Problems of Knowledge and Freedom

By Noam Chomsky

Book Overview

The first work to connect Noam Chomsky's linguistic and political thought, offering important insight into the philosophical foundations of his worldview

"A subtle and scrupulous look at some of the most interesting work done in our time on language and mind." --George Steiner, The New York Times Book Review

Originally delivered in 1971 as the first Cambridge lectures in memory of Bertrand Russell, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom is a masterful and cogent synthesis of Noam Chomsky's moral philosophy, linguistic analysis, and emergent political critique of America's war in Vietnam.

In the first half of this wide-ranging work, Chomsky takes up Russell's lifelong search for the empirical principles of human understanding, in a philosophical overview referencing Hume, Wittgenstein, von Humboldt, and others. In the following half, aptly titled "On Changing the World," Chomsky applies these concepts to the issues that would remain the focus of his increasingly political work of the period--his criticisms of the war in Southeast Asia and the Cold War ideology that supported it, of the centralization of U.S. decision-making in the Pentagon and the growing influence of multinational corporations in those circles, and of the politicization of American universities in the post-World War II years, as well as his analyses of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Nixon's foreign policy.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565848098
• ISBN13: 9781565848092
• Release Date: June 2003
• Publisher: New Press
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 6.1" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

not for everyone, but quite good

Looking through my bookshelves, I realized that all of my Chomsky books were from 1990 and up. Curious as to what his earlier writing was like, I decided to pick up this short text. Not being familiar with linguistics, the first chapter was difficult for me to get through. The material is very dense and I wouldn't have expected that getting through those first fifty pages would have taken so long. As for the second chapter, I was struck by how much his writing style has changed over the years. Chomsky can rightly be criticized for being too overtly moral sometimes. By this I mean that he makes predictable moral arguments, without acknowledging that others probably won't act with such moral conviction. This makes for a tricky situation, and while Chomsky is always "right," he's not always practical. Anyway, his political writing in this book comes across as being much more focused and more academic than anything he's written in the last 15 years. The same sense of moral indignation is there, but it's very different from a book like Hegemony or Survival, for example. I really think that if you've only read more recent Chomsky books, you should really take the time to go through some of his earlier work. Problems of Knowledge and Freedom is a good place to start (at least the second half). It's short and relatively cheap. This book really hints at what I'm expecting to be a much more in-depth body of work from earlier in his career. I look forward to reading more of his earlier books.