Childhood: 1928–1945 Chomsky was born on December 7, 1928, in
East Oak Lane, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His parents,
William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, were Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants. In 1913, William fled the
Russian Empire, from what is now
Ukraine, to escape conscription, and worked in Baltimore
sweatshops and Hebrew elementary schools before attending college. Elsie emigrated from the region of what is present-day
Belarus. Both parents' first language was
Yiddish although it was taboo to speak it at home; his father spoke English with a foreign accent while his mother spoke a native New York City English dialect. 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. Elsie, who also taught at Mikveh Israel, shared her leftist politics and care for social issues with her sons. Noam's only sibling, David Eli Chomsky, was born five years later, and worked as a cardiologist in Philadelphia. 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. He faced
antisemitism as a child, particularly from Philadelphia's Irish and German communities. Chomsky attended the independent,
Deweyite Oak Lane Country Day School 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. He also attended Hebrew High School at Gratz College, where his father taught. 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. He was substantially influenced by his uncle and the Jewish leftists who frequented his New York City newspaper stand to debate current affairs. Chomsky himself often visited left-wing and anarchist bookstores when visiting his uncle in the city, voraciously reading political literature. 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. That he came to identify with anarchism first rather than another leftist movement, he described as a "lucky accident". Chomsky was firmly
anti-Bolshevik by his early teens.
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. Living at home, he funded his undergraduate degree by teaching Hebrew. Frustrated with his experiences at the university, he considered dropping out and moving to a
kibbutz in
Mandatory Palestine, 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. Chomsky's
BA honors thesis, "Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew", applied Harris's methods to the language. Chomsky revised this thesis for his
MA, which he received from the University of Pennsylvania in 1951; it was subsequently published as a book. He also developed his interest in philosophy while at university, in particular under the tutelage of
Nelson Goodman. 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. Having been encouraged by Goodman to apply, 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. In 1952, Chomsky published his first academic article in
The Journal of Symbolic Logic. 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. 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. Harvard professor
George Armitage Miller was impressed by Chomsky's thesis and collaborated with him on several technical papers in
mathematical linguistics. Chomsky's doctorate exempted him from
compulsory military service, which was otherwise due to begin in 1955. In 1947, Chomsky began a romantic relationship with
Carol Doris Schatz, whom he had known since early childhood. They married in 1949. 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. The couple took a Harvard travel grant to Europe in 1953. 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. 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. 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. His politics were reaffirmed by Orwell's depiction of
Barcelona's functioning anarchist society in
Homage to Catalonia (1938). Chomsky read the leftist journal
Politics, which furthered his interest in anarchism, and the
council communist periodical
Living Marxism, though he rejected the Marxist orthodoxy of its editor,
Paul Mattick.
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. He described MIT as open to experimentation where he was free to pursue his idiosyncratic interests. 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. The Chomskys had their first child,
Aviva, that same year. He also published his first book on linguistics,
Syntactic Structures, a work that radically opposed the dominant Harris–
Bloomfield trend in the field. Responses to Chomsky's ideas ranged from indifference to hostility, and his work proved divisive and caused "significant upheaval" in the discipline. The linguist
John Lyons later asserted that
Syntactic Structures "revolutionized the scientific study of language". From 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was a
National Science Foundation fellow at the
Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, New Jersey. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Chomsky began working at MIT in 1955. Chomsky's provocative critique of
B. F. Skinner, who viewed language as entirely learned behavior, and that critique's 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. 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. 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. Between 1963 and 1965 he consulted on a military-sponsored project to teach computers to understand natural English commands from military generals. 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). Along with Halle, he also edited the
Studies in Language series of books for
Harper and Row. As he began to accrue significant academic recognition and honors for his work, Chomsky lectured at the
University of California, Berkeley, in 1966. These lectures were published as
Language and Mind in 1968. 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.
Anti-war activism and dissent: 1967–1975 Chomsky joined
protests against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War in 1962, speaking on the subject at small gatherings in churches and homes. 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. 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. 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. These publications led to Chomsky's association with the American
New Left movement, though he thought little of prominent New Left intellectuals
Herbert Marcuse and
Erich Fromm and preferred the company of activists to that of intellectuals. Chomsky remained largely ignored by the mainstream press throughout this period. 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. During this time, Chomsky co-founded the anti-war collective
RESIST with
Hans Koning,
Mitchell Goodman,
Denise Levertov,
William Sloane Coffin, and
Dwight Macdonald. Although he questioned the objectives of the
1968 student protests, 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. 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. Chomsky has acknowledged that his MIT lab's funding at this time came from the military. He later said he considered resigning from MIT during the Vietnam War. There has since been a wide-ranging debate about what effects Chomsky's employment at MIT had on his political and linguistic ideas. 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. 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. Chomsky's scientific reputation insulated him from administrative action based on his beliefs. 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. Chomsky's work in linguistics continued to gain international recognition as he
received multiple honorary doctorates. He delivered
public lectures at the
University of Cambridge,
Columbia University (
Woodbridge Lectures), and
Stanford University. His appearance in a
1971 debate with French
continental philosopher Michel Foucault positioned Chomsky as a symbolic figurehead of
analytic philosophy. He continued to publish extensively on linguistics, producing
Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar (1972), an enlarged edition of
Language and Mind (1972), and
Reflections on Language (1975). In 1974 Chomsky became a
corresponding fellow of the British Academy.
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. His political talks often generated considerable controversy, particularly when he criticized the Israeli government and military. In the early 1970s Chomsky began collaborating with
Edward S. Herman, who had also published critiques of the U.S. war in Vietnam. 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. While mainstream publishing options proved elusive, Chomsky found support from
Michael Albert's
South End Press, an activist-oriented publishing company. In 1979, South End published Chomsky and Herman's revised
Counter-Revolutionary Violence as the two-volume
The Political Economy of Human Rights, 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. 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. Marxist academic
Steven Lukes most prominently publicly accused Chomsky of betraying his anarchist ideals and acting as an apologist for Cambodian leader
Pol Pot. Herman said that the controversy "imposed a serious personal cost" on Chomsky, who considered the personal criticism less important than the evidence that "mainstream intelligentsia suppressed or justified the crimes of their own states". 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 . Chomsky was widely condemned for defending Faurisson, and France's mainstream press accused Chomsky of being a Holocaust denier himself, refusing to publish his rebuttals to their accusations. Critiquing Chomsky's position, sociologist
Werner Cohn later published an analysis of the affair titled
Partners in Hate: Noam Chomsky and the Holocaust Deniers. The Faurisson affair had a lasting, damaging effect on Chomsky's career, especially in France.
Critique of propaganda and international affairs 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. Many of these lectures were published in 1987 as
On Power and Ideology: The Managua Lectures. In 1983 he published
The Fateful Triangle, which argued that the U.S. had continually used the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict for its own ends. In 1988, Chomsky visited the
Palestinian territories to witness the impact of Israeli occupation. 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. The book received
a 1992 film adaptation. 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. By the 1980s, Chomsky's students had become prominent linguists who, in turn, expanded and revised his linguistic theories. in 2011 In the 1990s, Chomsky embraced political activism to a greater degree than before. 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. The lectures he gave on the subject were published as
Powers and Prospects in 1996. 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. 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. Chomsky was widely interviewed after the
September 11 attacks in 2001 as the American public attempted to make sense of the attacks. 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. He gave the
D.T. Lakdawala Memorial Lecture in New Delhi in 2001, and in 2003 visited Cuba at the invitation of the Latin American Association of Social Scientists. 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. Chomsky toured internationally with greater regularity during this period.
Retirement Chomsky retired from MIT in 2002, but continued to conduct research and seminars on campus as an
emeritus. 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. During that trip Chomsky visited Kurdish areas of Turkey and spoke out in favor of the Kurds' human rights. 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. 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. The 2015 documentary
Requiem for the American Dream summarizes his views on capitalism and
economic inequality through a "75-minute
teach-in". In 2015, Chomsky and his wife purchased a residence in
São Paulo, Brazil, and began splitting their time between Brazil and the U.S. Chomsky taught a short-term politics course at the
University of Arizona in 2017. He was later hired as the Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in the Agnese Nelms Haury Program in Environment and Social Justice, a part-time professorship in the linguistics department with duties including teaching and public seminars. His salary was covered by philanthropic donations. After a stroke in June 2023, Chomsky moved to Brazil full-time. ==Linguistic theory==