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Deconstructing Empire with Noam Chomsky

According to Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times, Noam Chomsky “continues to challenge our assumptions long after other critics have gone to bed. He has become the foremost gadfly of our national conscience.” New Statesman correspondent Francis Hope praised Chomsky for “a proud defensive independence, a good plain writer’s hatred of expert mystification, a doctrine of resistance which runs against the melioristic and participatory current of most contemporary intellectual life.” Hope concludes: “Such men are dangerous; the lack of them is disastrous.” According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, between 1980 and 1992 Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any living scholar, and the eighth most cited source overall. He is a professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and revolutionized the field of linguistics.

One of Noam Chomsky’s latest books, Hegemony or Survival, recently shot to the top of the bestsellers list because of an endorsement by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on the floor of the United Nations. In the same speech where he called President Bush “the devil,” Chavez lauded Chomsky’s book about US empire, Hegemony or Survival. The book demonstrates how, for more than half a century the United States has been pursuing a grand imperial strategy with the aim of staking out the globe. Our leaders have shown themselves willing — as in the Cuban missile crisis — to follow the dream of dominance no matter how high the risks. Chomsky investigates how we came to this perilous moment and why our rulers are willing to jeopardize the future of our species.Click here for more information about the book.

Special Limited Add-on – The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature. In 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War and at a time of great political and social instability, two of the world’s leading intellectuals, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, were invited by Dutch philosopher Fons Edlers to debate an age-old question: is there such a thing as “innate” human nature independent of our experiences and external influences? The resulting dialogue is one of the most original, provocative, and spontaneous exchanges to have occurred between contemporary philosophers, and above all serves as a concise introduction to their basic theories. What begins as a philosophical argument rooted in linguistics (Chomsky) and the theory of knowledge (Foucault), soon evolves into a broader discussion encompassing a wide range of topics, from science, history, and behaviorism to creativity, freedom, and the struggle for justice in the realm of politics.

Thank you Gifts:

$50 – Deconstructing Empire – DVD

$65 – Hegemony or Survival – Paperback book

$35 – Chomsky at MIT speech – CD

$150 – all three above gifts plus Chomsky-Foucault Debate – limited to 5