Who fights alone on their soil, is creating their own institutions, their music and aspirations?

Noam Chomsky is one of the most recognized names of our time; his contributions to linguistics and the implications of his theories for studies on the workings of the human mind have rocked the intellectual world for over fifty years, beginning with the critical reception of his first book on Syntactic Structures (1957), his review of Skinner’s Verbal Behaviour for Language in 1959, and the range of books he produced in the 1960s, including his assessment of Current Issues in Linguistic Theory in 1964, Aspects of the Theory of Syntax in 1965, Topics in the Theory of Generative Grammar in 1966, Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought, also in 1966, Language and Mind in 1968, and (with Morris Halle) The Sound Pattern of English (1968). Since then, the flow of linguistic work has been profuse, as Chomsky overturned prevailing paradigms in fields concerned with the study of language and set the stage for the rethinking of the whole field of linguistics, often with overt reference to approaches first articulated during the Enlightenment. During this same period, Chomsky’s very public crusade against the Vietnam War, recorded in the pages of the New York Review of Books and assembled in American Power and the New Mandarins, his on-going critique of American foreign policy, his analyses of the Middle East and Central America, his long-standing local and international activism, and his studies (sometimes with Edward Herman) of how media functions in contemporary society, have combined to provoke some very strong feelings, positive and negative, about him and his work. The effect that he has upon people on account of his actions and his views extends across national, social, and institutional lines, and the ever-growing corpus of work he has undertaken in the political realm is a remarkable testament to what an intellectual can accomplish when engaged ‘beyond the ivory tower’.