Noam Chomsky

From the nature of democracy to our place in the natural world, from intellectual politics to the politics of language, Powers and Prospects provides a scathing critique of orthodox views and government policy, and outlines other paths that can lead to better understanding an more constructive action.

In this still-timely classic, Noam Chomsky argues that the real "rogue" states are the United States and its allies. Chomsky turns his penetrating gaze toward U. S. involvement in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America to trace the enduring combined effects of military domination and economic imperialism on these regions.

This classic text provides a scathing critiques of U. S. political culture through billion analysis of the Iran-Contra scandal. Chomsky irrefutably shows how the unites States has opposed human rights and democratization to advance it economic interests.

One of Noam Chomsky's most accessible books, On Power and Ideology is a product of his 1986 visit to Managua, Nicaragua, for a lecture series at Unversidad Centroamericana. Delivered at the height of U. S. involvement in the Nicaraguan civil war, this succinct series of lectures lays out the parameters of Noam Chomsky's foreign policy analysis. The book consists of five lectures on U. S. international and security policy. The first two lectures examine the persistent and largely homogenous features of U. S. foreign policy, and overall framework of order. The third discusses Central America and its foreign policy pattern. The fourth looks at U. S. national security and the arms race. And the fifth examines U. S. domestic policy. These five talks, conveyed directly to the people bearing the brunt of devastating U. S. foreign policy, make historic and exciting reading.

Co-authored by two leading voices in the struggle to liberate Palestine, an indispensable book for understanding the situation in Gaza right nowWhat is the future of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement directed at Israel? Which is more viable, the binational or one state solution? Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé discuss the road ahead for Palestinians and how the international community can pressure Israel to end its human rights abuses against the people of Palestine in this urgent and timely book, a sequel to their acclaimed Gaza in Crisis.'Chomsky is a global phenomenon . . . he may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet' The New York Times Book Review'Ilan Pappé is Israel's bravest, most principled, most incisive historian' John Pilger'This sober and unflinching analysis should be read and reckoned with by anyone concerned with practicable change in the long-suffering region' Publishers Weekly (on Gaza in Crisis)

New preface by Noam Chomsky

Rethinking Camelot is a thorough analysis of John F. Kennedy's role in the U/S. invasion of Vietnam and a probing reflection on the elite political culture that allowed and encouraged the Cold War. In it, Chomsky dismisses effort to resurrect Camelot--an attractive American myth portraying JFK as a shining knight promising peace, fooled only by assassins bent on stopping this lone hero who would have unilaterally withdraws from Vietnam had he lived. Chomsky argues that U. S. institutions and political culture, not individual presidents, are the key to understanding U. S. behavior during [the] Vietnam [War].

Updated preface by Noam Chomsky

Pirates and Emperors is a brilliant exploration of the role of the United States in the Middle East that exposes how the media manipulates public opinion about what constitutes "terrorism." Chomsky masterfully argues that appreciating the differences between state terror and nongovernmental terror is crucial to stopping terrorism and understanding why atrocities like the bombing of the World Trade Center and the killing of the Charlie Hebdo journalists happen.

Operation Protective Edge, Israel's most recent assault on Gaza, left thousands of Palestinians dead and cleared the way for another Israeli land grab. The need to stand in solidarity with Palestinians has never been greater. Ilan Pappe and Noam Chomsky, two leading voices in the struggle to liberate Palestine, discuss the road ahead for Palestinians and how the international community can pressure Israel to end its human rights abuses against the people of Palestine. On Palestine is the sequel to their acclaimed book Gaza in Crisis. Noam Chomsky is widely regarded to be one of the foremost critics of US foreign policy in the world. He has published numerous groundbreaking books, articles, and essays on global politics, history, and linguistics. Since 2003 he has written a monthly column for the New York Times syndicate. His recent books include Masters of Mankind and Hopes and Prospects. Haymarket Books recently released updated editions of twelve of his classic books. Ilan Pappe is the bestselling author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine: A History of Modern Palestine and The Israel/Palestine Question. Frank Barat is a human rights activist and author. He was the coordinator of the Russell Tribunal on Palestine and is now the president of the Palestine Legal Action Network. His books include Freedom is a Constant Struggle, Gaza in Crisis, Corporate Complicity in Israel's Occupation, and On Palestine.

On 7 July 2014, in an apparent response to the murder of three teenagers, Israel launched a major offensive against the Gaza Strip, lasting 51 days, killing 2145 Palestinians (578 of them children), injuring over 11,000, and demolishing 17,200 homes. The usual news machine rolled up, and the same distressing images and entrenched political rhetoric were broadcast, yet almost nothing was reported of the on-going lives of ordinary Gazans – the real victims of the war. One of the few voices to make it out was that of Atef Abu Saif, a writer and teacher from Jabalia Refugee Camp, whose eye-witness accounts (published in The Guardian, The New York Times, and elsewhere) offered a rare window into the conflict for Western readers. Here, Atef’s complete diaries of the war allow us to witness the full extent of last summer’s atrocities from the most humble of perspectives: that of a young father, fearing for his family’s safety, trying to stay sane in an insanely one-sided war.

Exploring 'the great work of subjugation and conquest' which began with Columbus, in Year 501 Chomsky surveys the history of American imperial power in the ensuing 500 years that followed. Touching on everything from the British in India to the Americans in Beirut, Year 501 is a searing condemnation of the excesses of Western colonial and neo-colonial politics. For those seeking to understand the nature and structure of the imperial project as it reaches down to us today this work is a vital resource.

The second volume of The Political Economy of Human Rights remains one of the most controversial works produced by Chomsky to date. In a much discussed chapter on Cambodia, Chomsky and Herman questioned official Western narratives on the Khmer Rouge and suggested that the evidence available did not match up to the assertions being made at that time. These claims would resurface in a recent controversy with the Continental philosopher Slavoj Zizek and readers will now be able to judge for themselves the veracity of Zizek's claims. The work also contains important analysis of Western interventions across Indochina, including Vietnam and Laos, and provides a searing critique of American imperial aspirations in the region.

The Political Economy of Human Rights is an important two volume work, co-authored with Edward Herman – also co-author of the classic Manufacturing Consent – which provides a complete dissection of American foreign policy during the 1960s and '70s, looking at the entire sweep of the Cold War during that period, including events in Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia and Latin America. For those looking to develop a broad understanding of American foreign policy during the 20th Century this work has been a vital resource and is now available to a new generation of scholars and activists.

In the late 1980s, in the midst of Reagan's interventions in Central America, Chomsky travelled to Nicaragua and gave the lectures that became On Power and Ideology. The lectures provide a master class in foreign policy analysis from an intellectual at the height of his powers, covering everything from the US domestic basis of its overseas actions, to the pernicious concept of 'National Security' and its destabilising effect, to the broad framework of global imperial order which the United States seeks to maintain. A defining moment in the Cold War meets a defining moment in the career of one of its most important critics.

Fateful Triangle is Noam Chomsky's seminal work on Mideast politics. In the updated edition of this classic book, with a new introduction by Chomsky, readers seeking to understand the Middle East and U. S. foreign policy today will find an invaluable tool.

The fiftieth anniversary edition of a landmark work in generative grammar that continues to be influential, with a new preface by the author. Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax, published in 1965, was a landmark work in generative grammar that introduced certain technical innovations still drawn upon in contemporary work. The fiftieth anniversary edition of this influential book includes a new preface by the author that identifies proposals that seem to be of lasting significance, reviews changes and improvements in the formulation and implementation of basic ideas, and addresses some of the controversies that arose over the general framework. Beginning in the mid-fifties and emanating largely from MIT, linguists developed an approach to linguistic theory and to the study of the structure of particular languages that diverged in many respects from conventional modern linguistics. Although the new approach was connected to the traditional study of languages, it differed enough in its specific conclusions about the structure of language to warrant a name, "generative grammar." Various deficiencies were discovered in the first attempts to formulate a theory of transformational generative grammar and in the descriptive analysis of particular languages that motivated these formulations. At the same time, it became apparent that these formulations can be extended and deepened. In this book, Chomsky reviews these developments and proposes a reformulation of the theory of transformational generative grammar that takes them into account. The emphasis in this study is syntax; semantic and phonological aspects of the language structure are discussed only insofar as they bear on syntactic theory.

A classic work that situates linguistic theory in the broader cognitive sciences, formulating and developing the minimalist program. In his foundational book, The Minimalist Program, published in 1995, Noam Chomsky offered a significant contribution to the generative tradition in linguistics. This twentieth-anniversary edition reissues this classic work with a new preface by the author. In four essays, Chomsky attempts to situate linguistic theory in the broader cognitive sciences, with the essays formulating and progressively developing the minimalist approach to linguistic theory. Building on the theory of principles and parameters and, in particular, on principles of economy of derivation and representation, the minimalist framework takes Universal Grammar as providing a unique computational system, with derivations driven by morphological properties, to which the syntactic variation of languages is also restricted. Within this theoretical framework, linguistic expressions are generated by optimally efficient derivations that must satisfy the conditions that hold on interface levels, the only levels of linguistic representation. The interface levels provide instructions to two types of performance systems, articulatory-perceptual and conceptual-intentional. All syntactic conditions, then, express properties of these interface levels, reflecting the interpretive requirements of language and keeping to very restricted conceptual resources. In the preface to this edition, Chomsky emphasizes that the minimalist approach developed in the book and in subsequent work "is a program, not a theory." With this book, Chomsky built on pursuits from the earliest days of generative grammar to formulate a new research program that had far-reaching implications for the field.

With a new preface by the authors, this companion book to The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, dissects the aftermath of the war in Southeast Asia, the refugee problem, the Vietnam/Cambodia conflict and the Pol Pot regime.