ABSTRACT
Emeritus Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT, Avram Noam Chomsky is amongst the world’s mostcited living scholars. Lauded as the ‘father’ of modern linguistics and instigator of the ‘cognitive revolution’,1 he was voted the ‘world’s top public intellectual’ in 2005.2 He is, however, best known, and at his most controversial, in the fields of political criticism and activism. He has written and coauthored over 100 books-the best known of which is probably Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.3 He has engaged with issues ranging from the Vietnam War, US policy in South and Central America, what he calls the ‘US-PalestinianIsraeli problem’,4 the Spanish Civil War and the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, to name but a few. The scope of his thinking is nothing short of immense, and the polemics he incites extreme.5
