Chomsky, Noam, 1928-

Avram Noam Chomsky (1928- ) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, author, lecturer and political activist. Beginning with his opposition to the Vietnam War, he established himself as a prominent critic of U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Chomsky has become a profoundly influential voice on the left, lecturing widely and publishing numerous books on foreign policy, Mideast politics and related subjects.

His self-professed commitment to freedom has led him to champion the free speech rights of some rather unpopular groups and individuals, including Robert Faurisson, a French professor and Holocaust denier. Faurisson had been prevented from teaching French Literature at the University of Lyon in the late 1970s on the grounds that he could not be protected from attacks against him as a result of his views about the Holocaust. He was brought before the French courts in 1979 and found guilty of defamation and incitement to racial hatred because he denied the existnce of the gas chambers used by the Nazis to exterminate Jews. Approximately five hundred people, including Noam Chomsky, signed a petition defending Faurisson's freedom of speech and expression. Because this resulted in accusations of supporting, or at least adding credibility to, Faurisson's views, Chomsky subsequently wrote an essay attacking his critics for failing to respect the principle of freedom of speech and stressing the conceptual distinction between endorsing someone's views and defending his right to express them. The essay, "Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of Expression," was used, without Chomsky's knowledge, as the preface to a book by Faurisson. This episode led many to label Chomsky as anti-semitic and a Holocaust denier. Chomsky continued to defend his actions and took the position that freedom of speech must be extended to all viewpoints, no matter how unpopular or fallacious.

Robert Faurisson continues to express his views and, as recently as 2006, was given a three-month suspended sentence by a Paris correctional court for denying the Holocaust on an Iranian television channel.

Avram Noam Chomsky[a] (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historical essayist,[b][c] social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics",[d] Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He is a Laureate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and an Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and is the author of more than 150 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.

Born to Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from alternative bookstores in New York City. He studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During his postgraduate work in the Harvard Society of Fellows, Chomsky developed the theory of transformational grammar for which he earned his doctorate in 1955. That year he began teaching at MIT, and in 1957 emerged as a significant figure in linguistics with his landmark work Syntactic Structures, which played a major role in remodeling the study of language. From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. He created or co-created the universal grammar theory, the generative grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, and the minimalist program. Chomsky also played a pivotal role in the decline of linguistic behaviorism, and was particularly critical of the work of B. F. Skinner.

An outspoken opponent of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, which he saw as an act of American imperialism, in 1967 Chomsky rose to national attention for his anti-war essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Becoming associated with the New Left, he was arrested multiple times for his activism and placed on President Richard Nixon's Enemies List. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also became involved in the linguistics wars. In collaboration with Edward S. Herman, Chomsky later articulated the propaganda model of media criticism in Manufacturing Consent and worked to expose the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. His defense of unconditional freedom of speech, including that of Holocaust denial, generated significant controversy in the Faurisson affair of the 1980s. Since retiring from active teaching at MIT, he has continued his vocal political activism, including opposing the 2003 invasion of Iraq and supporting the Occupy movement. Chomsky began teaching at the University of Arizona in 2017.

One of the most cited scholars alive,[20] Chomsky has influenced a broad array of academic fields. He is widely recognized as having helped to spark the cognitive 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 scholarship, he remains a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, neoliberalism and contemporary state capitalism, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and mainstream news media. Chomsky and his ideas are highly influential in the anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist movements.

Avram Noam Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[21] His parents, Ze'ev "William" Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, were Jewish immigrants.In 1945, aged 16, Chomsky began a general program of study at the University of Pennsylvania, where he explored philosophy, logic, and languages and developed a primary interest in learning Arabic.[40] Living at home, he funded his undergraduate degree by teaching Hebrew.
Chomsky's BA honors thesis, "Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew", applied Harris's methods to the language.[44] Chomsky revised this thesis for his MA, which he received from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951; it was subsequently published as a book.[45] He also developed his interest in philosophy while at university, in particular under the tutelage of Nelson Goodman.[46]

From 1951 to 1955 Chomsky was a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, where he undertook research on what became his doctoral dissertation.[47] Having been encouraged by Goodman to apply,[48] 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.[49] 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.[48] 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.[50] 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 Doctor of Philosophy degree 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.[51] Harvard professor George Armitage Miller was impressed by Chomsky's thesis and collaborated with him on several technical papers in mathematical linguistics.[52] Chomsky's doctorate exempted him from compulsory military service, which was otherwise due to begin in 1955.[53]

In 1947 Chomsky began a romantic relationship with Carol Doris Schatz, whom he had known since early childhood. They married in 1949.[54] After Chomsky was made a Fellow at Harvard, the couple moved to the Allston area of Boston and remained there until 1965, when they relocated to the suburb of Lexington.[55] In 1953 the couple took a Harvard travel grant to Europe, from the United Kingdom through France, Switzerland into Italy,[56] and Israel, where they lived in Hashomer Hatzair's HaZore'a kibbutz. Despite enjoying himself, Chomsky was appalled by the country's Jewish nationalism, anti-Arab racism and, within the kibbutz's leftist community, pro-Stalinism.