Noam Chomsky

Born to Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants in Philadelphia in 1928, Chomsky found anarchist literature in New York bookstores as a teenager and studied at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1955 he earned his doctorate at Harvard and joined MIT; two years later Syntactic Structures landed like a depth charge, introducing transformational grammar and helping kill off behaviorist linguistics. He built universal grammar theory, the Chomsky hierarchy, the minimalist program - work that made him among the most cited living authors and a founder of cognitive science. In 1967 his essay "The Responsibility of Intellectuals" turned him into a lightning rod on the Left; he was arrested for anti-Vietnam activism, landed on Nixon's enemies list, and later co-wrote Manufacturing Consent to decode how media bends reality. His defense of free speech for Holocaust deniers sparked the Faurisson affair; his takes on Cambodia and Bosnia drew fire from multiple sides. Now a laureate professor at Arizona after decades at MIT, he remains the American empire's most persistent anatomist - and a fixture of anti-capitalist, anti-Zionist thought worldwide.