Chomsky has published over seventy books and over a thousand articles in a range of fields including linguistics, philosophy, politics, cognitive sciences, and psychology. He was made associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the age of twenty-nine and full professor at thirty-two; he was given an endowed chair at thirty-seven, and became institute professor, an honor reserved for the most distinguished faculty, at forty-seven. An enormous array of awards and honors have been bestowed upon him for his work in a variety of disciplines and fields including those, such as linguistics and cognitive sciences, that he himself revolutionized. A multitude of articles and books have been devoted to his work, and recently an four-volume collection containing over a hundred such articles has been published by Routledge as part of its Critical Assessments Series.

An activist who is looked to by masses of left-leaning individuals and groups as one of the truly inspirational figures of this century, Chomsky has maintained a radical stance for more than fifty years, and it has embroiled him in controversy. It has led people to idolize him, debate about him, arrest him, utter slanderous comments about him, and censor his work.

The work of the Chomsky biographer is in no way simplified by the fact that Chomsky himself deplores the biographical genre, for both political and personal reasons. On the one hand, I think that Chomsky is right to condemn personality cults; on the other, I believe that much can be learned by looking at Chomsky's life and work in the context of the milieus from which they have emerged and to which they have contributed. For that reason, this book, although an exploration of Chomsky's life and work, is also a portrait of his milieus. My premise is that Chomsky's ideas, and in particular his political ideas, cannot be fully understood without some knowledge of the organizations, movements, groups, and individuals with whom he has had contact, either through study or discussion. I will look at Chomsky's incredible body of work and explore its relationship to the work of others in various fields and milieus.

For Chomsky, the work he has produced is his life. In response to comments I made about the 1992 film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media,,^[3] Chomsky remarked that he had not, and most probably would not, go to see it:

[F]irst, I hate watching or hearing myself. I can only think about how I should have said things better. Second, I'm not happy with the personalized framework. Things happen in the world because of the efforts of dedicated and courageous people whose names no one has heard, and who disappear from history. I can give talks and write because of their organizing efforts, to which I'm able to contribute in my own ways. Not having seen the film, I don't know whether this is brought out. I'm concerned that it may not be. (18 Feb. 1993)

It could be argued that because there is already a huge amount of published work on Chomsky, there is no room for a biography. But while his linguistic work has been reasonably well covered (despite the weaknesses of many historical studies), there is only a relatively small quantity of commentary available on Chomsky's political background and his contribution to the field of political theory. This may be due, in part, to the prevailing belief that his work in this domain in some ways speaks for itself. Chomsky seldom mentions concurrent or competing schools of political theory or philosophy; when he does, he'll often just make passing reference to a text in order to establish his own point. Some may be misled by this and fail to realize that Chomsky has been profoundly inspired by various sources in his political thinking. The ways in which his approach to this particular area of thought differs from the approach he takes to others can be the substance of an intriguing and politically valuable discussion. Therefore, while I do look at Chomsky's contribution to linguistics and philosophy, my main focus is the political milieus that provide a context for understanding his approach to societal relations and the structures that regulate them.

The point of entry for my long-standing correspondence with Noam Chomsky and for my growing interest in his politics is Sam Abramovitch, who has introduced me to the ideas of left libertarianism and to the people and organizations that have struggled to promote them. Abramovitch is a former director of Hashomer Hatzair (in Montreal), a left-wing Jewish organization whose relation to Chomsky will be detailed in the following pages, as well as a close friend of people associated with a number of groups and individuals that have influenced Chomsky, directly or indirectly. This book is therefore filled with names of organizations, publications, and individual thinkers that have not been adequately discussed in relation to Chomsky's political work: the organizations include the left wing of Avukah, the Council Communists, Freie Arbeiter Stimme, Hashomer Hatzair, the Independent Labor Party, the Institute for Workers' Control, the League for Arab-Jewish Rapprochement, the Leninist League, the Marlenites, and Resist; among the journals I mention are International Council Correspondence, Living Marxism, Avukah Student Action, Modern Occasions, New Politics, Politics, and The Spokesman; and some of the individuals I look at are Chomsky contemporaries Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, Ken Coates, David Dellinger, Peggy Duff, Mitchell Goodman, Zellig Harris, Edward S. Herman, Jim Kelman, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer, Paul Mattick, Jerry Rubin, and Howard Zinn, to name but a few. While the work of another set of Chomsky contemporaries ­ Sam Abramovitch, Norman Epstein (whom Chomsky met fifteen years ago for the first time), Karl Korsch, Christopher Lasch, Dwight Macdonald (with whom Chomsky had contact in the 1960s), Seymour Melman (with whom Chomsky had casual contact early on, and who became a close friend), Karl Polanyi, and Arthur Rosenberg ­ had no direct impact upon Chomsky's endeavors, it does provide some important insight into his thinking, and is therefore explored here.

Reading through these lists raises the issue of the relationship between Chomsky and Judaism. Chomsky's father, William, was a Hebrew scholar and teacher who wrote a definitive study of the history of the Hebrew language. Furthermore, Chomsky was influenced by a strain of left-leaning Jewish intellectuals and has maintained contact with several influential Jewish thinkers. In short, Chomsky grew up in an intensely Jewish-Hebraic household, he was involved with the kibbutz movement, and he has always been interested in the actions of the Jewish state; nevertheless, it would be misleading to view his work solely from these perspectives, for reasons that will be discussed further on. So only when questions of his Jewish heritage illuminate his approach or overlap with biographical issues have I mentioned them.

As his massive body of publications attests, Chomsky's restless intellect has led him to embrace many fields, including social activism, history, the history of ideas, linguistics, philosophy, politics, cognitive sciences, and psychology. Due to the complexity of each of these domains, it would be inappropriate to take a solely chronological approach to the writing of his biography. Chomsky has pursued a range of distinct interests simultaneously, and has been drawn into controversy and intellectual debate on several fronts over the years. These interests are most clearly understood when looked at thematically. I have therefore divided this book into sections that deal individually with a series of subjects that are intimately connected to Chomsky's growth and impact. For the most part, I've written about each separately and chronologically, but when the sections are read together, they should combine to provide an overall sense of Chomsky's vast reach as a thinker and activist.