Noam Chomsky: biography of an anti-establishment linguist

We review the life and main theoretical contributions of this prolific thinker.

Today there are few thinkers and researchers as renowned as Noam Chomsky. Noam Chomsky. His interventions in the media are constantly circulating on the Internet, the interviews he offers have massive audience levels and he has even appeared in some songs, such as this one by Espaldamaceta.

No wonder. Chomsky is a controversial person, and curiously he is not controversial for selling his life in pieces of exclusives or for having a groundbreaking aesthetic, as it is frequent in today's celebrities. Noam Chomsky is known for his ideas in two seemingly unconnected fields: politics and linguistics (or psycholinguistics).

In the following we will review the details of his life trajectory up to the present day.

Chomsky's childhood

Noam Chomsky was born in 1928 in the American city of Philadelphia, in the family of William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, both Hebrew language scholars and originally from Eastern Europe (today's Ukraine and Belarus, respectively). Both Noam Chomsky and his younger brother, David Eli Chomsky, were brought up in an atmosphere of respect for the Jewish roots of their lineageThey were also imbued with the activist spirit of their parents, who were strongly influenced by the left-wing Zionism that was taking shape in Israel with the emergence of the kibbutz communes.

During his childhood and into his adolescence, Noam Chomsky developed a vocational habit based on reading essays on politics. This, together with the fact that from a very young age he frequented environments related to the anti-establishment left, led him to situate himself ideologically, led him to situate himself ideologically in anarchism.. Like researchers such as Viktor Frankl, he began writing his reflections at a very early age, before the age of 13.

Entering university

In 1945, Chomsky began a university career in the humanities and, specifically, in philosophy and Semitic languages, all from the classrooms of Philadelphia University. His contact with the linguist Zellig Harris during his university years made him decide to focus his studies on linguistics. In 1949, he married Carol Doris Schatz (later known as Carol Chomsky), who would also become a well-known linguist.

But Noam Chomsky's studies and interests went far beyond the study of languages per se. His early research, conducted at Harvard between 1951 and 1955, came to have implications for other topics within the purview of psychology, such as the processes by which language and mental structures may appear. This This led him to confront the behaviorist explanation of language of the emergence and learning of languages that B. F. Skinner, among others, maintained. F. Skinner, among others.

In the field of psycholinguistics, Noam Chomsky is known for his theory of Universal Grammar and his ideas about the development of language based on genetic inheritance, something that was used by evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker to explain the nature of language in humans. You can read more about this topic in this article on Chomsky's theories.

The activist Noam Chomsky

In parallel to all these research activities, Noam Chomsky's curiosity for issues related to politics and the development of capitalism did not cease. That is why this researcher combined his studies on linguistics with the reading of political essays, the writing of reflections and articles, and the writing of articles on the development of capitalism.He has been fiercely criticizing the system of structural relations and the distribution of wealth that he relates to the essence of capitalism, while at the same time criticizing certain aspects of the left that he considers authoritarian.

Noam Chomsky has also aimed his dialectical darts at the policy of the United States and its repressive role at the international level, favoring coups d'état and intervening militarily in foreign countries for reasons that can hardly be related to self-defense. It is not surprising that he was strongly opposed to his country's participation in the Vietnam War, for which he was arrested..

Noam Chomsky today

In recent years, due to his advanced age, Noam Chomsky has retired from teaching, but he continues to appear before the media to give but he continues to appear in the media in support of new left-wing initiatives.. Since the 1990s, especially, Noam Chomsky has been focusing on commentary on the political agenda and the development of inequalities, something that has earned him no small amount of enmity in a country as liberal as the United States.

The fact that he offers visibility to ideologies related to anarchism and has shown support for movements such as Occupy Wall Street has made him a person who, despite not being overly coddled by the mainstream media, arouses a lot of interest.

Noam Chomsky has also remarried, following the death of his first wife in 2008. His current partner's name is Valeria Wasserman.