Noam Chomsky b. 1928

Noam Chomsky is an American linguist, political philosopher, and one of the most cited intellectuals alive. His Syntactic Structures and the theory of generative grammar transformed twentieth-century linguistics by arguing that the capacity for language is innate to the human mind, organized around a universal grammar shared across languages. Beyond linguistics, his political writings, from Manufacturing Consent, co-written with Edward Herman, to Hegemony or Survival, have offered a sustained critique of American foreign policy and corporate media. He has long been Institute Professor emeritus at MIT and a laureate professor at the University of Arizona.

Avram Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia in December 1928, the elder son of the Hebrew scholar William Chomsky. He studied linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania under Zellig Harris and Nelson Goodman, taking his master's in 1951 and his doctorate in 1955 with a dissertation that became the basis of Syntactic Structures. After three years at Harvard's Society of Fellows, he joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1955, where he was for many decades Institute Professor; in 2017 he took up a laureate professorship at the University of Arizona.

His linguistic books include Syntactic Structures (1957), Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Cartesian Linguistics (1966), The Sound Pattern of English (with Morris Halle, 1968), Reflections on Language (1975), Lectures on Government and Binding (1981), Knowledge of Language (1986), The Minimalist Program (1995), and New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (2000). His political works, beginning with American Power and the New Mandarins (1969), run through Manufacturing Consent (1988, with Edward Herman), Deterring Democracy (1991), Hegemony or Survival (2003), Failed States (2006), and many later titles and interviews.

Chomsky's generative grammar revolutionised linguistics by treating the language faculty as a biological endowment of the species whose universal principles can be modelled by explicit recursive systems and whose parameters are fixed by limited childhood experience under the constraint of the poverty of the stimulus. His political writing, organised around the propaganda model of mass media and a libertarian-socialist critique of state and corporate power, has made him one of the most cited public intellectuals of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.