Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˈnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, cognitive scientist,philosopher,[21][22] logician,[23][24][25] political commentator, social justice activist, and anarcho-syndicalist advocate.[26]Often described as the "father of modern linguistics,"[27][28][29] Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy.[21]He has spent his entire career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is currently Institute Professor Emeritus, and has authored over 100 books.[30] He is widely considered a prominent cultural figure, and was voted the "world's top public intellectual" in a 2005 poll.[31]
Born to a middle-class Jewish family in Philadelphia, Chomsky developed an early interest in anarchism from relatives in New York City. He later undertook studies in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he obtained his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., while from 1951 to 1955 he was appointed to Harvard University's elite Society of Fellows,[32] where he developed his groundbreaking theory of generative grammar. In 1955 he began teaching at MIT, soon becoming a significant figure in the field of linguistics for his publications and lectures on the subject. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, the Chomsky–Schützenberger representation theorem, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger enumeration theorem. Chomsky also played a major role in the decline ofbehaviorism, and was especially critical of the work of B.F. Skinner.[33][34] In 1967 he entered the public consciousness through his vocal opposition to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, in part through his essay The Responsibility of Intellectuals, and came to be associated with the New Left while being arrested on multiple occasions for his anti-war activism. While expanding his work in linguistics over subsequent decades, he also developed the propaganda modelof media criticism with Edward S. Herman. Following his retirement from active teaching, he has continued his vocal public activism, for instance supporting the anti-Iraq War and Occupy movements.
Chomsky has been a highly influential academic figure throughout his career, and was cited within the field of Arts and Humanities more often than any other living scholar between 1980 and 1992. He was also the eighth most cited author overall within the Arts and Humanities Citation Index during the same period.[35][36][37][38] A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Chomsky as the 38th most cited scholar of the 20th century in the technical psychology journals, introductory psychology textbooks, and survey responses.[39] His work has influenced a wide range of domains, including artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, logic, mathematics, music theory and analysis, political science, programming language theory, and psychology.[37][38][40][41][42] Today, Chomsky continues to be a well-known political activist, and a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy, neoliberal capitalism, and the mainstream news media. Ideologically, he aligns himself with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.[43]
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