Noam Chomsky isn’t long for this world. Media Lens reports that Chomsky, who is now 95, “suffered a medical event in June” of last year and is now no longer able to communicate. Though age had noticeably slowed down his speech by then, he was still clearly quite sharp; just two months before, for example, he co-authored a cutting takedown of ChatGTP in a rare appearance in the New York Times.
Whatever one thinks of him, Chomsky will be remembered as one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century. Anyone interested will find a wealth of capsule summaries of his career in the coming weeks, so I think it would be redundant to rehearse the timeline here. Instead, I’d like to talk about what Chomsky meant to me — and where we eventually parted ways.
My history with Chomsky is a little unusual for a socialist writer, because my first encounter wasn’t with his political work — it was in linguistics. Work your way through any undergrad curriculum on linguistics in the world and it won’t be long until you learn about Chomsky’s legendary clash with famed behaviorist B.F. Skinner. To simplify things a bit, Skinner had argued that we learn to speak almost entirely through a process of punishment-and-reward operant conditioning; Chomsky, in a devastating review of his book, insisted that most of language acquistion had to come from processes internal to the human brain.
But it was how Chomsky argued this that made a lasting impression on me. His primary criticism wasn’t that Skinner was wrong — it was that Skinner wasn’t even wrong. Behaviorism presents us with the human brain and says that instead of speculating about what’s going on inside of it, we should just look at try to associate its “outputs” (behavior like speech) with various “inputs” (stimuli like punishments and rewards). But isn’t this just a fancy way of saying “we should figure out how this unknown thing works by looking at causes and effects”? Let’s say that you aren’t a behaviorist and do want to understand what’s going on inside the brain. Wouldn’t you proceed in the exact same way?
This was only part of Chomsky’s argument, but it was devastating. “Skinner has often advanced and defended this…as if it were a thesis which other investigators reject,” Chomsky wrote — but it was really just a description of how “investigation” works.
I suspect that most readers will find this a clever but otherwise unremarkable critique. To my young still-developing brain, however, it was my first introduction to analytical philosophy. Chomsky might have spent that essay arguing that something was empirically wrong with behaviorism, that its theoretical claims just didn’t match the data; but instead, he deconstructed it conceptually, attending closely to how Skinner was using these words and the role they played in the broader argument.
Chomsky was the consummate analytic philosopher. When people say that his writing is “dry” and “pedantic” this is what they are usually noticing. Chomsky revered Bertrand Russell, a founder of modern analytic philosophy, more than nearly anyone else, and the influence of both Russell and Wittgenstein (who he mentored) are clear throughout Chomsky’s linguistic work — and his political work as well.
Consider, for example, Chomsky’s writing on “rogue states.” Today, it has become such a cliche on the left to refer to the US as a rogue state that it’s easy to forget that the term was only coined thirty years ago. And it was Chomsky who, in the late nineties, wrote a series of essays deconstructing how we use the term. In Rogues’ Gallery: Who Qualifies, for example, Chomsky writes that
the term “rogue state” has two uses: a propagandistic use, applies to assorted enemies, and a literal use that applies to states that do not regard themselves as bound by international norms.
This is a classic analytic move. A continental philosopher might argue that language can only be used propagandistically, that any reference we make to rogue states will be politically laden. Chomsky rejects this: his position is that we can use any term we like in the course of communication so long as we do it consistently. From there, of course, it is a simple matter for him to demonstrate that we do not use the term “rogue state” consistently, since if we did it would have to apply to the United States as well. Most of the essay is just an extended exercise in demonstrating that last point. We can say that a rogue state is one that disregards international law, for example, a definition that most people will find intuitive; but from there it is very easy to lay out example after example of the US violating international law.
This attention to the form of an argument, to questions of consistency and coherence, is the thread that runs from the analytic philosophers to Chomsky’s critique of Skinner to his linguistic arguments with Lakoff (for example) to his political writing on rogue states and terrorism and freedom. It even runs through his (hilarious) criticism of continental theory. He observes that Foucault, for example, argues
that there has been “a great change from harsh mechanisms of repression to more subtle mechanisms by which people come to do” what the powerful want, even enthusiastically. That’s true enough, in fact, utter truism…I’ve been saying exactly that for years, and also giving the reasons and historical background, but without describing it as a theory (because it merits no such term), and without obfuscatory rhetoric (because it’s so simple-minded), and without claiming that it is new (because it’s a truism). It’s been fully recognized for a long time that as the power to control and coerce has declined, it’s more necessary to resort to what practitioners in the PR industry early in this century — who understood all of this well — called “controlling the public mind.” The reasons, as observed by Hume in the 18th century, are that “the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers” relies ultimately on control of opinion and attitudes…the “theory” is merely an extremely complex and inflated restatement of what many others have put very simply, and without any pretense that anything deep is involved.
The parallel with his takedown of Skinner is hard to miss: once again, Chomsky has looked at the form of the argument, at its obscure jargon and its complicated elaboration, and discovered that underneath is just some trivial point that no one contested in the first place.
The analytic approach was indispensable as I made my way though grad school and discovered that the post-Marx continental tradition had much less to say than I’d expected. It’s why you see me spend much more time with the old Soviets and contemporary scientists in this blog than I ever do with Foucault, or Lacan, or Derrida, or any of the other big names in “theory”. And it’s why you see me writing post after post obsessing over the definitions of words like “woke” and “progressive” and “independent” and “authoritarian”. Or using textbook analytic strategies like distinguishing between uses of imperialism¹, imperialism², and imperialism³, or from the river to the sea¹ and from the river to the sea². Political writing, for me, is almost never about creating new “theories” or coining new jargon; it’s a process of clarification and specification, of making distinctions and refining definitions; it’s analytic, through and through.
I have had my disagreements with Chomsky over the years. His hostility towards historical communism is often overstated by fans and critics alike, but it was real, and animated by some fairly vacuous ideas about anarchism.1 Particularly by the end of his career, his ideas about linguistics often traded off ambition for plausibility; in New Horizons, for example, he floats the idea that we are born with concepts like “house” and “book” already in our head. Chomsky’s argument against criticizing foreign powers has always struck me as extremely dubious, and as our geopolitical order transitions towards multipolarism I suspect that we’ll look back on it as a product of a time when the US exercised global hegemony. I once argued with Chomsky until 3am in the morning via email over my plans to vote for Ralph Nader; he was famously responsive and generous with his time, but I still think he got that one wrong.
Chomsky did not teach me what to think, but he certainly taught me how to think — certainly moreso than anyone alive on the left today. Breaks my heart to say that about him for the last time.
Chomsky was fond of summarizing his politics by saying that “authority is not self-justifying. They have to give a reason for it, a justification. And if they can’t justify that authority and power and control, which is the usual case, then the authority ought to be dismantled and replaced by something more free and just.” Is there a politics outside of some cartoonish supervillain “authoritarianism” that cannot be described in this way?