Noam Chomsky

Origins and early years

Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in East Oak Lane, a neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His parents, William (Zev) Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, were Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. William had fled the Russian Empire, in what is now Ukraine, to avoid conscription, and worked in Baltimore sweatshops and Hebrew elementary schools before attending college. Elsie came from the area of present-day Belarus. Both had Yiddish as their first language, although speaking it at home was discouraged. William, a scholar of the Hebrew language, became principal of the religious school of the Mikveh Israel congregation and joined the faculty of Gratz College. He stressed educating people to be free and independent thinkers who cared about improving the world, a mission his son would later take up. Elsie, who also taught at Mikveh Israel, passed on to her sons a leftist political outlook and a concern for social issues. Noam's only sibling, David Eli Chomsky, worked as a cardiologist in Philadelphia. The brothers were raised Jewish, learned Hebrew, and often argued about Zionism; the family was especially influenced by the left-Zionist writings of Ahad Ha'am. The children experienced antisemitism, particularly from the city's Irish and German communities.

Education in Philadelphia and at Harvard

Chomsky attended the independent Oak Lane Country Day School, which followed Deweyan principles, and then Philadelphia's Central High School, where he did well academically but resented the authoritarian teaching methods. He became interested in politics early, encouraged by an uncle active in the garment trade who joined leftist debates, and by the libertarian bookshops of New York City, where he read voraciously. At ten he wrote his first article, on the fall of Barcelona in 1939 and the suppression of the Spanish anarchosyndicalist movement; he later described his identification with anarchism rather than another leftist current as a "lucky accident". In 1945, at sixteen, he began studying at the University of Pennsylvania, where he explored philosophy, logic and languages and developed a strong interest in Arabic. He paid for his studies by teaching Hebrew. His academic path changed when he met the linguist Zellig Harris, who introduced him to theoretical linguistics and urged him to specialize in it. His undergraduate honors thesis on the morphophonemics of modern Hebrew applied Harris's methods, and he expanded it into his master's thesis, completed in 1951. He was also influenced at Pennsylvania by the philosopher Nelson Goodman. From 1951 to 1955 he was a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, where he carried out the research for his doctoral dissertation, with W. V. O. Quine and the visiting Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin among his intellectual influences. His first academic article appeared in 1952 in The Journal of Symbolic Logic. Strongly critical of the behaviorist linguistics of the day, he presented his ideas in 1954 at the University of Chicago and Yale. His dissertation on transformational grammar, which was not published until 1975 as The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, earned him his doctorate in 1955, and that year he began teaching at MIT.

Family life and early years at MIT

In 1947 Chomsky began a relationship with Carol Doris Schatz, whom he had known since childhood; they married in 1949. Carol also became a linguist. After a period in Boston, the couple settled in Lexington in 1965, and they had three children. At MIT he found an open atmosphere that let him pursue unconventional interests. His first linguistics book, Syntactic Structures (1957), sharply broke with the dominant Harris–Bloomfield approach and provoked responses ranging from indifference to hostility. The linguist John Lyons later asserted that it had revolutionized the scientific study of language. From 1958 to 1959 he was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His critique of B. F. Skinner, who regarded language as entirely learned behavior, brought him wider fame. He argued that behaviorism underrated human creativity and overrated the role of external conditions. With Morris Halle he founded MIT's graduate program in linguistics. He received tenure and became a full professor in 1961. In 1962 he was the plenary speaker at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which made him the de facto spokesman of American linguistics. He went on to publish Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) and Cartesian Linguistics (1966). In 1966 he lectured at the University of California, Berkeley, and these talks appeared in 1968 as Language and Mind. In the late 1960s some of his colleagues and doctoral students, including George Lakoff and John Ross, argued that his syntax-based approach did not adequately account for semantic context, which led to the so-called "linguistic wars". In hindsight, the two programs were seen as complementary.

Anti-war activism

Chomsky began joining protests against U.S. involvement in Vietnam in 1962, first at small gatherings in churches and homes. In 1967 his essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", published in The New York Review of Books, established him as a public dissident. His political writings were collected in American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), followed by At War with Asia (1970), The Backroom Boys (1973), For Reasons of State (1973) and Peace in the Middle East? (1974). These books linked him to the American New Left, although he had little regard for prominent New Left intellectuals such as Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm and preferred the company of activists. He helped found the anti-war collective RESIST, was arrested several times, and appeared on President Richard Nixon's list of political opponents. His position was especially striking because MIT, where he worked, held many military contracts. Chomsky acknowledged that his laboratory was funded by the military and considered resigning during the war. In 1970 he visited North Vietnam to lecture at the Hanoi University of Science and Technology, and in 1971 he took part in a famous debate with the French philosopher Michel Foucault.

Media criticism and international affairs

From the 1970s Chomsky worked closely with the economist Edward S. Herman. Their Counter-Revolutionary Violence was withdrawn by its first publisher because of its critical content; a revised version appeared as The Political Economy of Human Rights (1979), comparing the American media's coverage of the Cambodian genocide with its near silence about the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, an American ally. Chomsky twice testified before the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization and helped publicize the East Timorese cause internationally; his biographer Wolfgang Sperlich judged that he did more for it than anyone other than the journalist John Pilger. This work brought accusations from some Marxist critics that he was soft on Pol Pot. In 1980 the Faurisson affair caused a severe public backlash. Chomsky signed a statement defending the freedom of expression of the French historian Robert Faurisson, a Holocaust denier. He said he did not share Faurisson's views but did not find them antisemitic in themselves. His stance was widely condemned, especially in France, and it had a lasting effect on his reputation there. In 1983 he published The Fateful Triangle, arguing that the United States had repeatedly used the Israeli–Palestinian conflict for its own ends. With Herman he wrote Manufacturing Consent (1988), which set out the "propaganda model" of the mass media, according to which news is filtered through five mechanisms that shape what is reported and how. Necessary Illusions (1989) argued that a worthwhile democracy requires citizens to defend themselves intellectually against the media and elite culture. After the attacks of September 11, 2001, he was widely interviewed and argued that the war on terror continued a line of U.S. foreign policy stretching back to the Reagan era. In 2003 he published Hegemony or Survival, describing what he called the United States' "imperial grand strategy" and criticizing the Iraq War.

Retirement, later linguistic work and last years

Chomsky retired from MIT in 2002 but continued research and seminars there as an emeritus professor. That year he went to Turkey to attend the trial of a publisher accused of treason for printing one of his books, and he spoke out for Kurdish human rights. He supported the World Social Forum and the 2011 Occupy movement, which he described as a reaction to a thirty-year class war. The 2015 documentary Requiem for the American Dream summarizes his views on capitalism and inequality. In 2015 he and his wife, Valeria Wasserman, bought a home in São Paulo, and they divided their time between Brazil and the United States. He taught a short course at the University of Arizona in 2017 and was later appointed a part-time professor there. After a stroke in June 2023 he moved to Brazil permanently. In linguistics, Chomsky holds that the basic principles of language structure are preset in the human mind and shared by all people. Against empiricism and behaviorism he defends a nativist and rationalist position. His central argument is the "poverty of the stimulus": children acquire the grammar of their language from limited data, which requires an innate capacity. That capacity is the basis of universal grammar. He developed transformational grammar, then government and binding theory, and later the minimalist program, which seeks the simplest and most economical principles possible. His work also produced the Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal grammars that remains fundamental in the theory of computation.

Reception and legacy

Chomsky is one of the most cited figures in contemporary scholarship and is regarded as one of the founders of the cognitive revolution in the human sciences. His rejection of behaviorism and logical positivism opened a new framework for studying mind and language, with consequences for philosophy, psychology and artificial intelligence. His criticism of U.S. foreign policy, contemporary capitalism and the concentration of media power has given him great influence in anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist movements, though he has also been sharply criticized by conservatives and by some on the left.