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Noam Romsky's The Responsibility Of Intellectuals?

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Ever since the publication of his first political essay The Responsibility of Intellectuals in 1967, Noam Chomsky became a person of interest inside the US politics. In this very first essay, he critically examined the intellectuals figure in US culture at a time when the justifications for the Vietnam War were at stake. Chomsky especially focused on the ethical and social obligations of the intelligentsia regarding the public policies of American society and how most of their decisions and public statements were assisting the ruling power. Nevertheless, Chomsky had already entered the academic field through another gate. By the time of the publication, Chomsky was already a well-known figure in the linguistics field due to the long list …show more content…

His exposure to divergent opinions and the mayor contradictions between his readings and the mainstream press reports motivated his political interests that led him to embrace the anarcho-syndicalist philosophy in his early twenties . He was clearly influenced by the writer and activist Rudolf Rocker, who introduced him to the anarchist and syndicalist thinking, and by other mayor left-wing thinkers such as George Orwell, Bertrand Russell or Marxists, like Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht. In 1961 he was made professor of foreign language and linguistics in the MIT, and continued both to gain academic recognition and to publish books on linguistics. Works and publications of this period as an early professor, like Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1966), set the basis for his Transformational Generative Grammar theory, which, as linguist John Lyons claimed, has exerted an enormous and powerful influence in subsequent generations. The turning point, however, arrived in the late 1960s, when Chomsky’s engagement with politics and political activism turned him into a key figure in the international political …show more content…

Associated with the American New Left movement, Chomsky engaged a frenetic political activism in parallel to his official career as a linguist. His opinions were often surrounded with considerable controversy and he was even arrested in several occasions during the 1970’s, when President Richard Nixon even included him on his Enemies’ List. It was not until the 1990s, however, that Chomsky embraced political activism to a greater degree than ever before . Nevertheless, he never stopped writing about different fields inside the political sciences and maintained a quasi-unachievable publishing rhythm of almost one book per year since the 1970s. This vast number of publications has led him to build a rather consistent political view that strongly contradicts the perspectives put forward by American media and political organizations regarding issues such as American capitalist system, mass media control and propaganda, human rights or, what really matters for the development of this essay, US foreign policy’s double

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