Chomsky A Beginner's Guide

Michael Dean

• Publisher: Teach Yourself
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781444158489
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Utilitarianism

This informative text explores: Chomsky's linguistic theory from the groundbreaking Syntactic Structures to the present day; his ideas on child language acquisition and what they all mean to us; his theory of the mind and how it led us to see ourselves as thinking individuals; his fight for human rights; and more.

1	Linguistics and Politics in Early Life

THE CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN

Wordsworth’s saying that the child is father to the man was never truer than when applied to Avram Noam Chomsky. Both the linguist and the political commentator are there in embryo in his childhood.

Chomsky was born on 7 December 1928, the oldest son of Dr William Chomsky and Elsie Simonsky, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Chomsky’s own account of his parents is characteristically modest. In an interview with David Barsamian, he described them as ‘Hebrew school teachers, so sort of lower middle class.’ In fact Dr William Chomsky started teaching at the religious school of the Mikveh Israel congregation, but eventually became its principal, while continuing to research in medieval Hebrew language in his free time. The New York Times called him ‘one of the world’s greatest Hebrew grammarians’ in its obituary in 1977.

William Chomsky worked on a study of a thirteenth-century Hebrew grammar called David Kimhi’s Hebrew Grammar (Mikhlol). Noam Chomsky read this scholarly work while his father was still working on it. He was 12 at the time.

He also read the Talmud at home, in Hebrew. The Talmud is both the Jewish law (called the Mishnah) and a commentary on the law (the Gemara). ‘My idea of the ideal text is still the Talmud’ says Chomsky (quoted in Barsky, Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, 1948, p.10), ‘I love the idea of parallel texts, ... texts commenting on texts.’ It is possible that this parellelism gave Chomsky the idea that a text can do two things at once; it can operate on more than one level. Perhaps this was the inspiration for his later research into the ‘deep structure’ that lies beneath all texts (see Chapter 5).

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KEYWORD

The Depression: The Depression began in October 1929 with the Wall Street Crash, the collapse of the American Stock Market. It lasted throughout most of the 1930s and was really only ended by the Second World War (1939–45).

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The influence of Chomsky’s mother, Elsie, was more on the political side. She was more left wing than her husband. ‘Remember I grew up in the Depression,’ Chomsky reminds us (Ben Isitt, Noam Chomsky Interview, March 2000, p.7). ‘My earliest childhood memories are miserable old people coming to the house ... and trying to sell rags or apples just to survive ...’ The Depression was a time of great poverty and unemployment, which began in 1929 and continued throughout most of the 1930s. But it was also a time of great political awareness and political debate.

Jewish working class culture in New York was very unusual. It was highly intellectual, very poor; a lot of people had no jobs at all and others lived in slums and so on. But it was a rich and lively intellectual culture: Freud, Marx … and so forth. That was, I think the most intellectual culture during my early teens.

(Chomsky interview with James Peck in The Chomsky Reader, 1988, p.11)

As well as his mother, another family influence on Chomsky’s early left-wing politics was his uncle. The young Noam used to go from Philadelphia to New York by train and there, at the corner of 72nd Street and Broadway, his uncle had a newspaper kiosk. That was the place he claimed to have gained his political education. After listening to the poor intellectuals at the kiosk, young Noam would wander around the Fourth Avenue second-hand bookshops or visit the office of the anarchist magazine, Frei Arbeiter Stimme. This influenced his later anarchist political views. The magazine published the German anarchist Rudolf Rocker whose works Chomsky started to read (see Chapter 6).

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KEYWORD

Linguistics: Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Sometimes it studies the sounds, words and grammar of one language. As a result of Chomsky’s work, it can also study the relationship between particular languages and the universal characteristics that form the basis of all languages. It can also look at the sociological or psychological aspects of communication.

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EARLY INFLUENCES IN LINGUISTICS AND POLITICS

Even in his early years we see the individualism that underlay Chomsky’s work in linguistics and politics. Talking of this time in his early youth, Chomsky says ‘I didn’t have any affiliation to any group … Partly it was that I’m not much of a “joiner” I guess.’ (interview with James Peck in The Chomsky Reader, 1988, p.10), and that ‘he always felt out of tune with almost everything around him.’

Chomsky was brought up in an orthodox Jewish household. Robert F. Barsky, Chomsky’s biographer, who knows him personally, writes:

From a very early age Noam and David [Chomsky’s brother, who was five years younger] were immersed in the scholarship, culture and traditions of Judaism and the Hebrew language ...

(Noam Chomsky a Life of Dissent, 1948, p.12)

Zionism, the idea of Jewish people returning to Israel, was one of the hot political topics debated at the Chomsky family’s dinner table and at his uncle’s newspaper kiosk.

Chomsky got to know his future wife and life-long partner, Carol Schatz, at Hebrew School (though they ‘met’ when he was five and she was three). And if he needed a reminder that he was Jewish, it was provided by the fact that he belonged to the only Jewish family in a Irish and German Catholic neighbourhood. There he encountered bitter anti-semitism and open support for the Nazis until December 1941. But Noam was to oppose prejudice from whichever side it came. When a camp for German prisoners of war was set up right next to his school, some of the kids started taunting the prisoners, but Chomsky defended the Germans and tried to get them to stop, even though, as he recalls, he was a much more committed anti-Nazi than the kids who were baiting the prisoners.

At this time a global event was to influence Chomsky’s politics greatly: the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Chomsky recalls that he literally couldn’t talk to anybody and that he felt completely isolated. It was by no means the last time that he was to feel that way.

THE INFLUENCE OF HIS SCHOOLS

From the age of just two years old until he was 12, Chomsky went to the Oak Lane Country Day School which was run on Deweyite principles, that is the principles of the philosopher John Dewey. In ‘Democracy and Education’, a lecture given by Chomsky at Loyola University Chicago, 19 October 1994, he acknowledges Dewey’s influence ‘… his thought was a strong influence on me in my formative years – in fact from about age two on’ and he described Dewey as ‘one of the outstanding thinkers of the past century.’

At Oak Lane children from different backgrounds and with different levels of ability were encouraged to develop their individual interest freed from the competitive need to be a good student. The goal was self-development, not good marks or coming top of the class. In the 1994 Chicago lecture Chomsky quotes another influence on him, Bertrand Russell, ‘one of the very few people I actually admire,’ to explain the views on education that were formed at Oak Lane: shifting over from Dewey to Bertrand Russell, he describes the purpose of education as ‘to give a sense of the value of things other than domination.’

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KEYWORDS

Deweyite (John Dewey 1859–1952): John Dewey was a philosopher, a psychologist, an educator and a social critic. He was a pioneer of the progressive school movement. His interest in education, set out in Democracy and Education (1916) led him to be a fierce social critic. In his lecture in Chicago in 1994 Chomsky quoted a sentence of Dewey’s that sums up his educational and social philosophy: ‘The ultimate aim of production is not production of goods, but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality.’

Bertrand Russell (1872– 1970): Bertrand Russell was a socialist, a pacifist and a distinguished philosopher and mathematician. He also ran a progressive school called Beacon Hill from 1928–32. His picture is on the wall of Chomsky’s office at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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In the Oak Lane school magazine The Odyssey, Noam Chomsky, aged ten, wrote an article on the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). Barcelona had fallen to the fascist forces of the right in January 1939 and Chomsky recalls how affected he was by that event.

At the age of 12, Chomsky moved from Oak Lane to Central High School, also in Philadelphia. Despite discovering that he was intelligent and getting good marks, he yearned for the freedom of Oak Lane, and his lasting view of the purpose of education (which was that it should allow the growing principle of life to take its own course) had been formed by Oak.

But from this point on, Chomsky would follow his mentor Dewey in two things: one was in his educational ideas and the other was in not making any distinction between education and work. In other words, the goal of all activity, at school or at the workplace, was to provide creative tasks to develop the individual, not to produce things within a system. These ideas were developed later into libertarianism and anarchism (see Chapter 6), but the seeds were sown at the age of 12.

CHOMSKY’S ACADEMIC RISE

In 1945 Chomsky started at the University of Pennsylvania (often abbreviated to Penn) at the remarkably young age of 16. He was generally unhappy at Penn, finding the institutional structure as stifling as he had found it at Central High School. But once again the linguistics and the politics were to come together, as they had in his home life as a child.

Chomsky was living at home and teaching Hebrew to pay for his studies at university. He was also the only undergraduate in the university studying Arabic, partly ‘because of his interest in Semitic linguistics, which stemmed from his father’s work in that area, and partly through the influence of Georgio Levi Della Vida’ (as described in an interview with James Peck in The Chomsky Reader, 1988, p.7). Della Vida had had to leave Italy because of the rise of fascism in that country. A leading left-wing figure, he was an important political influence on Chomsky.

Chomsky himself always downplays any link between the linguistic and the political sides of his work and thought, but Della Vida’s influence on Chomsky as a young man is one of many examples throughout his life where the two have come together and intertwined.

Just as Chomsky was intending to leave university and pursue his political interests, he met a man who was to influence his life greatly. It was 1947, Chomsky had just turned 18, and the man taught modern linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. His name was Zellig Harris. Barsky (1948, p.50) argues that ‘it was not Harris’s linguistics that first attracted Chomsky: he was tantalized by his Profes...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title
• Content
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Linguistics and Politics in Early Life
• Chapter 2: Language and Mind
• Chapter 3: Child Language Acquisition
• Chapter 4: The Chomskyan Revolution in Linguistics I
• Chapter 5: The Chomskyan Revolution in Linguistics II
• Chapter 6: … Some Kind of Anarchist
• Chapter 7: The Manipulated Society
• Chapter 8: The New World Order
• Conclusion
• Further reading & Reference
• Copyright