Noam Chomsky (Reaktion Books - Critical Lives)

162 Pages·2006·0.69 MB·english

by  Wolfgang B. Sperlich

Noam
Chomsky
WolfgangB.Sperlich

Noam Chomsky
Titles in the series Critical Lives present the work of leading cultural
figures of the modern period. Each book explores the life of the artist,
writer, philosopher or architect in question and relates it to their
major works.
In the same series
Jean Genet
Stephen Barber
Michel Foucault
David Macey
Pablo Picasso
Mary Ann Caws
Franz Kafka
Sander L. Gilman
Guy Debord
Andy Merrifield
Marcel Duchamp
Caroline Cros

James Joyce
Andrew Gibson
Frank Lloyd Wright
Robert McCarter
Jean-Paul Sartre
Andrew Leak
Jorge Luis Borges
Jason Wilson
Noam Chomsky
Wolfgang B. Sperlich

reaktion books
For my family to the left, Susan, Samantha and d’Arcy
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33
Great Sutton Street
ec1v 0dx, uk
London
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
2006
First published
2006
Copyright © Wolfgang B. Sperlich
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the publishers.
Printed and bound in Great Britain
cpi
by /Bath Press Ltd, Bath
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
1948
Sperlich, Wolfgang B., –
Noam Chomsky. – (Critical lives)
1 2
. Chomsky, Noam . Linguists – United States – Biography
I.Title
410.92
’

isbn 1 86189 269 1
Contents
1 A Working Life 7
2 Linguist and Philosopher 26
3 Political Activist 66
4 Reading the Newspapers 121
References 146
Bibliography 154
Acknowledgements 159
Photo Acknowledgements 160
Chomsky at work.
1
A Working Life
Not a few of mankind’s original thinkers have been colourful
figures, led flamboyant lives and thus provided valuable material
for many a biography filled with a salacious story or two. Take
Friedrich Schiller, the German dramatic rebel and accidental
academic. When giving his inaugural lecture at the University of
1789
Jena in , he saw that far more people had turned up than could
be accommodated in the lecture hall. Rather than let his employers
find something bigger nearby, the youthful Schiller seized the
moment and marched with the crowd through the streets of Jena
to the town hall. There he lectured to an enthusiastic crowd of
thousands shouting ‘freedom’, subsequently enjoying the attention
he received from the liberated ladies of the town. Other fighters for
freedom and reason, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell,
led eccentric lives that had the local establishments in uproar. Even
a working-class hero like George Orwell could never quite divorce
himself from hi s upper-class public school upbringing, or so his
biographers tell us. All such activists – known and unknown –
fought their battles to improve the lot of ordinary men and women,
and quite a few advanced science and the arts along the way.
Noam Chomsky is one of the most notable contemporary cham-
pionsof the people. He is also a scientist of the highest calibre. But
is he great material for a biography? Certainly not, if you ask the
subject. An intensely private man, he is horrified to be consid-
ered the main character in any story. He jokes about the notion
7
Chomsky at work in private.
that people come to see him, listen to him, even adore him, when
in fact he is the most boring speaker ever to hit the stage. He gets
serious very quickly and tells his audiences that they have come
to hear about the ‘issues’ of our time, issues that are important to
them and, as it happens, to him. What is it that he knows and the
people don’t? Wrong question, he would say. The people merely
want to know the truth and they know it is hidden from them by a
vast propaganda machine. His skill is to lift the veil and reveal the
truth. Anyone can do it, says Chomsky, it only takes some dedicated
research and logical reasoning.
Two large problems of the world are known as Plato’s problem
and Orwell’s problem, respectively. Chomsky describes them thus:
Plato’s problem . . . is to explain how we can know so much,
given that the evidence available to us is so sparse. Orwell’s
problem is to explain why we know and understand so little,
1
even though the evidence available to us is so rich.
8