The threat of the threat: Greece under the hegemony of Thebes, 371–362 BC.

Hegemony (UK /hɨˈɡɛməni/ or US /ˈhɛdʒɨmoʊni/, US /hɨˈdʒɛməni/; Greek: ἡγεμονία hēgemonía, “leadership”, “rule”) is an indirect form of imperial dominance in which the hegemon (leader state) rules sub-ordinate states by the implied means of power rather than by direct military force — by intervention and occupation.^[1] In Ancient Greece (8th c. BC – AD 6th c.), hegemony denoted the politico–military dominance of a city-state over other city-states.^[2] In the 19th century, hegemony denoted the predominance of one country upon others; from which derives hegemonism, the Great Power politics meant to establish hegemony.^[3] In 20th-century political science, the concept of hegemony is central to cultural hegemony, a philosophic and sociologic theory proposed by Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist and intellectual, by means of which one social class can manipulate the system of values and mores of a society in order to create and establish a ruling-class worldview (Weltanschauung) that justifies the status quo of bourgeois domination upon the other social classes of the society.^[2][4][5][6]

In the praxis of hegemony, imperial dominance is established by means of cultural imperialism, whereby the the leader state (hegemon) dictates the internal politics and societal character of the sub-ordinate states that constitute the hegemonic sphere of influence, usually either by an internal, sponsored government or by an external, installed government. The imposition of the hegemon’s way of life — language (the imperial lingua franca) and bureaucracies (social, economic, educational, governing) — transforms the concrete imperialism of direct military domination into the abstract power of the status quo, indirect imperial domination.^[1] In the event, rebellion (social, political, economic, armed) is eliminated either by co-optation of the rebels or by suppression (police and military), without direct intervention by the hegemon; the examples are the latter-stage Spanish and British empires, and the unified Germany (ca. 1871–1945).^[7] (See: 1954 Guatemalan coup d’état)

History[link]

Antiquity

In the Græco–Roman world of 5th century European Classical antiquity, the city-state of Sparta was the hegemon of the Peloponnesian League (6th – 4th centuries BC) and King Philip II of Macedon was the hegemon of the League of Corinth in 337 BC (a kingship he willed to his son, Alexander the Great). In Ancient Eastern Asia, Chinese hegemony was present during the Spring and Autumn Period (ca. 770–480 BC), when the weakened rule of the Eastern Zhou Dynasty led to the relative autonomy of the Five Hegemons (Ba in Chinese [霸]). They were appointed by feudal lord conferences, and thus were nominally obliged to uphold the imperium of the Zhou Dynasty over the sub-ordinate states. In late 16th– and early 17th-century–Japan, the term hegemon applied to its “Three Unifiers” — Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu — who ruled most of the country by hegemony.

Middle Ages

As a universal, politico–cultural hegemonic practice, the cultural institutions of the hegemon establish and maintain the political annexation of the sub-ordinate peoples; in Italy, the Medici maintained their medieval Tuscan hegemony, by controlling the production of woolens by controlling the Arte della Lana guild, in the Florentine city-state. In Holland, the Dutch Republic’s 17th-century (1609–1672) mercantilist dominion was a first instance of global, commercial hegemony, made feasible with its technological development of wind power and its Four Great Fleets, for the efficient production and delivery of goods and services, which, in turn, made possible its Amsterdam stock market and concomitant dominance of world trade; in France, Louis XIV (1638–1715) established French hegemony via economic, cultural, and military domination of most of continental Europe.

Soviet hegemony: The extent of the politico-military influence of the USSR, after the Cuban Revolution (1959) and before the Sino–Soviet split (1961).

20th century

The USSR (1922–1991), Nazi Germany (1933–1945), and the USA (1945-present) each sought regional (sphere of influence), then global hegemony.^[8] Nazi Germany launched the Second World War (1939–1945) in its attempt to gain geographic dominance of Eurasia and Africa; afterwards, the USA and the USSR fought the Cold War (1945–1991) after the Second World War had destroyed the old European empires of France, Britain, the Netherlands, et al. In the mid-20th century, the hegemonic conflict was ideologic, between the Communist Warsaw Pact and the Capitalist NATO, wherein each hegemon competed directly (the arms race) and indirectly (proxy wars) against any country whose internal, national actions might destabilise its hegemony. The USSR defeated the nationalist Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and the USA precipitated the US–Vietnam War (1965–1975) by participating in the Vietnamese Civil War (1955–1965) that the National Liberation Front fought against the Republic of Vietnam, the client state of the United States.^[9]

21st century

In the post–Cold War (1945–1991) world, the French Socialist politician Hubert Védrine described the USA as a hegemonic hyperpower, because of its unilateral military actions worldwide, especially against Iraq; while the US political scientists John Mearsheimer and Joseph Nye counter that the USA is not a true hegemon because it has neither the financial nor the military resources to impose a proper, formal, global hegemony.^[10]

Geography[link]

The Neo-Marxist Henri Lefebvre proposes that geographic space is not a passive locus of social relations, but that it is trialectical — human geography is constituted by mental space, social space, and physical space — hence, hegemony is a spatial process influenced by geopolitics. In the ancient world, hydraulic despotism was established in the fertile river valleys of Egypt, China, and Mesopotamia. In China, during the Warring States Era (476–221 BC), the Qin State created the Chengkuo Canal for geopolitical advantage over its local rivals. In Eurasia, successor state hegemonies were established in the Middle East, using the sea (Greece) and the fringe lands (Persia, Arabia). European hegemony moved westwards, to Rome (27 BC – AD 476/145), then northwards, to the Holy Roman Empire (962–1806) of the Franks. Later, at the Atlantic Ocean, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, France, and the United Kingdom established their hegemonic centres.^[11]

Political science[link]

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), the theoretician of cultural hegemony

In the historical writing of the 19th century, the denotation of hegemony extended to describe the predominance of one country upon other countries; and, by extension, hegemonism denoted the Great Power politics (ca. 1880s–1914) for establishing hegemony (indirect imperial rule), that then leads to a definition of imperialism (direct foreign rule). In the early 20th century, in the field of international relations, the Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci developed the theory of cultural domination (an analysis of economic class) to include social class; hence, the philosophic and sociologic theory of cultural hegemony analysed the social norms that establish the social structures (social and economic classes) with which the ruling class establish and exert cultural dominance to impose their Weltanschauung (world view) — justifying the social, political, and economic status quo — as natural, inevitable, and beneficial to every social class, rather than as artificial social constructs beneficial solely to the ruling class.^{[12] [13][14]}

From the Gramsci analysis derives the political science denotation of hegemony as leadership; thus the historical example of Prussia as the militarily and culturally predominant province of the German Empire (Second Reich 1871–1918), and the personal and intellectual predominance of Napoleon Bonaparte in the French Consulate (1799–1804).^[15] Contemporarily, in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe define hegemony as a political relationship of power wherein a sub-ordinate society (collectivity) performs social tasks that are culturally unnatural and not beneficial to them, but that are in exclusive benefit to the imperial interests of the hegemon, the superior, ordinate power; hegemony is a military, political, and economic relationship that occurs as an articulation within political discourse.^[16]

Sociology[link]

Culturally, hegemony also is established by means of language, specifically the imposed lingua franca of the hegemon (leader state), which then is the official source of information for the people of the society of the sub-ordinate state. Therefore, in the selection of the particular information to be communicated to the sub-ordinate populace, the language of the hegemon thus limits what is communicated; hence, the source practises hegemonic influence upon the person or people receiving the given information. In contemporary society, the exemplar hegemonic organisations are churches and the mass communications media that continually transmit data and information to the public. As such, the ideologic content of the data and information are determined by the vocabulary with which the messages are presented — how the messages are presented; thereby determines the value of the information as “realiable” or “unreliable”, as “true” or “false”, for the recipient reader, listener, and viewer. Hence is language essential to the imposition, establishment, and functioning of the cultural hegemony that influences what and how people think about the status quo of their society.^{[citation needed]}

See also[link]

• Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
• Cultural hegemony
• Monetary hegemony
• Religious hegemony
• Regional hegemony
• Dominant ideology
• Soft power
• Hyperpower
• Posthegemony
• Balance of power in international relations
• Edward Soja
• David Harvey
• Chantal Mouffe

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• DuBois, T. D. (2005). "Hegemony, Imperialism and the Construction of Religion in East and Southeast Asia." History & Theory, 44, 4, 113-131.
• Hopper, P. (2007). Understanding Cultural Globalization. 1st ed. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
• Howson, Richard, ed. (2008). Hegemony: studies in consensus and coercion. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-415-95544-7. http://books.google.com/books?id=Nhq3fV6tWfwC. 
• Joseph, Jonathan (2002). Hegemony: A Realist Analysis. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-26836-2. 
• Slack, Jennifer Daryl (1996). "The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies". In Morley, David & Chen, Kuan-Hsing. Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies. Routledge. pp. 112–127. 

External links[link]

Look up hegemony in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Hegemonism/ Hegemony at the Open Directory Project
• Mike Dorsher, Ph.D., Hegemony Online: The Quiet Convergence of Power, Culture and Computers
• Hegemony and the Hidden Persuaders — the Power of Un-common sense
• Parag Khanna, Waving Goodbye to Hegemony
• Hegemonic

Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky visiting Vancouver, British Columbia in 2004
Other names	Avram Noam Chomsky
Born	(1928-12-07) December 7, 1928 (age 83) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Generative linguistics, Analytic philosophy
Main interests	Linguistics · Psychology Philosophy of language Philosophy of mind Politics · Ethics
Notable ideas	Generative grammar, universal grammar, transformational grammar, government and binding, X-bar theory, Chomsky hierarchy, context-free grammar, principles and parameters, Minimalist program, language acquisition device, poverty of the stimulus, Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem, Chomsky Normal Form, propaganda model[1]
Influenced by Dwight Macdonald,[2] Pāṇini, Bertrand Russell,[3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Dewey, Mikhail Bakunin, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Adam Smith, Zellig Harris, Rudolf Rocker, Immanuel Kant, René Descartes, George Orwell, C. West Churchman, Alan Turing, W. V. O. Quine, Russian literature, Hebrew literature[4]
Influenced Colin McGinn, Edward Said, Christopher Hitchens, Steven Pinker, Peter Ludlow, Tanya Reinhart, Morris Halle, Gilbert Harman, Jerry Fodor, Howard Lasnik, Robert Fisk, Neil Smith, Ray Jackendoff, Norbert Hornstein, Jean Bricmont, Marc Hauser, Norman Finkelstein, Robert Lees, Hugo Chavez, Mark Baker, Julian Boyd, Ray C. Dougherty, Derek Bickerton, Amy Goodman, Michael Albert

Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˈnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher,^[5][6] cognitive scientist, historian, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years.^[7] Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics"^[8][9][10] and a major figure of analytic philosophy.^[5] His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.^[11][12]

Ideologically identifying with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism, Chomsky is known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy^[13] and contemporary capitalism,^[14] and he has been described as a prominent cultural figure.^[15] His media criticism has included Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media.

According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source overall.^{[16][17][18][19]} Chomsky is the author of over 100 books.^[20] He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem.

Life and career[link]

Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, to Jewish parents in the affluent East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the elder son of noted professor of Hebrew at Gratz College and IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) member William Chomsky (1896–1977), a native of Ukraine. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (née Simonofsky)—a native of what is present-day Belarus—grew up in the United States and, unlike her husband, spoke "ordinary New York English". Chomsky's parents' first language was Yiddish,^[21] but Chomsky said it was "taboo" in his family to speak it.^[21] Although Chomsky's mother was part of the radical activism in the 1930s, he was influenced largely by his uncle who, having never passed 4th grade, owned a newsstand that acted as an "intellectual center [where] professors of this and that argu[ed] all night".^[22] Chomsky was influenced also by being a part of a Hebrew-based, Zionist organization, as well as by hanging around anarchist bookstores.^[22]

He describes his family as living in a sort of "Jewish ghetto", split into a "Yiddish side" and "Hebrew side", with his family aligning with the latter and bringing him up "immersed in Hebrew culture and literature", though he means more a "cultural ghetto than a physical one".^[23] Chomsky also describes tensions he experienced with Irish Catholics and German Catholics and anti-semitism in the mid-1930s. He recalls "beer parties" celebrating the fall of Paris to the Nazis.^[23] In a discussion of the irony of his staying in the 1980s in a Jesuit House in Central America, Chomsky explained that during his childhood, "We were the only Jewish family around. I grew up with a visceral fear of Catholics. They're the people who beat you up on your way to school. So I knew when they came out of that building down the street, which was the Jesuit school, they were raving anti-Semites. So childhood memories took a long time to overcome."^[24]

Chomsky remembers the first article he wrote was at age 10 while a student at Oak Lane Country Day School about the threat of the spread of fascism, following the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War. From the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics.^[25]

A graduate of Central High School of Philadelphia, Chomsky began studying philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, taking classes with philosophers such as C. West Churchman and Nelson Goodman and linguist Zellig Harris. Harris's teaching included his discovery of transformations as a mathematical analysis of language structure (mappings from one subset to another in the set of sentences). Chomsky referred to the morphophonemic rules in his 1951 master's thesis—The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew—as transformations in the sense of Carnap's 1938 notion of rules of transformation (vs. rules of formation), and subsequently reinterpreted the notion of grammatical transformations in a very different way from Harris, as operations on the productions of a context-free grammar (derived from Post production systems). Harris's political views were instrumental in shaping those of Chomsky.^[26] Chomsky earned a BA in 1949 and an MA in 1951.

In 1949, he married linguist Carol Schatz. They remained married for 59 years until her death from cancer in December 2008.^[27] The couple had two daughters, Aviva (b. 1957) and Diane (b. 1960), and a son, Harry (b. 1967). With his wife Carol, Chomsky spent time in 1953 living in HaZore'a, a kibbutz in Israel. Asked in an interview whether the stay was "a disappointment" Chomsky replied, "No, I loved it"; however, he "couldn't stand the ideological atmosphere" and "fervent nationalism" in the early 1950s at the kibbutz, with Stalin being defended by many of the left-leaning kibbutz members who chose to paint a rosy image of future possibilities and contemporary realities in the USSR.^[28] Chomsky notes seeing many positive elements in the commune-like living of the kibbutz, in which parents and children lived together in separate houses, and when asked whether there were "lessons that we have learned from the history of the kibbutz", responded,^[29][30] that in "some respects, the kibbutzim came closer to the anarchist ideal than any other attempt that lasted for more than a very brief moment before destruction, or that was on anything like a similar scale. In these respects, I think they were extremely attractive and successful; apart from personal accident, I probably would have lived there myself – for how long, it's hard to guess."

Chomsky received his PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. He conducted part of his doctoral research during four years at Harvard University as a Harvard Junior Fellow. In his doctoral thesis, he began to develop some of his linguistic ideas, elaborating on them in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures, one of his best-known works in linguistics.

Chomsky joined the staff of MIT in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy). From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics, and in 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor. As of 2010, Chomsky has taught at MIT continuously for 55 years.

In February 1967, Chomsky became one of the leading opponents of the Vietnam War with the publication of his essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals",^[31] in The New York Review of Books. This was followed by his 1969 book, American Power and the New Mandarins, a collection of essays that established him at the forefront of American dissent. His far-reaching criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and the legitimacy of U.S. power have raised controversy,^[32][33] and he is frequently sought out for his views by publications and news outlets internationally. In 1977 he delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, the Netherlands, under the title: Intellectuals and the State.

Chomsky has received death threats because of his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy.^[34] He was also on a list of planned targets created by Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber; during the period that Kaczynski was at large, Chomsky had all of his mail checked for explosives.^[34] He states that he often receives undercover police protection, in particular while on the MIT campus, although he does not agree with the police protection.^[34]

Chomsky resides in Lexington, Massachusetts, and travels often, giving lectures on politics.

Thought[link]

Linguistics[link]

Chomskyan linguistics, beginning with his Syntactic Structures, a distillation of his Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1955, 75), challenges structural linguistics and introduces transformational grammar. This approach takes utterances (sequences of words) to have a syntax characterized by a formal grammar; in particular, a context-free grammar extended with transformational rules.

Perhaps his most influential and time-tested contribution to the field is the claim that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" or "creativity" of language. In other words, a formal grammar of a language can explain the ability of a hearer-speaker to produce and interpret an infinite number of utterances, including novel ones, with a limited set of grammatical rules and a finite set of terms. He has always acknowledged his debt to Pāṇini for his modern notion of an explicit generative grammar, although it is also related to rationalist ideas of a priori knowledge.

It is a popular misconception that Chomsky proved that language is entirely innate, and that he discovered a "universal grammar" (UG). In fact, Chomsky simply observed that while a human baby and a kitten are both capable of inductive reasoning, if they are exposed to exactly the same linguistic data, the human child will always acquire the ability to understand and produce language, while the kitten will never acquire either ability. Chomsky labeled whatever the relevant capacity the human has that the cat lacks the "language acquisition device" (LAD) and suggested that one of the tasks for linguistics should be to figure out what the LAD is and what constraints it puts on the range of possible human languages. The universal features that would result from these constraints are often termed "universal grammar" or UG.^[35]

The Principles and Parameters approach (P&P)—developed in his Pisa 1979 Lectures, later published as Lectures on Government and Binding (LGB)—makes strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which are often likened to switches. (Hence the term principles and parameters, often given to this approach.) In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical items (words, grammatical morphemes, and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter settings, which can be done based on a few key examples.

Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably rapid, unless children have an innate ability to learn languages. The similar steps followed by children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general, rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are also pointed to as indications of innateness.

More recently, in his Minimalist Program (1995), while retaining the core concept of "principles and parameters," Chomsky attempts a major overhaul of the linguistic machinery involved in the LGB model, stripping from it all but the barest necessary elements, while advocating a general approach to the architecture of the human language faculty that emphasizes principles of economy and optimal design, reverting to a derivational approach to generation, in contrast with the largely representational approach of classic P&P.

Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers of language acquisition in children, though many researchers in this area such as Elizabeth Bates^[36] and Michael Tomasello^[37] argue very strongly against Chomsky's theories, and instead advocate emergentist or connectionist theories, explaining language with a number of general processing mechanisms in the brain that interact with the extensive and complex social environment in which language is used and learned.

His best-known work in phonology is The Sound Pattern of English (1968), written with Morris Halle (and often known as simply SPE). This work has had a great significance for the development in the field. While phonological theory has since moved beyond "SPE phonology" in many important respects, the SPE system is considered the precursor of some of the most influential phonological theories today, including autosegmental phonology, lexical phonology and optimality theory. Chomsky no longer publishes on phonology.

Generative grammar[link]

The Chomskyan approach towards syntax, often termed generative grammar, studies grammar as a body of knowledge possessed by language users. Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that much of this knowledge is innate, implying that children need only learn certain parochial features of their native languages.^[38] The innate body of linguistic knowledge is often termed universal grammar. From Chomsky's perspective, the strongest evidence for the existence of Universal Grammar is simply the fact that children successfully acquire their native languages in so little time. Furthermore, he argues that there is an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic knowledge they attain (the "poverty of the stimulus" argument). The knowledge of Universal Grammar would serve to bridge that gap.

Chomsky's theories have been immensely influential within linguistics, but they have also received criticism. One recurring criticism of the Chomskyan variety of generative grammar is that it is Anglocentric and Eurocentric, and that often linguists working in this tradition have a tendency to base claims about Universal Grammar on a very small sample of languages, sometimes just one. Initially, the Eurocentrism was exhibited in an overemphasis on the study of English. However, hundreds of different languages have now received at least some attention within Chomskyan linguistic analyses.^{[39][40][41][42][43]} In spite of the diversity of languages that have been characterized by UG derivations, critics continue to argue that the formalisms within Chomskyan linguistics are Anglocentric and misrepresent the properties of languages that are different from English.^[44][45][46] Thus, Chomsky's approach has been criticized as a form of linguistic imperialism.^[47] In addition, Chomskyan linguists rely heavily on the intuitions of native speakers regarding which sentences of their languages are well-formed. This practice has been criticized on general methodological grounds. Some psychologists and psycholinguists,^[who?] though sympathetic to Chomsky's overall program, have argued that Chomskyan linguists pay insufficient attention to experimental data from language processing, with the consequence that their theories are not psychologically plausible. Other critics (see language learning) have questioned whether it is necessary to posit Universal Grammar to explain child language acquisition, arguing that domain-general learning mechanisms are sufficient.

Today there are many different branches of generative grammar; one can view grammatical frameworks such as head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar, and combinatory categorial grammar as broadly Chomskyan and generative in orientation, but with significant differences in execution.

Chomsky hierarchy[link]

Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars into classes, or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modeling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a regular language is powerful enough to model English morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in computer science (especially in compiler construction and automata theory).^[48] Indeed, there is an equivalence between the Chomsky language hierarchy and the different kinds of automata. Thus theorems about languages are often dealt with as either languages (grammars) or automata.

An alternate method of dealing with languages is based upon Formal Power series.^[49] Formal Power series as well as the relationship between languages and semi-groups continued to occupy M. P. Schützenberger at the Sorbonne. Formal Power Series are similar to the Taylor Series one encounters in a course on Calculus, and it is especially useful for languages where words (terminal symbols) are commutative.^[50]

Politics[link]

Part of the Politics series on
Anarchism
Schools of thought Buddhist Capitalist Christian Collectivist Communist Egoist Existentialist Feminist Green Individualist Infoanarchism Insurrectionary Leftist Mutualist National Nihilist Naturist Pacifist Philosophical Platformist Post-anarchist Post-colonial Post-left Primitivist Queer Social Syndicalist Synthesist Vegan Voluntaryist Without adjectives
Theory practice Anarchy Anarchist Black Cross Anti-authoritarianism Anti-militarism Affinity group Black bloc Class struggle Communes Consensus democracy Conscientious objector Decentralization Deep ecology Direct action Direct democracy Dual power Especifismo Expropriative anarchism Free association Free love Free school Freethought Horizontalidad Illegalism Individualism Individual reclamation Isocracy Law Participatory politics Permanent Autonomous Zone Prefigurative politics Propaganda of the deed Refusal of work Revolution Rewilding Social center Social ecology Social insertion Somatherapy Spontaneous order Squatting Temporary Autonomous Zone Union of egoists
People William Godwin Josiah Warren Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Henry David Thoreau Max Stirner Mikhail Bakunin Louise Michel Peter Kropotkin Benjamin Tucker Errico Malatesta Johann Most Leo Tolstoy Emma Goldman Émile Armand Nestor Makhno Rudolf Rocker Buenaventura Durruti Alexander Berkman Francesc Ferrer i Guàrdia Volin Murray Bookchin Colin Ward Noam Chomsky Alfredo M. Bonanno John Zerzan
Issues Anarcho-capitalism Animal rights Capitalism Education Criticisms Islam LGBT rights Lifestylism Marxism Nationalism Orthodox Judaism Religion Sex/love Violence
History Paris Commune Hague Congress International Conference of Rome Trial of the thirty Haymarket affair May Day Anarchist Exclusion Act Congress of Amsterdam Tragic Week High Treason Incident Manifesto of the Sixteen 1919 United States anarchist bombings Biennio rosso Bavarian Soviet Republic Kronstadt rebellion Third Russian Revolution Free Territory Amakasu Incident Escuela Moderna Individualist anarchism in Europe Individualist anarchism in France Spanish Revolution Barcelona May Days Red inverted triangle Labadie Collection May 1968 Provo LIP Kate Sharpley Library Australian Anarchist Centenary Carnival Against Capitalism 1999 WTO Conference protest
Culture Anarchist films Anarchist Bookfair Anarcho-punk Arts Black anarchism Culture jamming DIY culture Freeganism Independent Media Center Infoshop The Internationale Jewish anarchism Land and liberty Lifestylism Popular education Property is theft! Radical cheerleading Radical environmentalism Squatting Symbolism Terminology A las barricadas
Economics Communization Co-operatives Counter-economics Economic democracy Free store Gift economy Infoanarchism Market abolitionism Mutual aid Mutualism Participatory economics Planned economy Really Really Free Market Wage slavery Workers' self-management
By region Africa Argentina Australia Austria-Hungary Brazil Canada China Cuba Ecuador England France Germany Greece India Iceland Ireland Israel Italy Japan Korea Mexico Poland Russia Spain Sweden Turkey Ukraine United States Vietnam
Lists Anarcho-punk bands Communities Fictional characters Jewish anarchists Musicians Organizations Periodicals Poets Pornographers Russian anarchists Films
Related topics Anti-capitalism Anti-consumerism Anti-corporatism Anti-fascism Anti-globalization Antimilitarism Anti-statism Anti-war Autarchism Autonomism Labour movement Left communism Libertarianism Libertarian perspectives on revolution Libertarian socialism Situationist International
Anarchism Portal Politics portal
v t e

Chomsky has stated that his "personal visions are fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism",^[51] and he has praised libertarian socialism.^[52] Although Chomsky tries to avoid the ambiguity of labels, his political views are often characterized in news accounts as "leftist"^{[53][54][55][56]} or "left-wing," and he has described himself as an anarcho-syndicalist.^[57] He is a member of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy and the Industrial Workers of the World international union.^[58] Chomsky is also a member of the International Organization for a Participatory Society which he describes as having the potential to "carry us a long way towards unifying the many initiatives here and around the world and molding them into a powerful and effective force."^[59][60] He published a book on anarchism titled Chomsky on Anarchism, published by the anarchist book collective AK Press in 2006.

Chomsky has engaged in political activism all of his adult life and expressed opinions on politics and world events, which are widely cited, publicized, and discussed. Chomsky has in turn argued that his views are those the powerful do not want to hear, and for this reason he is considered an American political dissident.

Chomsky asserts that authority, unless justified, is inherently illegitimate, and that the burden of proof is on those in authority. If this burden can't be met, the authority in question should be dismantled. Authority for its own sake is inherently unjustified. An example given by Chomsky of a legitimate authority is that exerted by an adult to prevent a young child from wandering into traffic.^[61] He contends that there is little moral difference between chattel slavery and renting one's self to an owner or "wage slavery". He feels that it is an attack on personal integrity that undermines individual freedom. He holds that workers should own and control their workplace, a view held (as he notes) by the Lowell Mill Girls.^[62]

Chomsky has strongly criticized the foreign policy of the United States. He claims double standards in a foreign policy preaching democracy and freedom for all while allying itself with non-democratic and repressive organizations and states such as Chile under Augusto Pinochet and argues that this results in massive human rights violations. He often argues that America's intervention in foreign nations, including the secret aid given to the Contras in Nicaragua, an event of which he has been very critical, fits any standard description of terrorism,^{[63][dead link]} including "official definitions in the US Code and Army Manuals in the early 1980s."^[64][65] Before its collapse, Chomsky also condemned Soviet imperialism; for example in 1986 during a question/answer following a lecture he gave at Universidad Centroamericana in Nicaragua, when challenged about how he could "talk about North American imperialism and Russian imperialism in the same breath," Chomsky responded: "One of the truths about the world is that there are two superpowers, one a huge power which happens to have its boot on your neck; another, a smaller power which happens to have its boot on other people's necks. I think that anyone in the Third World would be making a grave error if they succumbed to illusions about these matters."^[66]

Regarding the death of Osama bin Laden, Chomsky stated: "We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush's compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a 'suspect' but uncontroversially the 'decider' who gave the orders to commit the 'supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole' (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, [and] the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region."^[67]

He has argued that the mass media in the United States largely serve as a "bought priesthood"^[68] of the U.S. government and U.S.-based corporations, with the three intertwined through common interests. In a famous reference to Walter Lippmann, Chomsky along with his coauthor Edward S. Herman has written that the American media manufactures consent among the public. Chomsky has condemned the 2010 US Supreme Court Citizens United ruling revoking the limits on campaign finance, calling it a "corporate takeover of democracy."^[69]

Chomsky opposes the U.S. global "war on drugs", claiming its language is misleading, and refers to it as "the war on certain drugs." He favors drug policy reform, in education and prevention rather than military or police action as a means of reducing drug use.^[70] In an interview in 1999, Chomsky argued that, whereas crops such as tobacco receive no mention in governmental exposition, other non-profitable crops, such as marijuana are attacked because of the effect achieved by persecuting the poor.^[71] He has stated:

U.S. domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing substance abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control.^[72]