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Books

Decoding Chomsky by Chris Knight

Peter Stone detects an attempted literary left-wing hatchet job (an ice-pick job?) on Noam Chomsky.

Noam Chomsky is both a central figure in the field of linguistics and a leading public intellectual. In both capacities he is an incredibly divisive figure: people either love him or hate him. Chris Knight, a senior research fellow in the Anthropology Department at University College London, hates him. And for that reason, he wrote Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics (2016) – a nasty, mean-spirited, vitriolic, ideologically-driven hatchet job. While Knight, unlike most of Chomsky’s critics, attacks him from the Left (Knight is a Marxist clearly hostile to Chomsky’s anarchism), the level of venom on display here exceeds that of all but the most unhinged of Chomsky’s detractors on the Right.

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