Powers And Prospects

Noam Chomsky has been, for more than four decades, a prominent linguist and a prominent political activist. He was born in 1928 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to a family of Jewish emigrants from Russia. From an early age, he became aware of his interest in linguistic issues and political problems, particularly regarding the different positions of the Jewish resistance to Nazi-fascism. In 1945 he enrolled at the University of Philadelphia. He protests against the creation of the Jewish state in Palestine, predicting the marginalization of the Arab population. He even thought of abandoning his studies to go to Palestine to devote himself to socialist cooperation between Arabs and Jews. Their socialist sympathies are oriented towards the cooperative workers' movement, with a libertarian tendency. In linguistic research, Chomsky soon realizes the limitations of American structuralism, and lays the foundations of the most profound revolution in modern linguistics, with far-reaching consequences for the cognitive sciences. From the beginning of the 60s, he frequently participated in the public debate on political issues, namely foreign action in the USA, the collaboration of intellectuals with official politics or the Israeli-Arab conflict, which often earned him, in addition to hatred on the part of the mainstream press, various persecutions that reached the point of attempted physical aggression. A first collection of his political writings, "American Power and the New Mandarins", published in 1969, is an essential piece in the evaluation of the US intervention in Asia, particularly in Vietnam.