Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky (born 1928) is a linguist who taught at MIT from 1955 and is widely credited with founding modern linguistics through generative grammar. He became a prominent political dissident with his 1967 essay The Responsibility of Intellectuals, written against the Vietnam War, and has since published dozens of books on U.S. foreign policy, the media and capitalism. Since 2017 he has held a professorship at the University of Arizona, from which he is on leave. Since 2023 he has lived in Brazil. He has never held political office or a party role.

Admirers regard Chomsky as one of the most influential public intellectuals of his time, whose critiques of U.S. power, media and inequality have reached a worldwide audience, and he is among the most cited scholars in history for his linguistics. Critics argue that he holds the United States and its allies to a harsher standard than their adversaries. His early writing on Cambodia led to accusations that he minimized Khmer Rouge crimes, and his defense of the free-speech rights of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson in 1980 was widely condemned.