved largely around philosophical issues rather than linguistics proper.
Later life
Anti-Vietnam War activism and rise to prominence: 1967–75
[I]t does not require very far-reaching, specialized knowledge to perceive that the United States was invading South Vietnam. And, in fact, to take apart the system of illusions and deception which functions to prevent understanding of contemporary reality [is] not a task that requires extraordinary skill or understanding. It requires the kind of normal skepticism and willingness to apply one's analytical skills that almost all people have and that they can exercise. Chomsky on the Vietnam WarChomsky first involved himself in active political protest against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in 1962, speaking on the subject at small gatherings in churches and homes. In 1967 he entered the public debate on United States foreign policy. In February he published an essay in The New York Review of Books titled "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", in which he criticized the country's involvement in the conflict; the essay was based on a talk he had given to Harvard's Foundation for Jewish Campus Life. He expanded on his argument to produce his first political book, American Power and the New Mandarins, which was published in 1969 and soon established him at the forefront of American dissent. His other political books of the time included At War with Asia (1971), The Backroom Boys (1973), For Reasons of State (1973), and Peace in the Middle East? (1975), published by Pantheon Books. Coming to be associated with the American New Left movement, he nevertheless thought little of prominent New Left intellectuals Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm, and preferred the company of activists to intellectuals. Although The New York Review of Books did publish contributions from Chomsky and other leftists from 1967 to 1973, when an editorial change put a stop to it, he was virtually ignored by the rest of the mainstream press throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Along with his writings, Chomsky also became actively involved in left-wing activism. Refusing to pay half his taxes, he publicly supported students who refused the draft, and was arrested for being part of an antiwar teach-in outside the Pentagon. During this time, along with Mitchell Goodman, Denise Levertov, William Sloane Coffin, and Dwight Macdonald, Chomsky also founded the antiwar collective RESIST. Although he questioned the objectives of the 1968 student protests, Chomsky gave many lectures to student activist groups; furthermore, he and his colleague Louis Kampf began running undergraduate courses on politics at MIT, independently of the conservative-dominated political science department.
During this period, MIT's various departments were researching helicopters, smart bombs and counterinsurgency techniques for the war in Vietnam and, as Chomsky says, "a good deal of [nuclear] missile guidance technology was developed right on the MIT campus". As Chomsky elaborates, "[MIT was] about 90% Pentagon funded at that time. And I personally was right in the middle of it. I was in a military lab ... the Research Laboratory for Electronics." By 1969, student activists were actively campaigning "to stop the war research" at MIT. Chomsky was sympathetic to the students but also thought it best to keep such research on campus and proposed that it should be restricted to what he called "systems of a purely defensive and deterrent character". Six of MIT's antiwar student activists were sentenced to prison. Chomsky says MIT's students suffered things that "should not have happened", but has also commented that MIT has "quite a good record on civil liberties". In 1970 he visited Hanoi to give a lecture at the Hanoi University of Science and Technology; on this trip he also toured Laos to visit the refugee camps created by the war, and in 1973 he was among those leading a committee to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the War Resisters League.
President Richard Nixon placed Chomsky on his "Enemies List".
Because of his antiwar activism, Chomsky was arrested on multiple occasions, and President Richard Nixon included him on the master version of his "Enemies List".
He was aware of the potential repercussions of his civil disobedience,
and his wife began studying for her own Ph.D. in linguistics in order to
support the family in the event of Chomsky's imprisonment or loss of
employment. But despite being under some pressure to fire him, MIT refused, due to his prominence in linguistics. His work in this area continued to gain international recognition; in 1967 he received honorary doctorates from both the University of London and the University of Chicago. In 1970, Loyola University and Swarthmore College also awarded him honorary D.H.L.'s, as did Bard College in 1971, Delhi University in 1972, and the University of Massachusetts in 1973.
In 1971 Chomsky gave the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lectures at the University of Cambridge, which were published as Problems of Knowledge and Freedom later that year. He also delivered the Whidden Lectures at McMaster University, the Huizinga Lecture at Leiden University in the Netherlands, the Woodbridge Lectures at Columbia University, and the Kant Lectures at Stanford University. In 1971 he partook in a televised debate with French philosopher Michel Foucault on Dutch television, titled Human Nature: Justice versus Power. Although largely agreeing with Foucault's ideas, he was critical of postmodernism
and French philosophy generally, believing that postmodern leftist
philosophers' obscure language did little to aid the cause of the
working classes and lambasting France as "a highly parochial and remarkably illiterate culture". Chomsky continued to publish extensively on linguistics, producing Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972), an enlarged edition of Language and Mind (1972), and Reflections on Language (1975). In 1974 he became a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.
Edward Herman and the Faurisson affair: 1976–80
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Noam Chomsky (1977)
Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, Chomsky's publications expanded
and clarified his earlier work, addressing his critics and updating his
grammatical theory.
His public talks often generated considerable controversy, particularly
when he criticized actions of the Israeli government and military, and his political views came under attack from right-wing and centrist figures, the most prominent of whom was Alan Dershowitz. Chomsky considered Dershowitz "a complete liar" and accused him of actively misrepresenting his position on issues. During the early 1970s Chomsky began collaborating with Edward S. Herman, who had also published critiques of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Together they authored Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda,
a book that criticized U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia and
highlighted how mainstream media neglected to cover it; the publisher Warner Modular accepted it, and it was published in 1973, but Warner Modular's parent company, Warner Communications, disapproved of the book's contents and ordered all copies destroyed.
While mainstream publishing options proved elusive, Chomsky found support from Michael Albert's South End Press, an activist-oriented publishing company.
In 1979, Chomsky and Herman revised Counter-Revolutionary Violence and published it with South End Press as the two-volume The Political Economy of Human Rights. In this they compared U.S. media reactions to the Cambodian genocide and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor.
They argued that because Indonesia was a U.S. ally, U.S. media ignored
the East Timorese situation while focusing on events in Cambodia, a U.S.
enemy. Taking a particular interest in the situation in East Timor, Chomsky testified on the subject in front of the United Nations' Special Committee on Decolonization in both 1978 and 1979, and attended a conference on the occupation held in Lisbon in 1979. The next year, the Marxist academic Steven Lukes wrote an article for the Times Higher Education Supplement accusing Chomsky of betraying his anarchist ideals and acting as an apologist for Cambodian leader Pol Pot.
Laura J. Summers and Robin Woodsworth Carlsen replied to the article,
arguing that Lukes completely misunderstood Chomsky and Herman's work.
The controversy damaged his reputation, and Chomsky maintains that his critics deliberately printed lies about him to defame him.
Although Chomsky had long publicly criticized Nazism and totalitarianism more generally, his commitment to freedom of speech led him to defend the right of French historian Robert Faurisson to advocate a position widely characterized as Holocaust denial.
Without Chomsky's knowledge, his plea for the historian's freedom of
speech was published as the preface to Faurisson's 1980 book Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m'accusent de falsifier l'histoire. Chomsky was widely condemned for defending Faurisson,
and France's mainstream press accused Chomsky of being a Holocaust
denier himself, refusing to publish his rebuttals to their accusations. Critiquing Chomsky's position, sociologist Werner Cohn later published an analysis of the affair titled Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers. The Faurisson affair had a lasting, damaging effect on Chomsky's career, and Chomsky did not visit France, where the translation of his political writings was delayed until the 2000s, for almost 30 years.
Reaganite era and work on the media: 1980–89
The election of Republican Ronald Reagan to the U.S. presidency in 1980 began a period of increased military intervention in Central America. In 1985, during Nicaragua's Contra War – in which the U.S. supported the contra militia against the Sandinista government – Chomsky traveled to Managua to meet with workers' organizations and refugees of the conflict, giving public lectures on politics and linguistics. Many of these lectures were published in 1987 as On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures. In 1983 he published The Fateful Triangle, an examination of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the place of the U.S. within it, arguing that the U.S. had continually used the conflict for its own ends. In 1988, Chomsky then visited the Palestinian territories to witness the impact of Israeli military occupation.
In 1988, Chomsky and Herman published Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, in which they outlined their propaganda model
for understanding the mainstream media. They argued that even in
countries without official censorship, the news is censored through four
filters that have great impact on what stories are reported and how
they are presented. The book was adapted into a 1992 film, Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, directed by Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick. In 1989, Chomsky published Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, in which he critiqued what he sees as the pseudo-democratic nature of Western capitalist states.
By the 1980s, a number of Chomsky's students had become leading
linguistic specialists in their own right, expanding, revising, and
expanding on Chomsky's ideas of generative grammar.
Increased political activism: 1990–present
In the 1990s, Chomsky embraced political activism to a greater degree than before.
Retaining his commitment to the cause of East Timorese independence, in
1995 he visited Australia to talk on the issue at the behest of the East Timorese Relief Association and the National Council for East Timorese Resistance. The lectures he gave on the subject were published as Powers and Prospects in 1996.
As a result of the international publicity Chomsky generated, his
biographer Wolfgang Sperlich opined that he did more to aid the cause of
East Timorese independence than anyone but the investigative journalist
John Pilger. After East Timor's independence from Indonesia was achieved in 1999, the Australian-led International Force for East Timor
arrived as a peacekeeping force; Chomsky was critical of this,
believing that it was designed to secure Australian access to East
Timor's oil and gas reserves under the Timor Gap Treaty. Chomsky's book Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order was a Boston Globe and Village Voice Literary Supplement bestseller in 1999.
Chomsky at the World Social Forum (Porto Alegre) in 2003
Chomsky retired from full-time teaching, although as an emeritus he nevertheless continued to conduct research and seminars at MIT.
After the September 11 attacks in 2001, Chomsky was widely interviewed, with these interviews being collated and published by Seven Stories Press in October.
Chomsky argued that the ensuing War on Terror
was not a new development but a continuation of the U.S. foreign policy
and concomitant rhetoric that had been pursued since at least the
Reagan era. In 2003 he published Hegemony or Survival, in which he articulated what he called the United States' "imperial grand strategy" and critiqued the Iraq War and other aspects of the War on Terror.
Chomsky toured internationally with greater regularity during this period. In 2001 he gave the D.T. Lakdawala Memorial Lecture in New Delhi, India, and in 2003 he visited Cuba at the invitation of the Latin American Association of Social Scientists.
In 2002 Chomsky visited Turkey to attend the trial of a publisher who
had been accused of treason for printing one of Chomsky's books; Chomsky
insisted on being a co-defendant and amid international media attention the Security Courts dropped the prosecution on the first day. During that trip, Chomsky visited Kurdish areas of Turkey and spoke out in favour of the Kurds' human rights. A supporter of the World Social Forum, he attended their conferences in Brazil in both 2002 and 2003, also attending the Forum event in India.
Chomsky speaking in support of the Occupy movement in 2011
Chomsky was drawn to the energy and activism of the Occupy movement, delivering talks at encampments and producing two works that chronicled its influence, first Occupy a pamphlet, in 2012, then, in 2013, Occupy: Reflections on Class War, Rebellion and Solidarity. Both were published by Zuccotti Park Press.
His analysis included a critique that attributed Occupy's growth to a
perceived abandonment of the interests of the white working class by the
Democratic Party.
In March 2014, Chomsky joined the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation advisory council as a senior fellow.
In late 2015, Chomsky announced his support for Vermont U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders in the 2016 United States presidential election.
In early 2016, Chomsky was publicly rebuked by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey after he signed an open letter condemning Erdoğan for his anti-Kurdish repression and for his double standards on terrorism. Chomsky accused Erdoğan of hypocrisy, noting that Erdoğan supports al-Qaeda's Syrian affiliate, the al-Nusra Front. Chomsky also criticized the U.S.'s close ties with Saudi Arabia and U.S. involvement in Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen, highlighting that Saudi has "one of the most grotesque human rights records in the world".
In 2016, the documentary Requiem for the American Dream was released, summarizing his views on capitalism and economic inequality through a "75-minute teach-in". Requiem for the American Dream was published as a book in 2017 by Seven Stories Press.
In an interview with Al Jazeera, Chomsky called Donald Trump
an "ignorant, thin-skinned megalomaniac" and a "greater evil" than
Hillary Clinton. Asked about claims that Russia interfered in the U.S.
presidential election through hacking, Chomsky said: "It's possible, but
it's a kind of strange complaint in the United States. The U.S. has
been interfering with, and undermining, elections all over the world for
decades and is proud of it."
In August 2017, at age 88 and retired since 2002, Chomsky left MIT to join the linguistics department at the University of Arizona in Tucson as part-time faculty, officially starting a few weeks later, and teaching in spring 2018. His salary is covered by philanthropy funds. Chomsky maintains an office in Cambridge.
In July 2018, Chomsky said in an interview with Democracy Now! that "it's hard to think of a more brutal and sadistic policy" than the Trump administration family separation policy. In the same interview he said that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's victory in her Democratic primary "was a quite spectacular and significant event".
Linguistic theory
What started as purely linguistic research ... has led, through involvement in political causes and an identification with an older philosophic tradition, to no less than an attempt to formulate an overall theory of man. The roots of this are manifest in the linguistic theory ... The discovery of cognitive structures common to the human race but only to humans (species specific), leads quite easily to thinking of unalienable human attributes.Edward Marcotte on Chomsky's linguistic theory
Within the field of linguistics, McGilvray credits Chomsky with inaugurating the "cognitive revolution". McGilvray also credits him with establishing the field as a formal, natural science, moving it away from the procedural form of structural linguistics that was dominant during the mid-20th century. As such, some have called him "the father of modern linguistics".
The basis of Chomsky's linguistic theory is rooted in biolinguistics,
holding that the principles underlying the structure of language are
biologically determined in the human mind and hence genetically
transmitted. He therefore argues that all humans share the same underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of sociocultural differences. In adopting this position, Chomsky rejects the radical behaviorist psychology of B. F. Skinner, which views the mind as a tabula rasa ("blank slate") and thus treats language as learned behavior.
Accordingly, he argues that language is a unique evolutionary
development of the human species and unlike modes of communication used
by any other animal species. Chomsky's nativist, internalist view of language is consistent with the philosophical school of "rationalism",
and is contrasted with the anti-nativist, externalist view of language,
which is consistent with the philosophical school of "empiricism".
Universal grammar
Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that syntactic knowledge is
at least partially inborn, implying that children need only learn
certain parochial features of their native languages. He based his
argument on observations about human language acquisition, noting that
there is an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which
children are exposed and the rich linguistic knowledge they attain (the "poverty of the stimulus"
argument). For example, although children are exposed to only a finite
subset of the allowable syntactic variants within their first language,
they somehow acquire the ability to understand and produce an infinite
number of sentences, including ones that have never before been uttered.
To explain this, Chomsky reasoned that the primary linguistic data
(PLD) must be supplemented by an innate linguistic capacity.
Furthermore, while a human baby and a kitten are both capable of inductive reasoning,
if they are exposed to exactly the same linguistic data, the human will
always acquire the ability to understand and produce language, while
the kitten will never acquire either ability. Chomsky labeled whatever
relevant capacity the human has that the cat lacks the language acquisition device
(LAD), and suggested that one of the tasks of linguistics should be to
determine what the LAD is and what constraints it imposes on the range
of possible human languages. The universal features that would result
from these constraints constitute "universal grammar".
[Chomsky's] vision of a complex universe within the mind, governed by myriad rules and prohibitions and yet infinite in its creative potential, opens up vistas possibly as important as Einstein's theories. Daniel Yergin in The New York Times Magazine
Transformational generative grammar
Beginning with his Syntactic Structures (1957), a distillation of his Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955), Chomsky challenges structural linguistics and introduces transformational grammar.
Chomsky's theory posits that language consists of both deep structures and surface structures. Surface structure 'faces out' and is represented by spoken utterances, while deep structure 'faces inward' and expresses the underlying relations between words and conceptual meaning. Transformational grammar is a generative grammar
(which dictates that the syntax, or word order, of surface structures
adheres to certain principles and parameters) that consists of a limited
series of rules, expressed in mathematical notation, that transform
deep structures into well-formed surface structures. Transformational
grammar thus relates meaning and sound.
Set inclusions described by the Chomsky hierarchy
Chomsky hierarchy
The Chomsky hierarchy, sometimes called the Chomsky-Schützenberger hierarchy, is a containment hierarchy of classes of formal grammars.
It imposes a logical structure across different language classes and
provides a basis for understanding the relationship between grammars
(devices that enumerate the valid sentences within languages). In order
of increasing expressive power it includes regular (or Type-3) grammars, context-free (or Type-2) grammars, context-sensitive (or Type-1) grammars, and recursively enumerable (or Type-0) grammars. Each class is a strict subset of the class above it, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages (infinite sets of strings composed from finite sets of symbols, or alphabets) than the one below. The Chomsky hierarchy is also relevant in theoretical computer science, especially programming language theory, compiler construction, and automata theory.
Minimalist program
Since the 1990s, much of Chomsky's research has focused on what he
calls the Minimalist Program (MP), in which he departs from much of his
past research and instead attempts to simplify language into a system
that relates meaning and sound using the minimum possible faculties,
given certain external conditions independently imposed on us. Chomsky
dispenses with concepts such as 'deep structure' and 'surface structure'
and instead places emphasis on the plasticity of the brain's neural
circuits, with which come an infinite number of concepts, or 'logical forms'.
When exposed to linguistic data, the brain of a hearer-speaker proceeds
to associate sound and meaning, and the rules of grammar we observe are
in fact only the consequences, or side effects, of the way language
works. Thus, while much of Chomsky's prior research has focused on the
rules of language, he now focuses on the mechanisms that the brain uses
to create these rules.
Political views
The second major area to which Chomsky has contributed—and surely the best known in terms of the number of people in his audience and the ease of understanding what he writes and says—is his work on sociopolitical analysis; political, social, and economic history; and critical assessment of current political circumstance. In Chomsky's view, although those in power might—and do—try to obscure their intentions and to defend their actions in ways that make them acceptable to citizens, it is easy for anyone who is willing to be critical and consider the facts to discern what they are up to.James McGilvray, 2014
Chomsky has built a "reputation as a political dissident". His political views have changed little since his childhood, when he was influenced by the emphasis on political activism that was ingrained in Jewish working-class tradition. He usually identifies as an anarcho-syndicalist or a libertarian socialist.
He views these positions not as precise political theories but as
ideals that he thinks best meet human needs: liberty, community, and
freedom of association. Unlike some other socialists, such as Marxists, Chomsky believes that politics lies outside the remit of science, but he still roots his ideas about an ideal society in empirical data and empirically justified theories.
In Chomsky's view, the truth about political realities is systematically distorted or suppressed through elite corporate interests, who use corporate media, advertising, and think tanks to promote their own propaganda. His work seeks to reveal such manipulations and the truth they obscure.
He believes that "common sense" is all that is required to break
through the web of falsehood and see the truth, if it (common sense) is
employed using both critical thinking and an awareness of the role that self-interest and self-deception play both on oneself and on others.
He believes it is the moral responsibility of intellectuals to tell the
truth about the world, but that few do so because they fear losing
prestige and funding. He argues that, as such an intellectual, it is his duty to use his privilege, resources, and training to aid popular democracy movements in their struggles.
Although he had joined protest marches and organized activist
groups, he identifies his primary political outlet as education,
offering free lessons and lectures to encourage wider political
consciousness. His political writings have covered a wide range of topics, but have several core themes. He is a member of the Industrial Workers of the World international union, and sits on the interim consultative committee of the International Organization for a Participatory Society.
United States foreign policy
Chomsky and Enrique Dussel, who left Argentina in reaction to the U.S.-backed Dirty War in the 1970s and 1980s
Chomsky has been a prominent critic of U.S. imperialism. His published work has focused heavily on criticizing the actions of the United States, such as the U.S.-backed state terror campaign against left-wing dissidents across Latin America known as Operation Condor. Chomsky believes that the basic principle of the foreign policy of the United States
is the establishment of "open societies" that are economically and
politically controlled by the U.S. and where U.S.-based businesses can
prosper.
He argues that the U.S. seeks to suppress any movements within these
countries that are not compliant with U.S. interests and ensure that
U.S.-friendly governments are placed in power. When discussing current events, he emphasizes their place within a wider historical perspective.
He believes that official, sanctioned historical accounts of U.S. and
British imperialism have consistently whitewashed these nations' actions
in order to present them as having benevolent motives in either
spreading democracy or, in older instances, spreading Christianity; criticizing these accounts, he seeks to correct them. Prominent examples he regularly cites are the actions of the British Empire in India and Africa and the actions of the U.S. in Vietnam, the Philippines, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Chomsky has said he focuses on criticizing the U.S. over other
countries because, during his lifetime, the country has militarily and
economically dominated the world, and because its liberal democratic electoral system allows the citizenry to influence government policy.
His hope is that, by spreading awareness of the negative impact that
imperialism has on the populations affected by it, he can sway the
population of the U.S. and other countries into opposing imperialist
policies.
He urges people to criticize their governments' motivations, decisions,
and actions; to accept responsibility for their own thoughts and
actions; and to apply the same standards to others as to themselves.
Chomsky has been critical of U.S. involvement in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, arguing that it has consistently blocked a peaceful settlement. He has long endorsed the left binationalist program, seeking to create a democratic state in the Levant that is home to both Jews and Arabs. But given the realpolitik of the situation, Chomsky has also considered a two-state solution on the condition that both nation-states exist on equal terms. As a result of his criticisms of Israel, Chomsky was barred from entering Israel in 2010.
Capitalism and socialism
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Chomsky speaking at Chatham House, London, May 2014
In his youth, Chomsky developed a dislike of capitalism and the pursuit of material wealth. At the same time, he developed disdain for authoritarian attempts to establish a socialist society, as represented by the Marxist–Leninist policies of the Soviet Union.
Rather than accepting the common view among American economists that a
spectrum exists between total state ownership of the economy and total
private ownership, he instead suggests that a spectrum should be
understood between total democratic control of the economy and total
autocratic control (whether state or private). He argues that Western capitalist nations are not really democratic, because, in his view, a truly democratic society is one in which all persons have a say in public economic policy. He has stated his opposition to ruling elites, among them institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and GATT.
Socialism will be achieved only insofar as all social institutions—in particular, the central industrial, commercial, and financial institutions of a modern society—are placed under democratic control in a federal industrial republic of the sort that Russell and others envisioned, with actively functioning workers' councils and other self-governing units in which each citizen, in Thomas Jefferson's words, will be "a direct participator in the government of affairs."Noam Chomsky
Chomsky highlights that, since the 1970s, the U.S. has become
increasingly economically unequal as a result of the repeal of various
financial regulations and the rescinding of the Bretton Woods financial control agreements. He characterizes the U.S. as a de facto one-party state, viewing both the Republican Party and Democratic Party as manifestations of a single "Business Party" controlled by corporate and financial interests.
Chomsky highlights that, within Western capitalist liberal democracies,
at least 80% of the population has no control over economic decisions,
which are instead in the hands of a management class and ultimately
controlled by a small, wealthy elite.
Noting that this economic system is firmly entrenched and
difficult to overthrow, he believes that change is possible through the
organized cooperation of large numbers of people who understand the
problem and know how they want to reorganize the economy more equitably.
Acknowledging that corporate domination of media and government stifles
any significant change to this system, he sees reason for optimism,
citing the historical examples of the social rejection of slavery as
immoral, the advances in women's rights, and the forcing of government
to justify invasions to illustrate how change is possible.
He views violent revolution to overthrow a government as a last resort
to be avoided if possible, citing the example of historical revolutions
where the population's welfare has worsened as a result of upheaval.
Chomsky sees libertarian socialist and anarcho-syndicalist ideas as the descendants of the classical liberal ideas of the Age of Enlightenment, arguing that his ideological position revolves around "nourishing the libertarian and creative character of the human being".
He envisions an anarcho-syndicalist future with direct worker control of the means of production and government by workers' councils, who would select representatives to meet together at general assemblies. He believes that there will be no need for political parties.
By controlling their productive life, he believes that individuals can
gain job satisfaction and a sense of fulfillment and purpose.
He argues that unpleasant and unpopular jobs could be fully automated,
carried out by workers who are specially remunerated, or shared among
everyone.
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Chomsky, Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald in April 2011
News media and propaganda
Chomsky's political writings have largely focused on the two concepts of ideology and power, or the media and state policy. One of Chomsky's best-known works, Manufacturing Consent,
dissects the media's role in reinforcing and acquiescing to state
policies across the political spectrum while marginalizing contrary
perspectives. Chomsky asserts that this version of censorship, from
government-guided "free market" forces, is more subtle and difficult to
undermine than was the equivalent propaganda system in the Soviet Union. As he argues, the mainstream press is corporate-owned and thus reflects corporate priorities and interests.
Acknowledging that many American journalists are dedicated and
well-meaning, he argues that the mass media's choice of topics and
issues, the unquestioned premises on which that coverage rests, and the
range of opinions expressed are all constrained to reinforce the state's
ideology.
He states that, although the mass media will criticize individual
politicians and political parties, it will not undermine the wider
state-corporate nexus of which it is a part. As evidence, he highlights that the U.S. mass media does not employ any socialist journalists or political commentators.
He also points to examples of important news stories that the U.S.
mainstream media has ignored because reporting on them would reflect
badly upon the U.S. state, including the murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton with possible FBI involvement, the massacres perpetrated in Nicaragua by the U.S.-funded contras,
and the constant reporting on Israeli deaths while ignoring the far
larger number of Palestinian deaths in the conflict between those two
nations.
To remedy this situation, Chomsky calls for grassroots democratic control and involvement of the media.
Chomsky considers most conspiracy theories
to be fruitless, distracting substitutes for thinking about policy
formation in an institutional framework, where individual manipulation
is secondary to broader social imperatives.
While not dismissing them outright, he considers them unproductive to
challenging power in a substantial way. In response to the labeling of
his own ideas as "conspiracy theory", Chomsky has said that it is very
rational for the media to manipulate information in order to sell it,
like any other business. He asks whether General Motors would be accused of conspiracy if it deliberately selected what it would use or discard to sell their product.
Philosophy
Chomsky's intellectual life had been divided between his work in linguistics and his political activism, philosophy coming as a distant third. Nonetheless, his influence among analytic philosophers has been enormous ... he has persistently defended his views against all takers, engaging in important debates with many of the major figures in analytic philosophy throughout his career.Zoltán Gendler Szabó, 2004
Chomsky has also been active in a number of philosophical fields, including the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of science. In these fields he has been highly critical of many other philosophers, in particular those operating within the field of cognitive science.
Personal life
Chomsky endeavors to keep his family life, linguistic scholarship, and political activism strictly separate from one another, calling himself "scrupulous at keeping my politics out of the classroom". An intensely private person, he is uninterested in appearances and the fame that his work has brought him.
McGilvray suggested that Chomsky was never motivated by a desire for
fame, but that he was impelled to tell what he perceived as the truth
and a desire to aid others in doing so. He also has little interest in modern art and music. He reads four or five newspapers daily; in the U.S., he subscribes to The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and The Christian Science Monitor.
He acknowledges that his income and the financial security that it
accords him means that he lives a privileged life compared to the
majority of the world's population. He characterizes himself as a "worker", albeit one who uses his intellect as his employable skill.
Despite having been raised Jewish, Chomsky is non-religious, although he has expressed approval of forms of religion such as liberation theology. He is known for his "dry, laconic wit", and for the use of irony in his writings, and has attracted controversy for calling established political and academic figures "corrupt", "fascist", and "fraudulent". Chomsky's colleague Steven Pinker
has said that he "portrays people who disagree with him as stupid or
evil, using withering scorn in his rhetoric", and that this contributes
to the extreme reactions that he generates from his critics. Chomsky avoids attending academic conferences,
including left-oriented ones such as the Socialist Scholars Conference,
preferring to speak to activist groups or hold university seminars for
mass audiences.
Chomsky was married to Carol Doris Schatz (Chomsky) from 1949 until her death in 2008. They had three children together: Aviva (b. 1957), Diane (b. 1960), and Harry (b. 1967). In 2014, Chomsky married Valeria Wasserman.
Reception and influence
[Chomsky's] voice is heard in academia beyond linguistics and philosophy: from computer science to neuroscience, from anthropology to education, mathematics and literary criticism. If we include Chomsky's political activism then the boundaries become quite blurred, and it comes as no surprise that Chomsky is increasingly seen as enemy number one by those who inhabit that wide sphere of reactionary discourse and action.Sperlich, 2006
Chomsky's legacy is as both a "leader in the field" of linguistics and "a figure of enlightenment and inspiration" for political dissenters.
Despite his academic success, his political viewpoints and activism
have resulted in him being distrusted by the mainstream media apparatus,
and he is regarded as being "on the outer margin of acceptability."
In academia
Linguist John Lyons remarked that within a few decades of
publication, Chomskyan linguistics had become "the most dynamic and
influential" school of thought in the field. By the 1970s, his work had also come to exert a considerable influence on philosophy, while a poll conducted by Minnesota State University found Syntactic Structures to be the single most important work in the field of cognitive science. In addition, his work in automata theory and the Chomsky hierarchy has become well known in computer science, and he is much cited within the field of computational linguistics.
Chomsky's work contributed substantially to the decline of behaviorist psychology; in addition, some arguments in evolutionary psychology are derived from his research results. Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a study in animal language acquisition at Columbia University, was named after Chomsky in reference to his view of language acquisition as a uniquely human ability.
The 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology, Niels Kaj Jerne,
used Chomsky's generative model to explain the human immune system,
equating "components of a generative grammar ... with various features
of protein structures". The title of Jerne's Stockholm Nobel Lecture was
"The Generative Grammar of the Immune System". His theory of generative grammar has also carried over into music theory and analysis.
Chomsky and Jorge Majfud at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in April 2016
An MIT press release found that Chomsky was cited within the Arts and Humanities Citation Index more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992.
Despite their respect for his intellectual contribution, a number
of linguists and philosophers have been very critical of Chomsky's
approach to language. These critics include Christina Behme, Cedric
Boeckx, Margaret Boden, Rudolph Botha, Vyvyan Evans, Nicholas Evans, Daniel Everett, Adele Goldberg, Anna Kinsella, Chris Knight, Stephen Levinson, Bruce Nevin, Geoffrey K. Pullum, Barbara Scholtz, Pieter Seuren and Michael Tomasello.
Chomsky's approach to academic freedom has led him to give
support to MIT academics whose actions he deplores. In 1969, when
Chomsky heard that Walt Rostow,
a major architect of the Vietnam war, wanted to return to work at MIT,
Chomsky threatened "to protest publicly" if Rostow was "denied a
position at MIT". Then, in 1989, when Pentagon adviser John Deutch wanted to be the President of MIT, Chomsky supported his candidacy. Later, when Deutch became head of the CIA, The New York Times
quoted Chomsky as saying, "He has more honesty and integrity than
anyone I've ever met. ... If somebody's got to be running the C.I.A.,
I'm glad it's him."
In politics
[Chomsky's] become the guru of the new anti-capitalist and Third World movements. They take his views very uncritically; it's part of the Seattle mood – whatever America does is wrong. He confronts orthodoxy but he's becoming a big simplifier. What he can't see is Third World and other regimes that are oppressive and not controlled by America.Fred Halliday, 2001
Chomsky biographer Wolfgang B. Sperlich characterizes the linguist
and activist as "one of the most notable contemporary champions of the
people", while journalist John Pilger
described him as a "genuine people's hero; an inspiration for struggles
all over the world for that basic decency known as freedom. To a lot of
people in the margins – activists and movements – he's unfailingly
supportive." Arundhati Roy called him "one of the greatest, most radical public thinkers of our time", and Edward Said thought him to be "one of the most significant challengers of unjust power and delusions". Fred Halliday
stated that by the start of the 21st century, Chomsky had become a
"guru" for the world's anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements.
The propaganda model of media criticism that he and Herman developed
has been widely accepted in radical media critiques and adopted to some
level in mainstream criticism of the media, also exerting a significant influence on the growth of alternative media, including radio, publishers, and the Internet, which in turn have helped to disseminate his work.
However, Sperlich notes that Chomsky has been vilified by corporate interests, particularly in the mainstream press.
University departments devoted to history and political science rarely
include Chomsky's work on their syllabuses for undergraduate reading.
Critics have argued that despite publishing widely on social and
political issues, Chomsky has no expertise in these areas; to this he
has responded that such issues are not as complex as many social scientists
claim and that almost everyone is able to comprehend them, regardless
of whether they have been academically trained to do so or not.
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Bolivian Vice President Álvaro García Linera with Noam Chomsky in New York, June 8, 2013
His far-reaching criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and the legitimacy of U.S. power have raised controversy. A document obtained pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from the U.S. government revealed that the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) monitored Chomsky's activities and for years denied doing so. The
CIA also destroyed its files on Chomsky at some point in time, possibly
in violation of federal law.
He has often received undercover police protection at MIT and when
speaking on the Middle East, although he has refused uniformed police
protection. German newspaper Der Spiegel described him as "the Ayatollah of anti-American hatred", while conservative commentator David Horowitz
termed him "the most devious, the most dishonest and ... the most
treacherous intellect in America", one whose work was infused with an
"anti-American dementia" and which evidences Chomsky's "pathological
hatred of his own country". Writing in Commentary magazine, the journalist Jonathan Kay
described Chomsky as "a hard-boiled anti-American monomaniac who simply
refuses to believe anything that any American leader says".
His criticism of Israel has led to him being accused of being a traitor to the Jewish people and an anti-Semite.
Criticizing Chomsky's defense of the right of individuals to engage in
Holocaust denial on the grounds that freedom of speech must be extended
to all viewpoints, Werner Cohn accused Chomsky of being "the most important patron" of the Neo-Nazi movement, while the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) accused him of being a Holocaust denier himself. The ADL have been accused of monitoring Chomsky's activities,
and have characterized him as a "dupe of intellectual pride so
overweening that he is incapable of making distinctions between
totalitarian and democratic societies, between oppressors and victims". In turn, Chomsky has claimed that the ADL is dominated by "Stalinist types" who oppose democracy in Israel. Alan Dershowitz considered Chomsky to be a "false prophet of the left",
while Chomsky has accused Dershowitz of being on "a crazed jihad,
dedicating much of his life to trying to destroy my reputation".
According to McGilvray, many of Chomsky's critics "do not bother
quoting his work or quote out of context, distort, and create straw men
that cannot be supported by Chomsky's text".
In Spring 2017, Chomsky taught a short-term politics course at the University of Arizona.
Academic achievements, awards, and honors
In 1970, Chomsky was named one of the "makers of the twentieth century" by the London Times. In early 1969, he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University; in January 1971, the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at the University of Cambridge; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi; in 1975, the Whidden Lectures at McMaster University; in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden; in 1978, the Woodbridge Lectures at Columbia University; in 1979, the Kant Lectures at Stanford University; in 1988, the Massey Lectures at the University of Toronto; in 1997, The Davie Memorial Lecture on Academic Freedom in Cape Town; in 2011, the Rickman Godlee Lecture at University College, London; and many others.
In the United States, he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the Linguistic Society of America, the American Philosophical Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Abroad, he is a member of the Utrecht Society of Arts and Sciences, the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina, a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, an honorary member of the British Psychological Society, and a foreign member of the Department of Social Sciences of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In addition, he is a recipient of a 1971 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1984 American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology, 1988 the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the 1996 Helmholtz Medal, the 1999 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, and the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award. He is also a two-time winner of the Gustavus Myers Center Award, receiving the honor in both 1986 and 1988, and the NCTE George Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language, receiving the honor in both 1987 and 1989. He has also received the Rabindranath Tagore Centenary Award from The Asiatic Society.
In 2004 Chomsky received the Carl-von-Ossietzky Prize from the city of Oldenburg, Germany, to acknowledge his body of work as a political analyst and media critic. In 2005, Chomsky received an honorary fellowship from the Literary and Historical Society. In February 2008, he received the President's Medal from the Literary and Debating Society of the National University of Ireland, Galway. Since 2009, he has been an honorary member of International Association of Professional Translators and Interpreters (IAPTI).
In 2010, Chomsky received the Erich Fromm Prize in Stuttgart, Germany.
In April 2010, Chomsky became the third scholar to receive the
University of Wisconsin's A.E. Havens Center's Award for Lifetime
Contribution to Critical Scholarship.
The Megachile chomskyi holotype, a bee that was named after Chomsky
Chomsky was voted the world's leading public intellectual in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll jointly conducted by American magazine Foreign Policy and British magazine Prospect. In a list compiled by the magazine New Statesman in 2006, he was voted seventh in the list of "Heroes of our time."
Actor Viggo Mortensen and avant-garde guitarist Buckethead dedicated their 2003 album Pandemoniumfromamerica to Chomsky. On January 22, 2010, a special honorary concert for Chomsky was given at Kresge Auditorium at MIT. The concert, attended by Chomsky and dozens of his family and friends, featured music composed by Edward Manukyan and speeches by Chomsky's colleagues, including David Pesetsky of MIT and Gennaro Chierchia, head of the linguistics department at Harvard University.
In May 2007, Jamia Millia Islamia, a prestigious Indian university, named one of its complexes after Noam Chomsky.
In June 2011, Chomsky was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize, which cited his "unfailing courage, critical analysis of power and promotion of human rights." Also in 2011, Chomsky was inducted into IEEE Intelligent Systems' AI's Hall of Fame for "significant contributions to the field of AI and intelligent systems."
In 2013, a newly described species of bee was named after him: Megachile chomskyi.
In 2014, he was awarded the Neil and Saras Smith Medal for Linguistics by the British Academy: this medal is awarded "for lifetime achievement in the scholarly study of linguistics".
In 2016, he was awarded the Int'l Courage of Conscience Award by the Peace Abbey:
this award was bestowed at MIT "for his unrelenting critique of U.S.
foreign policy, capitalism and the globalization of systems and
structures of profit and greed".
In 2017 he was one of three recipients awarded the Seán MacBride Peace Prize "for his tireless commitment to peace, his strong critiques to U.S. foreign policy, and his anti-imperialism".
