Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship

By Noam Chomsky

1969

First Published

3.80

Average Rating

144

Number of Pages

4H24M

Audio Length

Noam Chomsky’s classic critique of the ideology of liberalism that justified American imperialist foreign policy during the 1960s—a critique that remains relevant to this day “Provocative . . . Chomsky establishes the premise that the U.S. presence in Southeast Asia was little more than updated imperialism.” — Publishers Weekly Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship is Noam Chomsky’s powerful indictment of a liberal intelligentsia that provided self-serving arguments for war in Vietnam, legitimizing U.S. commitment to autocratic rule, intervention in Asia and, ultimately, the “pacification” of millions. As America today continues to engage in “regime change” in the Middle East and South America and elsewhere in the world, Chomsky’s words remain prophetic. Included here is Chomsky’s classic analysis of the Spanish Civil War as a revolutionary war from below, laying bare scholarly elites’ hostility to mass movements and social change. This hostility, and the technocratic neoliberalism birthed in its wake, reveals not objectivity, but its opposite—the use of ideology to mask self-interest and obeisance to power. Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship is a crucial contribution to our age, and an indispensable lens through which to consider mainstream justifications for militarism today.

Avg Rating

3.80

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

30%

4 STARS

32%

3 STARS

29%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Noam Chomsky

Author · 139 books

Avram Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, philosopher, political activist, author, and lecturer. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to the field of linguistics made in the 20th century. He also helped spark the cognitive revolution in psychology through his review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, in which he challenged the behaviorist approach to the study of behavior and language dominant in the 1950s. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has affected the philosophy of language and mind. He is also credited with the establishment of the Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages in terms of their generative power. Beginning with his critique of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Chomsky has become more widely known for his media criticism and political activism, and for his criticism of the foreign policy of the United States and other governments. According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar during the 1980–1992 time period, and was the eighth-most cited scholar in any time period.