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Mad About Chomsky

Today we spend the hour hearing in-depth analysis of domestic and foreign policy over 4 decades by philosopher, political activist, author, and lecturer, Noam Chomsky. Chomsky is professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The year he will turn 80 years old, we celebrate the brilliance of Chomsky, who has become so much an institution, that Robert Barsky wrote a book last year called “The Chomsky Effect.”

Chomsky is well known for several things – in his field of academic study, he is credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar, considered to be one of the most significant contributions to 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 domination 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.

In the realm of political analysis, he is internationally renowned for speaking out against the abuse of power in all forms, most specifically, being a fierce critic of US foreign policy. To that end, he has written more than 70 books in his lifetime. 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 is the eighth-most cited scholar in any time period.

He has received honorary degrees from 32 universities nationally and internationally. Chomsky was voted the leading living public intellectual in a 2005 poll and in 2006, he was voted seventh in the list of “Heroes of our time” by the New Statesman Magazine.

Today we are proud to present 4 decades of Chomsky from the Pacifica Radio Archives, along with two of his recent books.

Vintage Chomsky is a 3 CD pack featuring Noam Chomsky on US policy in Vietnam, in a 1968 speech given at a town hall meeting in Boston against the military draft; Chomsky on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 1975, giving a speech at a symposium on the Middle East before the Jewish Socialist Youth Band; and Chomsky on “The Drift Toward Global War” – a speech given at the University of Minnesota in 1985. The 1975 speech in particular, was just dubbed from reel to digital format yesterday by the Pacifica Radio Archives, and has not been heard in many years.

The Chomsky 6 CD pack features 6 recent speeches of Chomsky on a variety of issues including Iraq, Latin America, including Guatemala and El Salvador, the media, propaganda, and the manufacture of consent.