Daniel Bessner in The Nation:
Noam Chomsky is the most famous critic of US empire in the world. No single living intellectual comes close. Even John Mearsheimer, the international relations theorist well-known for his critiques of US foreign relations, can’t hold a candle to Chomsky: A Google Ngram search quickly reveals how many more times Chomsky’s name appears in English-language texts than Mearsheimer’s.
And Chomsky is not just one of the most cited writers on the subject of US foreign relations; he’s that rare scholar who has made the leap from academia to popular culture. His name appears in songs by the punk band NOFX (“And now I can’t sleep from years of apathy / All because I read a little Noam Chomsky”) and the comedian Bo Burnham (“My show is a little bit silly / And a little bit pretentious / Like Shakespeare’s willy / Or Noam Chomsky wearing a strap-on”). Robin Williams’s psychologist character in Good Will Hunting brings up Chomsky to demonstrate his intellectual bona fides to Will himself. And in my favorite reference, on the TV show Community, the character Britta—an annoying lefty poseur whose claim to fame is that she “lived in New York”—has a cat named Chomsky. If ordinary Americans know one critic of the American Empire, it’s almost certainly Chomsky.
Though he was trained as a linguist, it’s not especially surprising that Chomsky has become best known for his political opinions.
More here.
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