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Chomsky and Irving Howe By contrasting Chomsky's views with those of Irving Howe we may reach a better understanding of the public intellectual. Chomsky knew Howe personally ­ they were next-door neighbors for a few years. Howe was the founder of the magazine Dissent, and functioned as a kind of guiding light in "left-ish" circles for decades. In the end, however, he may have done more harm than good to genuinely left-wing causes because he became an acceptable version of a left-winger. For example, although he criticized the Vietnam War, he did so in such narrow terms that, in the eyes of some, he eventually lent credibility to its instigators, and to those of other such atrocities. It was partly to avoid, at all costs, such a derailment that Chomsky opted to affiliate himself with the activist community rather than the Marxologists, the intellectual left, or the ivory-tower theoreticians of emancipation. Such a concern also prompted him to maintain consistent viewpoints and to choose his battles carefully. Howe's role as a left-wing intellectual evolved from the 1930s to the 1970s. In Chomsky's view, it is not Howe's work for Dissent (which that journal first began to publish in the 1950s) that was significant. Chomsky was impressed by the even earlier work Howe submitted to the little-known journal Commentary, and the work that he had done for yet another journal called Labor Action (now virtually unknown) when he was still quite young. Says Chomsky: "[Howe] and Hal Draper particularly had quite interesting commentary on current affairs [in Labor Action during the 1940s] (though I didn't go along with the Leninist line, of course). I was never part of the Dissent circle, though I read it and occasionally would go to a meeting" (14 Aug. 1995). Journals such as Dissent, The Nation, The New Left Review, and newspapers such as The Village Voice, The Manchester Guardian, and Libération do serve a useful purpose on the left, but they often veer far too close to the status quo to be the organs of radical change. Chomsky remarks: It's too strong to say that Dissent was of no interest to me, then or now. I've always read it, and sometimes find interesting things ­ much more so in the 1950s, before Howe's bitter resentment of the student movement and the New Left for failing to pay enough attention to him, and the post-1967 switch to unthinking Zionist commitments (largely as a weapon against the New Left, it seems), which changed the character of the journal quite sharply, as you can tell by reading it (try to find something about Israel or Zionism pre-1967, for example). (14 Aug. 1995)