Noam Chomsky1

Avram Noam Chomsky is a theoretical linguist, philosopher, and social critic. His

1957 book Syntactic Structures proposed a theory of grammar that led to the

transformation of the field of linguistics. He is more popularly known as a political

commentator and dissident who constructs detailed, evidence-driven critiques of the

exercise of power by political elites, mass media, corporate capitalism, and the state,

often focusing on the foreign policy of the United States. As a result of the range and

influence of his thought, he has been described as the most important intellectual alive

today.

Born in Philadelphia, PA in 1928, Chomsky’s parents were immigrants from

Russia and middle-class Hebrew school teachers. His father was also a scholar of

medieval Hebrew. Young Chomsky was involved in a branch of the Zionist movement

focused on socialist bi-nationalism and Arab-Jewish cooperation. He attended an

experimental elementary school, Oak Lane Country Day School, whose founders were

involved in the progressive education movement and influenced by the educational

philosophy of John Dewey.

He attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his B.A. (1949),

M.A. (1951), and Ph.D. (1955) and joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology in 1955. He was appointed full professor in 1965, held the Ferrari P. Ward

Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics from 1966-1976, and was named

Institute Professor in 1976. From 1958-1959 he was in residence at the Institute for

Advanced Study at Princeton, NJ.

1
Submitted September 8, 2013 for inclusion in D. Phillips (Ed.). Encyclopedia of educational theory
and philosophy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

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 He has received numerous honors for his scholarship, including over 25 honorary

degrees, the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award

from American Psychological Association, and the Helmholtz Medal, among others. He

has also delivered numerous prestigious lectures, including the John Locke Lectures at

Oxford, the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at Cambridge and Massey Lectures at the

University of Toronto.

Chomsky’s early research in linguistics sparked a paradigmatic revolution in the

field. Structural linguistics, which originated in the early 20th Century, was a

classificatory science focused on organizing the basic elements of human languages.

Research methods in the field were based on the assumptions of philosophical positivism.

Structural linguistics treated language as a static system of interconnected units; the basic

approach was to examine a selected “corpus of utterances” in an attempt to classify the

elements of the corpus into different linguistic levels (e.g., phonemes, morphemes, etc.).

Chomsky argued that while this approach was adequate for phonology and morphology,

it was inadequate for explaining sentences (syntax). His critiques of structural linguistics

led to the development of generative grammar, which shifted the subject matter of the

field to speakers’ linguistic competence or their knowledge of how to create and

understand sentences. As a result, the goal of linguistics was transformed from

classification of language elements to the creation of a set of rules that could generate all

sentences of a language and ultimately to explain all linguistic relationships between a

sound system and meaning system of a language.

Chomsky’s theories derive from two fundamental observations of language: (1)

grammar describes the basic knowledge shared by all speakers of a language; (2)

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humans’ use of language is fundamentally creative. He argues that the properties of

generative grammar come from an “innate” universal grammar, that is, all languages have

the same basic principles and are genetically determined. Language acquisition then is

not a matter of habit or sensory experience (e.g., children imitating sounds, repeating

words, and responding to positive and negative reinforcement). Rather, in Chomsky view

humans have instinctive mental capacity that enables them to learn and produce language

without being taught.

Chomsky’s political views fall into the broad category of anarchism, which

opposes authority, coercion, or hierarchical organization in human relations. Chomsky

has described himself as a libertarian socialist. He believes there is a fundamental need of

human nature for creative work and inquiry without the arbitrary limiting effects of

coercive institutions. And his vision of a social order that would maximize this

fundamental human characteristic is a federated, decentralized system of free associations

that incorporate economic and social institutions, or what has been called anarcho-

syndicalism. His political agenda might be described as seeking out forms of authority

and domination and challenging their legitimacy. Chomsky has stated that beyond some

tenuous points of contact, he sees no intellectually convincing connections between his

anarchist political convictions and his scholarship on human intelligence.

Chomsky the political dissident first came into the public eye when he spoke at a

protest against the Vietnam War on the Boston Common in October 1965. But it was his

1967 article “The Responsibility of Intellectuals”, originally published in The New York

Review of Books, which established him as the leading American intellectual in the anti-

war movement. His book American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) was one of the

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earliest and significant works of social and political thought to emerge from the Vietnam

War era. His anti-war activism resulted in several arrests and associated him with the

New Left Movement, of which he was general critical. U.S. President Richard Nixon

included Chomsky on his infamous “Enemies List.”

In the 1980s, Chomsky began to examine and write about the media and

democracy. Manufacturing Consent (written with Edward Herman) is a political

economy of the mass media that proposes a “propaganda model” to describe how money

and power filter the news in ways that marginalize dissent and allow government and

corporate capitalist interests to propagandize the public. His book Necessary Illusions:

Thought Control in Democratic Societies deconstructs representative democracy,

illustrating how capitalist elites control the state, while the public merely observes. In

practice, democracy becomes a system of elite decision-making and public ratification or

what he calls “spectator democracy.” Correspondingly, dominant interests view popular

involvement in public policy-making as a threat. Chomsky argues that indoctrination of

the political class and diversion of the masses makes up the essence of democracy as

practiced in the United States.

Based upon his political philosophy and assessments of the mass media and

government is it not surprising that Chomsky has described education, or more

particularly schooling, as a system of imposed ignorance. He argues that like the mass

media, schools succeed in domesticating youth by operating within a propaganda

framework that has the effect of distorting or suppressing unwanted ideas and

information and creating “necessary illusions” and “emotionally potent

oversimplifications” to keep people isolated from important issues. Questions that are

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offensive or embarrassing to the doctrinal systems are ignored. Information that is

inconvenient is suppressed.

Chomsky has argued that if schools were serving the public (as opposed to

private) interests, they would be providing students with techniques of intellectual self-

defense, so they could protect themselves from manipulation and control. Chomsky has

recalled his own early education in a progressive school as an example of this, a school

where children were encouraged to study and investigate as a process of discovering the

truth for themselves.

E. Wayne Ross

University of British Columbia

Further Reading:

Chomsky, N. (1987). The Chomsky reader. New York: Pantheon.

Chomsky, N. (1989). Necessary illusions: Thought control in democratic societies.

Boston, MA: South End Press.

Chomsky, N., & Macedo, D. P. (2000). Chomsky on miseducation. Lanham, MD:

Rowman & Littlefield.

Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of

the mass media. New York: Pantheon.

See also:

Cognitive Revolution and Information Processing Theory

Democratic Theory of Education

Indoctrination

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Language acquisition, Theories of

Progressive Education and Its Critics

Positivism

Spectator Theory of Knowledge