Academic literature on the topic 'Political and social viewschomsky, noam'

AbstractThis article examines the assumptions that underlie Noam Chomsky's politics and argues that his analysis of US foreign policy since World War II may best be situated within the realist tradition in international relations. Chomsky's left realism has not been adequately understood or addressed by IR scholars for both political and disciplinary reasons. In opposition to most classical realists, he has insisted that intellectuals should resist rather than serve national power interests. In contrast to most political scientists, he has also refused to theorize, critiquing much of the enterprise of social science in terms of what he sees as highly suspect power interests within the academy. Hostility to Chomsky's normative commitments has consequently prevented IR scholars from discerning key aspects of his project, as well as important historical and theoretical continuities between radical and realist thought.

The following dialogue between Noam Chomsky and Harvard Educational Review Editors Pepi Leistyna and Stephen Sherblom occurred in the fall of 1994, at Chomsky's office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In conceptualizing this Special Issue, the Editorial Board thought it imperative to frame the lives of youth within an interdisciplinary perspective that explores and lays bare the historical, sociopolitical, economic, ideological, and cultural conditions of U.S. society. Chomsky's prolific work accomplishes this in many important respects; however, his political critiques and insights have been almost entirely excluded from national efforts to understand community disintegration and address issues of youth violence. It is the Board's belief that by bringing Chomsky's critical perspectives, concerns, and outlooks to the center of educational debates we can better understand the complex roots and history of violence in this country, and thus better inform educators of the current social contexts in which children live. The dialogue begins by confronting the dominant ideologies that drive our history of systemic inequalities, oppression, and sanctioned violence that have resulted in this country's current culture of violence. Moving from a discussion of how the poor and middle-class in the United States subsidize the rich, to how the media and public institutions such as schools function to manufacture public consent for, and complicity with, such unequal distribution of power and wealth, Chomsky concludes with a discussion of the possibilities for progressive social change. Throughout, the dialogue vividly illustrates how we as a society often work against the values that we publicly profess, such as the growth and health of children, the social and economic well-being of all people, and the basic tenets of democracy. As participants in this dialogue, Editors Sherblom and Leistyna acknowledge their understanding of violence as endemic to unequal and exclusionary economic and social structures. This understanding and their commitment to social transformation shaped both the flavor of the questions and the evolution of the discussion, and may not reflect the opinion of the full Board of the Harvard Educational Review. The Board sincerely hopes that the following will contribute significantly to meaningful public dialogue, support the development and implementation of social policy that will reduce violence in the lives of youth, and work toward realizing a vision of a society without violence.

In what follows, we present a conversation with Professor Noam Chomsky on the topic of whether the business school might be a site for progressive political change. The conversation covers a number of key issues related to pedagogy, corporate social responsibility and working conditions in the contemporary business school. We hope the conversion will contribute to the ongoing discussion about the role of the business school in neoliberal societies.

In this article I argue that Chomsky's political writings, widely ignored in the discipline, are a significant resource for thinking about contemporary world politics, how we should analyse it, and to what ends. This claim is defended through an analysis of recent efforts by IR scholars to interpret the post-Cold War order. When viewed through the analytic perspective articulated by Chomsky, disciplinary accounts of the post-Cold War world as liberal and peaceful are shown to be insufficiently attentive to the empirical record. Chomsky's political writings are also shown to be compatible with standard accounts of critical social science.

This article aims to analyze the role of intellectuals in times of a global pandemic, whereby their discourse is assumed as a counterbalance to the hegemony of experts. It takes as a case study several exemplar speeches by Noam Chomsky, linguist and political activist, which were produced since the beginning of March 2020 regarding Covid-19. We will try to show that what marks Chomsky’s discourse is related to the ethos (Maingueneau 2020) of an “intellectual engagement” (Bourdieu 2003). Within the universe of possibilities for choosing intellectuals’ speeches, who are not necessarily convergent on topics affecting the world, and who, in general, don’t talk about the same things, we chose to circumscribe our research on a specific intellectual: Noam Chomsky. In our view, he is an actual example of “intellectual action”, representing properly “the relations between intellectuals and power” (Bobbio 1997). Therefore, it is necessary to understand the statements of intellectuals like Chomsky in moments of global uncertainty, and as a discourse of a different nature that stands against the experts’ power in major media corporations or in government technocracy. Thus, far from wanting to exhaust the possibilities of interpreting the role of the wider category of intellectuals during the pandemic, our proposal is to outline the main points of how an intellectual like Chomsky has been developing and taking the same political positions since the beginning of his activism, in the 1960s, which refers to a type of intellectual engagement similar to that taken since the Dreyfus Affair. In the Dreyfus Affair we have an “inaugural archetype” of the concept of an “engaged intellectual” (Bourdieu 2003, p. 73–74), from which the one who has social capital as an erudite, a scientist or a writer, comes out publicly criticizing the established powers and denounces crimes committed by “the reasons of State” (Chomsky 1973). Therefore, we understand that Chomsky comes from a lineage whose representatives are inserted into a form of intellectual activism; a lineage that became known as “the century of intellectuals” (Winock 2000), the intellectual conceived as the one who “tells the truth”, as Chomsky (1996, p. 55) himself define the “intellectual's responsibility”: “At one level, the answer is too easy: the intellectual responsibility of the writer, or any decent person, is to tell the truth.” On the one hand, there is a patent argument of authority behind the experts, based on a “scientific discourse”, but, on the other hand, there is a kind of “moral commitment to the truth” behind the intellectuals' discourse that becomes a “deeper criticism”. That is, a holistic view to ponder, in the case of Covid-19, the humanitarian problems created due to the pandemic, but also to think about relating this crisis to previous and further geopolitical reasons, from a freer position, not committed to companies and States. This position of the intellectual engagement is idealized in opposition to the “normal science discourse”: the genre of the scientific discourse is produced under official means; it is plastered, blunted, does not allow the spokespeople of science to speak beyond what their research allows. In other words, the scientific experts are inscribed in discursive structures of “scenes of enunciation” (Maingueneau, 2006) that don’t permit them to surpass the barriers of “objectiveness” and enter the field of moral judgment. Seeking to understand how Chomsky acts as an engaged intellectual during the pandemic, we searched his political network and the media in which he is involved. From that, we chose our corpus of analysis, selected from Noam Chomsky’s innumerous speeches to a left-wing or clearly progressive press during the first months of Covid-19 pandemic in the form of interviews from March to June: an interview to Michael Brooks (2020), at the Jacobin Magazine (Brooks, M. 2020); an interview with his longtime interviewer, David Barsamian (2020), an Armenian-American journalist and political activist, published on the website Literary Hub; an interview with the British socialist newspaper Morning Star (2020); two interviews he gave to Amy Goodman (2020a, 2020b) for the American journal Democracy Now; an interview with the Croatian philosopher Srecko Horvat (2020), from which we will use only the parts of the transcript that we found published by Al Jazeera and not the video; an interview to the writer Chris Brooks to the magazine Labor Notes, channel for the proletarian movement; an interview to Cristina Magdaleno (2020) for the Euroactiv, a non-profit organization for democracy in European Union, as well as an interview Chomsky and Robert Pollin gave to C. J. Polychroniou (2020). We believe that through this corpus it is possible to cover the vast majority of Chomsky's speeches on the Covid-19 pandemic, centered on media where Chomsky usually features and that name themselves as having a more progressive bias. We assume that what gives Chomsky’s speech authority to talk about the pandemic, to be invited multiple times to do so, is not his expertise in the subject; it is not his background in epidemiology studies, which he lacks, neither his linguistics theories, that do not relate to the topic, but his image as a great surviving intellectual. It’s to say, what authorizes Chomsky to speak and, therefore, to make his contribution to the studies of this pandemic situation, is not what interests the State, or what would lead the actions of government officials, as they are in general centered on the discourse of experts. Instead, it is his trajectory as a critic without corporate scruples, engaged in telling another kind of “truth”, as one that can discuss and propose a different future for humanity. So, with this article we intended to produce a discussion about the following problem: the type of discourse raised by Chomsky is not that of government experts, men of science who must anchor themselves in statistical studies on disease proliferation curves, researchers who need to give prevention guidelines or economists who provide “get out of the crisis” scenarios. In other words, differently from a biologist, a disease proliferation specialist or a market administrator, Chomsky conceives the pandemic beyond Covid-19, as a long-term crisis, which will cover economic, social and environmental aspects of much greater proportions. In short, with this article we seek to understand how Chomsky assumes himself as a spokesman for all of humanity and how he constructs this position discursively. He is concerned with “bigger problems”, not diminishing the dangers of the Covid-19 pandemic, but insisting on the fact that global warming and the economic crisis created by the debacle of neoliberalism, as well as nuclear war menaces, are much greater threats to human species survival and the maintenance of the planet. We also bring an overview of three important intellectuals who also acted and contributed their reflections on the Covid-19 pandemic during its inception. They are Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, and Byung-Chul Han. The purpose of incorporating these distinct views is, in the first instance, to compare to what extent they may resemble the Chomskyan discourse, but also to show how intellectual discourse is constructed in times of a global pandemic in the face of the discourses of health experts or specialists who occupy the spaces of intellectual speech authority.

In the wake of the Gaza-Jericho Agreement, radical academic Noam Chomsky has renewed his criticism of US-Israeli collusion' in the Middle East. Chomsky, one of the foremost analysts of US foreign policy, is author, most recently, of World Orders, Old and New (Pluto, 1994). When the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles was first announced in September 1993, you came out with an article which was neither openly supportive nor dismissive. You took a very cautious approach. Could you elaborate on your position?

This article critically examines the emerging global war on pathogens mimicking the Global War on Terror (GWOT). We draw upon the history of recent wars and the fear-driven narratives aimed at nudging the public toward uncritical acceptance of the new emerging social and economic global order. We adopt Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s ‘Propaganda Model’ to describe how mainstream media perform in manufacturing consent to policies that tighten control over populations and degrade rights, agency, and sovereignty. Here we consider the efforts of globalist political actors who seek to co-opt or influence political institutions around the world and position themselves as unelected rulers of an emerging authoritarian order. We argue that agenda-setting media are predisposed to serve elite interests that shape news coverage, bound public debate, and obscure new forms of warfare behind the smokescreen of a manufactured Global War on Pathogens (GWOP). We introduce critical analysis and alternative perspectives, largely marginalized by the mainstream, on the hidden conflicts of interest involved in the demands for full social compliance.

This thesis argues that Noam Chomsky’s theory of propaganda is a useful way to understand class domination. The strengths and weaknesses of Chomsky’s theory are examined by means of a comparison with Antonio Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony. Since work that discusses and analyses Chomsky’s theory is sparse, this piece first gives a detailed explanation of his theory. This requires a short clarification of Chomsky’s terminology, focusing on his definitions of indoctrination and class. Thereafter a thorough account of Chomsky’s ideas regarding class structure, the indoctrinating functions of educational and media institutions and the difference between upper and lower class propaganda are discussed. A common criticism of Chomsky’s arguments is that they are conspiratorial. Thus, following the discussion of Chomsky’s theory I present an argument that Chomsky uses an institutional analysis as opposed to conspiracy theory to reach his conclusions. After arguing that Chomsky has a coherent, logical theory of propaganda that is not conspiratorial, this thesis shifts to a comparison of Chomsky and Gramsci’s theory. The elements of Gramsci’s theory that are relevant to Chomsky are discussed, focusing on their overall similarities, in particular, the question of consent. The final chapter consists of a comparison of the two theories, examining each theorist’s ideas on the nature of education, language, consent and the possible ways in which the lower classes can oppose their own oppression.

Media economics provides a basis for Eli Noam in setting out the logic behind a series of expectations he shares about how the transition from regular linear TV to online video will lead to major changes in culture, politics, and society. His perspective on the dramatic implications of this shift suggests comparisons with the fundamental changes brought about by the introduction of first-generation TV over seventy years ago, with both exciting advances and also disturbing problems. Noam is able to raise serious questions about new and enduring cultural, consumer-oriented, political, economic, educational, and other social implications of what might sound like a mere technical shift to a new style of video.