From one of the world’s most prominent thinkers comes an urgent warning of the threat that US power poses to humanity’s future The land of the free. The home of the brave. But what has America achieved in the aim of “spreading democracy” — except wreak havoc in country after country and establish a reckless foreign policy that served the interest of few and endangered all too many? Without, ironically, making Americans any safer. In this timely book, Noam Chomsky, one of the most widely known intellectuals of all time, and his fellow political commentator Nathan J. Robinson vividly trace America’s pursuit of global domination, offering an incisive critique of the self-serving myths they continue to push. Offering penetrating accounts of Washington’s relationship with the Global South, its role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they argue, they are now driving us closer to wars with Russia and China that imperil humanity’s future. At once thorough and devastating, urgent and provocative, The Myth of American Idealism offers a highly readable entry to the conclusions Noam Chomsky has come to after a lifetime of thought and activism.
Authors
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.
