Background

Noam Chomsky was born on February 7, 1928, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States to the family of Zeev "William" Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants born in modern-day Ukraine and Belarus respectively. His mother, Elsie, was a teacher and was active in the radical politics of the 1930s. His father, William was a respected professor of Hebrew at Gratz College, an institution for teacher’s training. Chomsky felt the weight of America's Great Depression. He was raised with a younger brother, David, and although his own family was middle class, he witnessed injustices all around him. One of his earliest memories consisted of watching security officers beat women strikers outside a textile plant.

Chomsky's parents had an enormous impact on their son. He was introduced to linguistics by his father. From an early age Noam and his brother were immersed in the revival of the Jewish culture and the Hebrew language. Young Noam studied Hebrew literature with his father. He spent time in Hebrew school and later became a Hebrew teacher himself.

By the age of 13, Chomsky was traveling from Philadelphia to New York, spending much of his time listening to the disparate perspectives hashed out among adults over cigarettes and magazines at his uncle’s newsstand at the back of a 72nd Street subway exit. Chomsky greatly admired his uncle, a man of little formal education, but someone who was wildly smart about the world around him. Chomsky’s current political views spring from this type of lived-experience stance, positing that all people can understand politics and economics and make their own decisions, and that authority ought to be tested before being deemed legitimate and worthy of power.

Education

While at Oak Lane Country Day School, Noam Chomsky was encouraged to develop his interests and ideas through self-actualization. When he was 10 years old, he wrote an editorial for his school newspaper lamenting the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War and the rise of fascism in Europe. His research then and during the next few years was thorough enough to serve decades later as the basis of “Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship” (1969), Chomsky’s critical review of a study of the period by the historian Gabriel Jackson. He had his secondary education at Central High school. There, he was an active member of several clubs and societies. He also attended the Hebrew High school at Gratz College during this time.

In 1945, at the age of 16, Chomsky entered the University of Pennsylvania but found little to interest him. After two years he considered leaving the university to pursue his political interests, perhaps by living on a kibbutz. He changed his mind, however, after meeting the linguist Zellig S. Harris, one of the American founders of structural linguistics, whose political convictions were similar to Chomsky’s. Chomsky took graduate courses with Harris and, at Harris’s recommendation, studied philosophy with Nelson Goodman and Nathan Salmon and mathematics with Nathan Fine, who was then teaching at Harvard University. In his 1951 master’s thesis, The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew, and especially in The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (LSLT), written while he was a junior fellow at Harvard in 1951-1955 and published in part in 1975, Chomsky adopted aspects of Harris’s approach to the study of language and of Goodman’s views on formal systems and the philosophy of science and transformed them into something novel. Chomsky received a Doctor of Philosophy in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 after submitting one chapter of LSLT as a doctoral dissertation (Transformational Analysis).

Career

In 1956 Noam Chomsky was appointed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to a teaching position that required him to spend half his time on a machine translation project, though he was openly skeptical of its prospects for success (he told the director of the translation laboratory that the project was of “no intellectual interest and was also pointless”). Impressed with his book Syntactic Structures (1957), a revised version of a series of lectures he gave to Massachusetts Institute of Technology undergraduates, the university asked Chomsky and his colleague Morris Halle to establish a new graduate program in linguistics, which soon attracted several outstanding scholars, including Robert Lees, Jerry Fodor, Jerold Katz, and Paul Postal.

Chomsky’s 1959 review of Verbal Behavior, by B.F. Skinner, the dean of American behaviorism, came to be regarded as the definitive refutation of behaviorist accounts of language learning. Starting in the mid-1960s, with the publication of Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) and Cartesian Linguistics (1966), Chomsky’s approach to the study of language and mind gained wider acceptance within linguistics, though there were many theoretical variations within the paradigm. Chomsky was appointed full professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961, Ferrari P. Ward Professor of Modern Languages and Linguistics in 1966, and Institute Professor in 1976. He retired as professor emeritus in 2002 but continued to conduct research and seminars on campus as an emeritus.

Chomsky has published more than 70 books and more than 1,000 articles covering a broad range of topics including linguistics, philosophy, politics, and psychology. In 1988, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize, the Japanese equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Chomsky is also well respected as a social activist and critic. He spoke out publicly against the Vietnam War. He continues to teach and write on the interface of human beings, science, and technology.

Since 2017, Chomsky teaches as a part-time professor in the linguistics department at the University of Arizona in Tucson, with his duties including teaching and public seminars.

Chomsky is a prolific author whose principal linguistic works after Syntactic Structures include Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1964), The Sound Pattern of English (with Morris Halle, 1968), Language and Mind (1972), Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972), and Knowledge of Language (1986). In addition, he has wide-ranging political interests. He was an early and outspoken critic of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and has written extensively on many political issues from a generally left-wing point of view. Among his political writings are American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), Peace in the Middle East? (1974), Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding (1982), Manufacturing Consent (with E. S. Herman, 1988), Profit over People (1998), and Rogue States (2000). Chomsky’s controversial bestseller 9-11 (2002) is an analysis of the World Trade Center attack that, while denouncing the atrocity of the event, traces its origins to the actions and power of the United States, which he calls “a leading terrorist state.”

Achievements

• Noam Chomsky radically changed the arena of linguistics by assuming language as a uniquely human, biologically based cognitive capacity. In 1970, the London Times listed him as one of the "makers of the twentieth century." Chomsky was chosen the world's leading public intellectual in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll jointly made by American magazine Foreign Policy and British magazine Prospect. New Statesman readers named him among the world's foremost heroes in 2006.
  
  Chomsky has received honorary degrees from the University of London, University of Chicago, Loyola University of Chicago, Swarthmore College, Delhi University, Bard College, University of Massachusetts, University of Pennsylvania, Georgetown University, Amherst College, Cambridge University, University of Buenos Aires, McGill University, Universitat Rovira I Virgili, Tarragona, Columbia University, University of Connecticut, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, University of Western Ontario, University of Toronto, Harvard University, University of Calcutta, and Universidad Nacional De Colombia. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Science. In addition, he is a member of other professional and learned societies in the United States and abroad, and is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal, the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award, the Ben Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, and others. Actor Viggo Mortensen and avant-garde guitarist Buckethead dedicated their 2003 album Pandemoniumfromamerica to Chomsky.

Works

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• book

  • Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order

    (Why is the Atlantic slowly filling with crude petroleum, ...)

    1999
  • Middle East Illusions: Including Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on Justice and Nationhood

    (What are the roots of the Israel-Palestinian conflict and...)

    2003
  • 9-11: Was There an Alternative?

    (In 9-11, published in November 2001 and arguably the sing...)

    2001
  • Getting Haiti Right This Time: The U.S. and the Coup

    (Did Aristide leave Haiti voluntarily? Why did the United ...)

    2004
  • The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume I

    (A brilliant, shattering, and convincing account of United...)

    1979
  • Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship

    (Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship is Chomsky’s powerful...)

    1997
  • Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought

    (In this extraordinarily original and profound work, Noam ...)

    1965
  • Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies

    (In his national bestselling 1988 CBC Massey Lectures, Noa...)

    1989
  • Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World

    (Timely, urgent, and powerfully elucidating, this importan...)

    2005
  • After the Cataclysm: The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume II

    (With a new preface by the authors, this companion book to...)

    1979
  • Towards a New Cold War

    (With the same uncompromising style that characterized his...)

    1982
  • Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance

    (An immediate national bestseller, Hegemony or Survival de...)

    2003
  • The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many

    (These wide-ranging interviews, from 1992 and 1993, cover ...)

    1993
  • Syntactic Structures

    (American linguist Paul Postal wrote in 1964 that most of ...)

    1957
  • Interventions

    (Concise and fiercely argued, Interventions covers the inv...)

    2007
  • Reflections on Language

    (The book presents observations on and analyses of the pur...)

    1975
  • Aspects of the Theory of Syntax

    (Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, published...)

    1965
  • Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power

    (In his first major book on the subject of income inequali...)

    2017
  • American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays

    (American Power and the New Mandarins is Noam Chomsky’s fi...)

    1969
  • Pirates and Emperors, Old and New: International Terrorism in the Real World

    (One of the world’s leading intellectuals “raises provocat...)

    1986
  • The Minimalist Program

    (In his foundational book, The Minimalist Program, publish...)

    1992
  • Occupy

    (In Occupy, Chomsky discusses the cornerstone issues, ques...)

    2012
  • Making the Future: Occupations, Interventions, Empire and Resistance

    (Making the Future is a follow-up to Interventions, publis...)

    2012
  • Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on the US-Israeli War Against the Palestinians

    (Israel's Operation Cast Lead thrust the humanitarian cris...)

    2010
  • World Orders Old and New

    (Chomsky takes on the international scene since 1945, devo...)

    1994
  • Lectures on Government and Binding

    (The architecture of the human language faculty has been o...)

    1981
  • Deterring Democracy

    (From World War II until the 1980s, the United States reig...)

    1991
  • Language and Mind

    (This is the third edition of Chomsky's outstanding collec...)

    1968
  • Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy

    (The United States has repeatedly asserted its right to in...)

    2007
  • Understanding Power: The Indispensible Chomsky

    (Noam Chomsky is universally accepted as one of the world’...)

    2002
  • Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians

    (Fateful Triangle is Noam Chomsky's seminal work on Mideas...)

    1983
  • Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media

    (In this pathbreaking work, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chom...)

    1988
  • Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 1964
  • The Sound Pattern of English 1968
  • Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact and Propaganda 1973
  • Letters From Lexington: Reflections on Propaganda 1993

Religion

Chomsky’s religious heritage is Jewish, and he was raised Jewish but now considers himself an atheist. Still, he admits that religion can be a powerful force for good, offering community, solidarity, and comfort for people. Chomsky praised some aspects of the Catholic Church for it’s "radical" politics and its attempt to push south and Central American society in a more cooperative and humanitarian direction.

Politics

Chomsky’s political views seem to be supported to some extent by his approach to the study of language and mind, which implies that the capacity for creativity is an important element of human nature. Chomsky often notes, however, that there is only an "abstract" connection between his theories of language and his politics. A close connection would have to be based on a fully developed science of human nature, through which fundamental human needs could be identified or deduced. But there is nothing like such a science. Even if there were, the connection would additionally depend on the assumption that the best form of political organization is one that maximizes the satisfaction of human needs. And then there would remain the question of what practical measures should be implemented to satisfy those needs. Clearly, questions such as this cannot be settled by scientific means.

Although Chomsky was always interested in politics, he did not become publicly involved in it until 1964, when he felt compelled to lend his voice to protests against the United States role in the Vietnam War (or, as he prefers to say, the United State invasion of Vietnam), at no small risk to his career and his personal safety. He has argued that the Vietnam War was only one in a series of cases in which the United States used its military power to gain or consolidate economic control over increasingly larger areas of the developing world. In the same vein, he regards the domestic political scene of the United States and other major capitalist countries as theaters in which major corporations and their elite managers strive to protect and enhance their economic privileges and political power.

In democracies like the United States, in which the compliance of ordinary citizens cannot be guaranteed by force, this effort requires a form of "propaganda": the powerful must make ordinary citizens believe that vesting economic control of society in the hands of a tiny minority of the population is to their benefit. Part of this project involves enlisting the help of "intellectuals" - the class of individuals (primarily journalists and academics) who collect, disseminate, and interpret political and economic information for the public. Regrettably, Chomsky argues, this task has proved remarkably easy.

As a responsible (rather than mercenary) member of the intellectual class, Chomsky believes that it is his obligation to provide ordinary citizens with the information they needed to draw their own conclusions and to make their own decisions about vital political and economic issues.

In one of his first political essays, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" (1967), Chomsky presented case after case in which intellectuals in positions of power, including prominent journalists, failed to tell the truth or deliberately lied to the public in order to conceal the aims and consequences of the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. In their two-volume work The Political Economy of Human Rights (1979) and later in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), Chomsky and the economist Edward Herman analyzed the reporting of journalists in the mainstream (id est, corporate-owned) media on the basis of statistically careful studies of historical and contemporary examples. Their work provided striking evidence of selection, skewing of data, filtering of information, and outright invention in support of assumptions that helped to justify the controlling influence of corporations in United States foreign policy and domestic politics.

The studies in these and other works made use of paired examples to show how very similar events can be reported in very different ways, depending upon whether and how state and corporate interests may be affected. In The Political Economy of Human Rights, for example, Chomsky and Herman compared reporting on Indonesia’s military invasion and occupation of East Timor with reporting on the behavior of the communist Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. The events in the two cases took place in approximately the same part of the world and at approximately the same time (the mid- to late 1970s). As a proportion of population, the number of East Timorese tortured and murdered by the Indonesian military was approximately the same as the number of Cambodians tortured and murdered by the Khmer Rouge. And yet the mainstream media in the United States devoted much more attention to the second case (more than 1,000 column inches in the New York Times) than to the first (about 70 column inches). Moreover, reporting on the actions of the Khmer Rouge contained many clear cases of exaggeration and fabrication, whereas reporting on the actions of Indonesia portrayed them as essentially benign. In the case of the Khmer Rouge, however, exaggerated reports of atrocities aided efforts by the United States to maintain the Cold War and to protect and expand its access to the region’s natural resources (including East Timorese oil deposits) through client states. Indonesia, on the other hand, was just such a state, heavily supported by United States military and economic aid. Although ordinary Americans were not in a position to do anything about the Khmer Rouge, they were capable of doing something about their country’s support for Indonesia, in particular by voting their government out of office. But the media’s benign treatment of the invasion made it extremely unlikely that they would be motivated to do so. According to Chomsky, this and many other examples demonstrate that prominent journalists and other intellectuals in the United States function essentially as "commissars" on behalf of elite interests.

Some of Chomsky’s critics have claimed that his political and media studies portray journalists as actively engaged in a kind of conspiracy - an extremely unlikely conspiracy, of course, given the degree of coordination and control it would require. Chomsky’s response is simply that the assumption of conspiracy is unnecessary. The behavior of journalists in the mainstream media is exactly what one would expect, on average, given the power structure of the institutions in which they are employed, and it is predictable in the same sense and for the same reasons that the behavior of the president of General Motors is predictable. In order to succeed - in order to be hired and promoted - media personnel must avoid questioning the interests of the corporations they work for or the interests of the elite minority who run those corporations. Because journalists naturally do not wish to think of themselves as mercenaries (no one does), they engage in what amounts to a form of self-deception. They typically think of themselves as stalwart defenders of the truth (as suggested by the slogan of the New York Times, "All the news that’s fit to print"), but when state or corporate interests are at stake they act otherwise, in crucially important ways. In short, very few of them are willing or even able to live up to their responsibility as intellectuals to bring the truth about matters of human significance to an audience that can do something about them.

Views

In 1957 Noam Chomsky introduces transformational grammars in his work Syntactic Structures that was a distillation of his book Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. The theory takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax which can be (largely) characterized by a formal grammar; in particular, a Context-free grammar extended with transformational rules. Children are hypothesized to have an innate knowledge of the basic grammatical structure common to all human languages (i.e. they assume that any language which they encounter is of a certain restricted kind). This innate knowledge is often referred to as universal grammar. It is argued that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" of language: with a limited set of grammar rules and a finite set of terms, humans are able to produce an infinite number of sentences, including sentences no one has previously said.

The Principles and Parameters approach (P&P) - developed in his Pisa 1979 Lectures, later published as Lectures on Government and Binding (LGB) - make strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which are often likened to switches. (Hence the term principles and parameters, often given to this approach.) In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical items (words, grammatical morphemes, and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter settings, which can be done based on a few key examples.

Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably rapid, unless children have an innate ability to learn languages. The similar steps followed by children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general, rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are also pointed to as motivation for innateness.

More recently, in his Minimalist Program (1995), while retaining the core concept of "principles and parameters", Chomsky attempts a major overhaul of the linguistic machinery involved in the LGB model, stripping from it all but the barest necessary elements, while advocating a general approach to the architecture of the human language faculty that emphasizes principles of economy and optimal design, reverting to a derivational approach to generation, in contrast with the largely representational approach of classic P&P.

Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers investigating the acquisition of language in children, though some researchers who work in this area today do not support Chomsky's theories, often advocating emergentist or connectionist theories reducing language to an instance of general processing mechanisms in the brain.

The Chomskyan approach towards syntax, often termed generative grammar, though quite popular, has been challenged by many, especially those working outside the United States of America. Chomskyan syntactic analyses are often highly abstract, and are based heavily on careful investigation of the border between grammatical and ungrammatical constructs in a language. (Compare this to the so-called pathological cases that play a similarly important role in mathematics.) Such grammatical judgments can only be made accurately by a native speaker, however, and thus for pragmatic reasons such linguists often focus on their own native languages or languages in which they are fluent, usually Spanish, English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Japanese or one of the Chinese languages.

Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars into classes, or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modeling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a regular language is powerful enough to model English morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in computer science (especially in compiler construction and automata theory).

Chomsky's work in linguistics has had major implications for modern psychology. For Chomsky linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology; genuine insights in linguistics imply concomitant understandings of aspects of mental processing and human nature. His theory of a universal grammar was seen by many as a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how language is learned by children and what, exactly, the ability to use language is. Many of the more basic principles of this theory (though not necessarily the stronger claims made by the principles and parameters approach described above) are now generally accepted in some circles.

In 1959, Chomsky published an influential critique of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, a book in which Skinner offered a speculative explanation of language in behavioral terms. "Verbal behavior" he defined as learned behavior which has its characteristic consequences being delivered through the learned behavior of others; this makes for a view of communicative behaviors much larger than that usually addressed by linguists. Skinner's approach focused on the circumstances in which language was used; for example, asking for water was functionally a different response than labeling something as water, responding to someone asking for water, etc. These functionally different kinds of responses, which required in turn separate explanations, sharply contrasted both with traditional notions of language and Chomsky's psycholinguistic approach. Chomsky thought that a functionalist explanation restricting itself to questions of communicative performance ignored important questions. (Chomsky-Language and Mind, 1968). He focused on questions concerning the operation and development of innate structures for syntax capable of creatively organizing, cohering, adapting and combining words and phrases into intelligible utterances.

In the review Chomsky emphasized that the scientific application of behavioral principles from animal research is severely lacking in explanatory adequacy and is furthermore particularly superficial as an account of human verbal behavior because a theory restricting itself to external conditions, to "what is learned", cannot adequately account for generative grammar. Chomsky raised the examples of rapid language acquisition of children, including their quickly developing ability to form grammatical sentences, and the universally creative language use of competent native speakers to highlight the ways in which Skinner's view exemplified under-determination of theory by evidence. He argued that to understand human verbal behavior such as the creative aspects of language use and language development, one must first postulate a genetic linguistic endowment. The assumption that important aspects of language are the product of universal innate ability runs counter to Skinner's radical behaviorism.

It has been claimed that Chomsky's critique of Skinner's methodology and basic assumptions paved the way for the "cognitive revolution", the shift in American psychology between the 1950s through the 1970s from being primarily behavioral to being primarily cognitive. In his 1966 Cartesian Linguistics and subsequent works, Chomsky laid out an explanation of human language faculties that has become the model for investigation in some areas of psychology. Much of the present conception of how the mind works draws directly from ideas that found their first persuasive author of modern times in Chomsky.

There are three key ideas. First is that the mind is "cognitive", or that the mind actually contains mental states, beliefs, doubts, and so on. Second, he argued that most of the important properties of language and mind are innate. The acquisition and development of a language is a result of the unfolding of innate propensities triggered by the experiential input of the external environment. Subsequent psychologists have extended this general "nativist" thesis beyond language. Lastly, Chomsky made the concept of "modularity" a critical feature of the mind's cognitive architecture. The mind is composed of an array of interacting, specialized subsystems with limited flows of inter-communication. This model contrasts sharply with the old idea that any piece of information in the mind could be accessed by any other cognitive process (optical illusions, for example, cannot be "turned off" even when they are known to be illusions).

Quotations: "The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men, including all of us who have allowed it to go on and on with endless fury and destruction - all of us who would have remained silent, had stability and order been secured."

"It is the fundamental duty of the citizen to resist and to restrain the violence of the state."

"Just as I'm opposed to political fascism, I'm opposed to economic fascism. I think that until major institutions of society are under the popular control of participants and communities, it's pointless to talk about democracy."

"The war is simply an obscenity, a depraved act by weak and miserable men, including all of us who have allowed it to go on and on with endless fury and destruction - all of us who would have remained silent, had stability and order been secured."

"Lenin was a right-wing deviation of the socialist movement."

"There was nothing remotely like socialism in the Soviet Union."

"Non-violent resistance activities cannot succeed against an enemy that is able freely to use violence. That's pretty obvious. You can't have non-violent resistance against the Nazis in a concentration camp, to take an extreme case."

"If we don't believe in free expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all."

"This coronavirus pandemic could have been prevented, the information was there to prevent it. In fact, it was well-known. In October 2019, just before the outbreak, there was a large-scale simulation in the United States - possible pandemic of this kind. Nothing was done. The crisis was then made worse by the treachery of the political systems that didn't pay attention to the information that they were aware of."

Membership

Noam Chomsky is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, the Linguistic Society of America, the American Philosophical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Cognitive Science Society, the Utrecht Society of Arts and Sciences, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the British Academy, the British Psychological Society, the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Royal Society of Canada, the Tunisian Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts, and the Academia Europaea.

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  American Association for the Advancement of Science , United States

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  National Academy of Sciences , United States

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  American Academy of Arts and Sciences , United States

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  American Philosophical Society , United States

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  Linguistic Society of America , United States

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  British Academy , United Kingdom

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  British Psychological Society , United Kingdom

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  German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina , Germany

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  Royal Society of Canada , Canada

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  Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts , Serbia

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  Academia Europaea

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  Cognitive Science Society , United States

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  Tunisian Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts , Tunisia

• Utrecht Society of Arts and Sciences , Netherlands

Personality

Noam Chomsky is humble both in his attitude to his own importance and his living standards (he has resided in the same suburban house in Boston for half a century). He spends six or seven hours a day answering emails, which leaves little time for hobbies.

Physical Characteristics: Chomsky's height is 1.69 meters.

Quotes from others about the person

• "Unlike many leftists of his generation, Chomsky never flirted with movements or organizations that were later revealed to be totalitarian, oppressive, exclusionary, antirevolutionary, or elitist." - Robert Franklin Barsky, Chomsky's biographer
  
  "Noam Chomsky is America’s greatest intellectual. His massive body of work, which includes nearly 100 books, has for decades deflated and exposed the lies of the power elite and the myths they perpetrate. Chomsky has done this despite being blacklisted by the commercial media, turned into a pariah by the academy and, by his own admission, being a pedantic and at times slightly boring speaker. He combines moral autonomy with rigorous scholarship, a remarkable grasp of detail and a searing intellect." - Chris Hedges, American journalist
  
  "Chomsky proceeds on the almost unthinkably subversive assumption that the United States should be judged by the same standards that it preaches (often at gunpoint) to other nations - he is nearly the only person now writing who assumes a single standard of international morality not for rhetorical effect, but as a matter of habitual, practically instinctual conviction." - Christopher Hitchens, British journalist

Interests

• sailing

• Politicians

  Bernie Sanders

• Writers

  Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, T-Bone Slim

• Artists

  Paul Cézanne

• Sport & Clubs

  baseball

• Music & Bands

  Johann Sebastian Bach, Pablo Casals

Connections

In 1949, Chomsky married educational specialist Carol Doris Schatz, a woman he had known since childhood. The relationship lasted for 59 years until she died from cancer in 2008. They had three children together: Aviva, Diane, and Harry. For a short time, between Chomsky’s master's and doctoral studies, the couple lived on a kibbutz in Israel. In 2014, Chomsky married Valeria Wasserman.

Father:

William Chomsky

Mother:

Elsie Simonofsky

late wife:

Carol Doris Schatz

Daughter:

Aviva Chomsky

Daughter:

Diane Chomsky

Son:

Harry Chomsky

Wife:

Valeria Wasserman

Friend:

Morris Halle

Friend:

Roman Jakobson

Acquaintance:

Michael Moore

References

• Modern Linguistics the Results of Chomsky's Revolution
  1979
• Language and Learning: The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky
  1980
• Noam Chomsky
  2011
• Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent
  1997
• Noam Chomsky: Critical Assessments
  1994
• Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics
  2016