Childhood: 1928–1945

Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in the East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.^[21] His parents, William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, were Jewish immigrants.^[22] William had fled the Russian Empire in 1913 to escape conscription and worked in Baltimore sweatshops and Hebrew elementary schools before attending university.^[23] After moving to Philadelphia, William became principal of the Congregation Mikveh Israel religious school and joined the Gratz College faculty. He placed great emphasis on educating people so that they would be "well integrated, free and independent in their thinking, concerned about improving and enhancing the world, and eager to participate in making life more meaningful and worthwhile for all", a mission that shaped and was subsequently adopted by his son.^[24] Elsie, who also taught at Mikveh Israel, shared her leftist politics and care for social issues with her sons.^[24]

Noam's only sibling, David Eli Chomsky (1934–2021), was born five years later, and worked as a cardiologist in Philadelphia.^[24]^[25] The brothers were close, though David was more easygoing while Noam could be very competitive. They were raised Jewish, being taught Hebrew and regularly involved with discussing the political theories of Zionism; the family was particularly influenced by the Left Zionist writings of Ahad Ha'am.^[26] He faced antisemitism as a child, particularly from Philadelphia's Irish and German communities.^[27]

Chomsky attended the independent, Deweyite Oak Lane Country Day School^[28] and Philadelphia's Central High School, where he excelled academically and joined various clubs and societies, but was troubled by the school's hierarchical and domineering teaching methods.^[29] He also attended Hebrew High School at Gratz College, where his father taught.^[30]

Chomsky has described his parents as "normal Roosevelt Democrats" with center-left politics, but relatives involved in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union exposed him to socialism and far-left politics.^[31] He was substantially influenced by his uncle and the Jewish leftists who frequented his New York City newspaper stand to debate current affairs.^[32] Chomsky himself often visited left-wing and anarchist bookstores when visiting his uncle in the city, voraciously reading political literature.^[33] He became absorbed in the story of the 1939 fall of Barcelona and suppression of the Spanish anarchosyndicalist movement, writing his first article on the topic at the age of 10.^[34] That he came to identify with anarchism first rather than another leftist movement, he described as a "lucky accident".^[35] Chomsky was firmly anti-Bolshevik by his early teens.^[36]

University: 1945–1955

In 1945, at the age of 16, Chomsky began a general program of study at the University of Pennsylvania, where he explored philosophy, logic, and languages and developed a primary interest in learning Arabic.^[37] Living at home, he funded his undergraduate degree by teaching Hebrew.^[38] Frustrated with his experiences at the university, he considered dropping out and moving to a kibbutz in Mandatory Palestine,^[39] but his intellectual curiosity was reawakened through conversations with the linguist Zellig Harris, whom he first met in a political circle in 1947. Harris introduced Chomsky to the field of theoretical linguistics and convinced him to major in the subject.^[40] Chomsky's BA honors thesis, "Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew", applied Harris's methods to the language.^[41] Chomsky revised this thesis for his MA, which he received from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951; it was subsequently published as a book.^[42] He also developed his interest in philosophy while at university, in particular under the tutelage of Nelson Goodman.^[43]

From 1951 to 1955, Chomsky was a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, where he undertook research on what became his doctoral dissertation.^[44] Having been encouraged by Goodman to apply,^[45] Chomsky was attracted to Harvard in part because the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine was based there. Both Quine and a visiting philosopher, J. L. Austin of the University of Oxford, strongly influenced Chomsky.^[46] In 1952, Chomsky published his first academic article in The Journal of Symbolic Logic.^[45] Highly critical of the established behaviorist currents in linguistics, in 1954, he presented his ideas at lectures at the University of Chicago and Yale University.^[47] He had not been registered as a student at Pennsylvania for four years, but in 1955 he submitted a thesis setting out his ideas on transformational grammar; he was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree for it, and it was privately distributed among specialists on microfilm before being published in 1975 as part of The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory.^[48] Harvard professor George Armitage Miller was impressed by Chomsky's thesis and collaborated with him on several technical papers in mathematical linguistics.^[49] Chomsky's doctorate exempted him from compulsory military service, which was otherwise due to begin in 1955.^[50]

In 1947, Chomsky began a romantic relationship with Carol Doris Schatz, whom he had known since early childhood. They married in 1949.^[51] After Chomsky was made a Fellow at Harvard, the couple moved to the Allston area of Boston and remained there until 1965, when they relocated to the suburb of Lexington.^[52] The couple took a Harvard travel grant to Europe in 1953.^[53] He enjoyed living in Hashomer Hatzair's HaZore'a kibbutz while in Israel, but was appalled by his interactions with Jewish nationalism, anti-Arab racism and, within the kibbutz's leftist community, Stalinism.^[54] On visits to New York City, Chomsky continued to frequent the office of the Yiddish anarchist journal Fraye Arbeter Shtime and became enamored with the ideas of Rudolf Rocker, a contributor whose work introduced Chomsky to the link between anarchism and classical liberalism.^[55] Chomsky also read other political thinkers: the anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Diego Abad de Santillán, democratic socialists George Orwell, Bertrand Russell, and Dwight Macdonald, and works by Marxists Karl Liebknecht, Karl Korsch, and Rosa Luxemburg.^[56] His politics were reaffirmed by Orwell's depiction of Barcelona's functioning anarchist society in Homage to Catalonia (1938).^[57] Chomsky read the leftist journal Politics, which furthered his interest in anarchism,^[58] and the council communist periodical Living Marxism, though he rejected the Marxist orthodoxy of its editor, Paul Mattick.^[59]

Early career: 1955–1966

Chomsky befriended two linguists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)—Morris Halle and Roman Jakobson—the latter of whom secured him an assistant professor position there in 1955. At MIT, Chomsky spent half his time on a mechanical translation project and half teaching a course on linguistics and philosophy.^[60] He described MIT as open to experimentation where he was free to pursue his idiosyncratic interests.^[61] MIT promoted him to the position of associate professor in 1957, and over the next year he was also a visiting professor at Columbia University.^[62] The Chomskys had their first child, Aviva, that same year.^[63] He also published his first book on linguistics, Syntactic Structures, a work that radically opposed the dominant Harris–Bloomfield trend in the field.^[64] Responses to Chomsky's ideas ranged from indifference to hostility, and his work proved divisive and caused "significant upheaval" in the discipline.^[65] The linguist John Lyons later asserted that Syntactic Structures "revolutionized the scientific study of language".^[66] From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a National Science Foundation fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.^[67]

Chomsky's provocative critique of B. F. Skinner, who viewed language as learned behavior, and its challenge to the dominant behaviorist paradigm thrust Chomsky into the limelight. Chomsky argued that behaviorism underplayed the role of human creativity in learning language and overplayed the role of external conditions in influencing verbal behavior.^[68] He proceeded to found MIT's graduate program in linguistics with Halle. In 1961, Chomsky received tenure and became a full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics.^[69] He was appointed plenary speaker at the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, held in 1962 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which established him as the de facto spokesperson of American linguistics.^[70] Between 1963 and 1965 he consulted on a military-sponsored project to teach computers to understand natural English commands from military generals.^[71]

Chomsky continued to publish his linguistic ideas throughout the decade, including in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965), Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar (1966), and Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought (1966).^[72] Along with Halle, he also edited the Studies in Language series of books for Harper and Row.^[73] As he began to accrue significant academic recognition and honors for his work, Chomsky lectured at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966.^[74] These lectures were published as Language and Mind in 1968.^[75] In the late 1960s, a high-profile intellectual rift later known as the linguistic wars developed between Chomsky and some of his colleagues and doctoral students—including Paul Postal, John Ross, George Lakoff, and James D. McCawley—who contended that Chomsky's syntax-based, interpretivist linguistics did not properly account for semantic context (general semantics). A post hoc assessment of this period concluded that the opposing programs ultimately were complementary, each informing the other.^[76]

Anti-war activism and dissent: 1967–1975

[I]t does not require very far-reaching, specialized knowledge to perceive that the United States was invading South Vietnam. And, in fact, to take apart the system of illusions and deception which functions to prevent understanding of contemporary reality [is] not a task that requires extraordinary skill or understanding. It requires the kind of normal skepticism and willingness to apply one's analytical skills that almost all people have and that they can exercise.

—Chomsky on the Vietnam War^[77]

Chomsky joined protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in 1962, speaking on the subject at small gatherings in churches and homes.^[78] His 1967 critique of U.S. involvement, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", among other contributions to The New York Review of Books, debuted Chomsky as a public dissident.^[79] This essay and other political articles were collected and published in 1969 as part of Chomsky's first political book, American Power and the New Mandarins.^[80] He followed this with further political books, including At War with Asia (1970), The Backroom Boys (1973), For Reasons of State (1973), and Peace in the Middle East? (1974), published by Pantheon Books.^[81] These publications led to Chomsky's association with the American New Left movement,^[82] though he thought little of prominent New Left intellectuals Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm and preferred the company of activists to that of intellectuals.^[83] Chomsky remained largely ignored by the mainstream press throughout this period.^[84]

Chomsky also became involved in left-wing activism. Chomsky refused to pay half his taxes, publicly supported students who refused the draft, and was arrested while participating in an anti-war teach-in outside the Pentagon.^[85] During this time, Chomsky co-founded the anti-war collective RESIST with Mitchell Goodman, Denise Levertov, William Sloane Coffin, and Dwight Macdonald.^[86] Although he questioned the objectives of the 1968 student protests,^[87] Chomsky regularly gave lectures to student activist groups and, with his colleague Louis Kampf, ran undergraduate courses on politics at MIT independently of the conservative-dominated political science department.^[88] When student activists campaigned to stop weapons and counterinsurgency research at MIT, Chomsky was sympathetic but felt that the research should remain under MIT's oversight and limited to systems of deterrence and defense.^[89] Chomsky has acknowledged that his MIT lab's funding at this time came from the military.^[90] He later said he considered resigning from MIT during the Vietnam War.^[91] There has since been a wide-ranging debate about what effects Chomsky's employment at MIT had on his political and linguistic ideas.^[92]

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Chomsky participating in the anti-Vietnam War March on the Pentagon, October 21, 1967
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Chomsky's anti-war activism led to his arrest on multiple occasions and he was on President Richard Nixon's master list of political opponents.^[93] Chomsky was aware of the potential repercussions of his civil disobedience, and his wife began studying for her own doctorate in linguistics to support the family in the event of Chomsky's imprisonment or joblessness.^[94] Chomsky's scientific reputation insulated him from administrative action based on his beliefs.^[95] In 1970 he visited southeast Asia to lecture at Vietnam's Hanoi University of Science and Technology and toured war refugee camps in Laos. In 1973 he helped lead a committee commemorating the 50th anniversary of the War Resisters League.^[96]

Chomsky's work in linguistics continued to gain international recognition as he received multiple honorary doctorates.^[97] He delivered public lectures at the University of Cambridge, Columbia University (Woodbridge Lectures), and Stanford University.^[98] His appearance in a 1971 debate with French continental philosopher Michel Foucault positioned Chomsky as a symbolic figurehead of analytic philosophy.^[99] He continued to publish extensively on linguistics, producing Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972),^[95] an enlarged edition of Language and Mind (1972),^[100] and Reflections on Language (1975).^[100] In 1974 Chomsky became a corresponding fellow of the British Academy.^[98]

Edward S. Herman and the Faurisson affair: 1976–1980

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Chomsky's linguistic publications expanded and clarified his earlier work, addressing his critics and updating his grammatical theory.^[101] His political talks often generated considerable controversy, particularly when he criticized the Israeli government and military.^[102] In the early 1970s Chomsky began collaborating with Edward S. Herman, who had also published critiques of the U.S. war in Vietnam.^[103] Together they wrote Counter-Revolutionary Violence: Bloodbaths in Fact & Propaganda, a book that criticized U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia and the mainstream media's failure to cover it. Warner Modular published it in 1973, but its parent company disapproved of the book's contents and ordered all copies destroyed.^[104]

While mainstream publishing options proved elusive, Chomsky found support from Michael Albert's South End Press, an activist-oriented publishing company.^[105] In 1979, South End published Chomsky and Herman's revised Counter-Revolutionary Violence as the two-volume The Political Economy of Human Rights,^[106] which compares U.S. media reactions to the Cambodian genocide and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. It argues that because Indonesia was a U.S. ally, U.S. media ignored the East Timorese situation while focusing on events in Cambodia, a U.S. enemy.^[107] Chomsky's response included two testimonials before the United Nations' Special Committee on Decolonization, successful encouragement for American media to cover the occupation, and meetings with refugees in Lisbon.^[108] Marxist academic Steven Lukes most prominently publicly accused Chomsky of betraying his anarchist ideals and acting as an apologist for Cambodian leader Pol Pot.^[109] Herman said that the controversy "imposed a serious personal cost" on Chomsky,^[110] who considered the personal criticism less important than the evidence that "mainstream intelligentsia suppressed or justified the crimes of their own states".^[111]

Chomsky had long publicly criticized Nazism, and totalitarianism more generally, but his commitment to freedom of speech led him to defend the right of French historian Robert Faurisson to advocate a position widely characterized as Holocaust denial. Without Chomsky's knowledge, his plea for Faurisson's freedom of speech was published as the preface to the latter's 1980 book Mémoire en défense contre ceux qui m'accusent de falsifier l'histoire.^[112] Chomsky was widely condemned for defending Faurisson,^[113] and France's mainstream press accused Chomsky of being a Holocaust denier himself, refusing to publish his rebuttals to their accusations.^[114] Critiquing Chomsky's position, sociologist Werner Cohn later published an analysis of the affair titled Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers.^[115] The Faurisson affair had a lasting, damaging effect on Chomsky's career,^[116] especially in France.^[117]

Critique of propaganda and international affairs

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Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, a 1992 documentary exploring Chomsky's work of the same name and its impact

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In 1985, during the Nicaraguan Contra War—in which the U.S. supported the contra militia against the Sandinista government—Chomsky traveled to Managua to meet with workers' organizations and refugees of the conflict, giving public lectures on politics and linguistics.^[118] Many of these lectures were published in 1987 as On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures.^[119] In 1983 he published The Fateful Triangle, which argued that the U.S. had continually used the Israeli–Palestinian conflict for its own ends.^[120] In 1988, Chomsky visited the Palestinian territories to witness the impact of Israeli occupation.^[121]

Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988) outlines their propaganda model for understanding mainstream media. Even in countries without official censorship, they argued, the news is censored through five filters that greatly influence both what and how news is presented.^[122] The book received a 1992 film adaptation.^[123] In 1989, Chomsky published Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, in which he suggests that a worthwhile democracy requires that its citizens undertake intellectual self-defense against the media and elite intellectual culture that seeks to control them.^[124] By the 1980s, Chomsky's students had become prominent linguists who, in turn, expanded and revised his linguistic theories.^[125]

In the 1990s, Chomsky embraced political activism to a greater degree than before.^[126] Retaining his commitment to the cause of East Timorese independence, in 1995 he visited Australia to talk on the issue at the behest of the East Timorese Relief Association and the National Council for East Timorese Resistance.^[127] The lectures he gave on the subject were published as Powers and Prospects in 1996.^[127] As a result of the international publicity Chomsky generated, his biographer Wolfgang Sperlich opined that he did more to aid the cause of East Timorese independence than anyone but the investigative journalist John Pilger.^[128] After East Timor attained independence from Indonesia in 1999, the Australian-led International Force for East Timor arrived as a peacekeeping force; Chomsky was critical of this, believing it was designed to secure Australian access to East Timor's oil and gas reserves under the Timor Gap Treaty.^[129]

Chomsky was widely interviewed after the September 11 attacks in 2001 as the American public attempted to make sense of the attacks.^[130] He argued that the ensuing War on Terror was not a new development but a continuation of U.S. foreign policy and concomitant rhetoric since at least the Reagan era.^[131] He gave the D.T. Lakdawala Memorial Lecture in New Delhi in 2001,^[132] and in 2003 visited Cuba at the invitation of the Latin American Association of Social Scientists.^[133] Chomsky's 2003 Hegemony or Survival articulated what he called the United States' "imperial grand strategy" and critiqued the Iraq War and other aspects of the War on Terror.^[134] Chomsky toured internationally with greater regularity during this period.^[133]

During the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, Chomsky supported Scottish independence.^[135]

Retirement

Chomsky retired from MIT in 2002,^[136] but continued to conduct research and seminars on campus as an emeritus.^[137] That same year he visited Turkey to attend the trial of a publisher who had been accused of treason for printing one of Chomsky's books; Chomsky insisted on being a co-defendant and amid international media attention, the Security Courts dropped the charge on the first day.^[138] During that trip Chomsky visited Kurdish areas of Turkey and spoke out in favor of the Kurds' human rights.^[138] A supporter of the World Social Forum, he attended its conferences in Brazil in both 2002 and 2003, also attending the Forum event in India.^[139]

Chomsky discussing ecology, ethics and anarchism in 2014

Chomsky supported the 2011 Occupy movement, speaking at encampments and publishing on the movement, which he called a reaction to a 30-year class war.^[140] The 2015 documentary Requiem for the American Dream summarizes his views on capitalism and economic inequality through a "75-minute teach-in".^[141]

In 2015 Chomsky and his wife purchased a residence in São Paulo, Brazil, and began splitting their time between Brazil and the U.S.^[142]

Chomsky taught a short-term politics course at the University of Arizona in 2017^[143] and was later hired as a part-time professor in the linguistics department there, his duties including teaching and public seminars.^[144] His salary was covered by philanthropic donations.^[145]

After a stroke in June 2023, Chomsky moved to Brazil full-time;^[142] this was not publicly reported until June 2024.^[142]