01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10

An Early Leitmotif This attack on behaviorist assumptions was the work of a confident and competent young scholar. By the age of thirty, Chomsky had already developed manifestly original views on numerous political, philosophical, and linguistic concerns. But some of his challenges to contemporary dogma had roots in long-forgotten texts. And just as his political work was informed by the nineteenth- and twentieth-century radical libertarian left, his work on language was eventually informed by studies that had been undertaken as far back as the seventeenth century. Chomsky was also developing a series of leitmotifs. He asserted, for example, that the error of Skinner's ways was symptomatic of a larger problem: determinism and behaviorism, as well as other intellectual ploys, were being used on a much broader scale to control the masses and justify abhorrent acts. A representative Chomsky interview on this subject, "Class Consciousness and the Ideology of Power" (1974), may be used to gauge the force of his argument, and to illustrate the sarcastic humor of his approach: As far as the Skinner thing is concerned . . . I think it's a fraud, there's nothing there. I mean, it is empty. It's an interesting fraud. See, I think that there are two levels of discussion here. One is purely intellectual: What does it amount to? And the answer is zero, zilch . . . I mean, there are no principles there that are non-trivial, that even exist. . . . Now the other question is, why so much interest in it? And here I think the answer is obvious. I mean, the methodology that they are suggesting is known to every good prison guard, or police interrogator. But, they make it look benign and scientific, and so on; they give a kind of coating to it, and for that reason it's very valuable to them. I think both these things have to be pointed out. First you ask, is this science? No, it's fraud. And then you say, ok, then why the interest in it? Answer: because it tells any concentration camp guard that he can do what his instincts tell him to do, but pretend to be a scientist at the same time. So that makes it good, because science is good, or neutral, and so on. (Language and Politics 190) Chomsky here reiterates his belief that there can be a strong relation between ruling-class interests and the promotion of particular theories. Skinner himself never offered a response to Chomsky's review, or to other remarks he has made, although in 1990 he did write a letter to the Times Literary Supplement in which he suggested that Chomsky did not address "the production of speech," and instead "was on the side of comprehension." He insisted that Chomsky's "contribution to an understanding of verbal behaviour was as `negligible' then as it is now" ("Verbal Behaviour"). Chomsky's sense is that "there's no particular reason why he should have responded. We knew each other, and got along quite well, but virtually never discussed these issues" (13 Feb. 1996). The Skinner-Chomsky debate emphasized Skinner's empiricist assumptions, "which restrict innate qualities of the mind to simple capacities of induction, comparison and so on" (Goreing 15). From Chomsky's perspective, these assumptions render Skinner's brand of behaviorism incapable of explaining even simple elements of human behavior, never mind the almost infinite variations of language. Chomsky's perspective is essentially a rationalist one; it encompasses ideas developed during the seventeenth century. As he extended linguistic frontiers, he was also reaching towards the realm of intellectual history.