The Chomsky Quartet

The Common Good/The Prosperous Few & the Restless Many/Secrets, Lies & Democracy/What Uncle Sam Really Wants

By Noam Chomsky

2002

First Published

4.17

Average Rating

528

Number of Pages

16H07M

Audio Length

Four Chomsky classics - The Common Good, The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many, Secrets, Lies and Democracy, and What Uncle Sam Really Wants - for the price of three. Available now as a handsome quartet shrink-wrapped in a 4-colour case suitable for display. This collection of interviews and talks by Noam Chomsky is an ideal introduction to the man the New York Times called arguably the most important intellectual alive. In a lively, conversational style, Chomsky discusses a range of political issues from Central America to the Middle East, Aristotle to postmodernism. Here are a few excerpts: US forces inaugurated a brutal repression in Korea in 1945, using Japanese fascist police and Koreans who collaborated with them during the Japanese occupation. About a hundred thousand people were murdered in South Korea prior to what we call the Korean War. In 1970, about 90 per cent of international capital was used for trade and long-term investment - more or less productive things - and 10 per cent for speculation. Twenty years later, those figures had reversed. After World War II, many Nazis were spirited off to Latin America, often with help from the Vatican and fascist priests. There they taught Gestapo torture techniques to US-supported police states modelled, often quite openly, on the Third Reich.

Avg Rating

4.17

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

50%

4 STARS

33%

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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.