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The Responsible Intellectual The tenacity with which Chomsky has upheld his position on the role of the academic institution and the conformity that it enforces is extraordinary. Many leftists, even radical ones, eventually revise their positions: witness the cliché of the sixties hippie-turned-stockbroker. Never one to sacrifice his viewpoints to peer recognition or material reward, Chomsky came out more and more strongly against the apparently willing collaboration of the intellectual community with the state. He now turned to assembling the Beckman lectures ­ which trace historical developments concerning the study of language and mind with particular reference to rationalist philosophy ­ for publication (they appeared as Language and Mind in 1968). At the same time, he worked on a series of political articles. "Responsibility of Intellectuals," the first of these articles, which were published in the New York Review of Books, excited considerable interest. This article had appeared one year earlier in the Harvard student journal Mosaic, published by the Hillel Association, and had been brought to the attention of the NYRB's editor by Chomsky's friend Fred Crews. Through his contributions to the NYRB, Chomsky solidified his public persona and his power as a political renegade. These writings would, especially after the 1969 publication of his book American Power and the New Mandarins (which contained a number of them), facilitate his association with the vocal dissenters of America's New Left. One characteristic of the articles, and, in fact, of all Chomsky's writings, is the clarity of the prose. There are very few obscure passages in his work; no matter how complex the philosophical issue in question, and no matter how much prior knowledge must be assumed on the part of the reader, Chomsky provides readable analyses accompanied by easy-to-grasp examples. From an early age, he had suspected that obscurity is generally self-serving or deliberately deceptive. In this sense, the clarity of his prose is, in itself, a consistent political position: It's true that I don't appeal to philosophical texts, in [political analysis], because I don't find them terribly revealing. Sometimes they are suggestive, but usually I find that when I've cleared away the usually unnecessary rhetoric and complexity, what remains is pretty straightforward. I feel the same about the areas of philosophy where I have done a fair amount of writing and research (philosophy of mind, philosophy of language). (8 Aug. 1994) This tendency to reject complex philosophical arguments raises questions, even from those otherwise sympathetic to Chomsky, concerning the degree to which issues of individual liberty are straightforward. There is no doubt that corporate agendas, military-backed regimes, and individual-interest-driven institutions can be analyzed and understood as such. But people's willingness to tolerate high levels of personal restriction or persecution, even in the face of possible alternatives, is arguably a phenomenon of considerable complexity. Some theoreticians ­ members of the Frankfurt or Birmingham schools ­ suggest that aesthetic media such as visual arts, theater, literature or music offer spaces within which alternative forms of expression can be contemplated or realized. Such issues are linked to the science-versus-nonscience distinction and its implications for useful social engagement.