Noam Chomsky. Flickr/Andrew Rusk. Some rights reserved.
With a British Knight leading the charge, there is a whole new ragtag army on the offensive against Chomsky, armed with spurious arguments and feeble deceptions. While I have reviewed Chris Knight’s Decoding Chomsky in some detail, there is now a whole new industry to bolster Knight’s contentions, notably on his Scienceandrevolution website, and lately on openDemocracy, with contributors such as Knight himself and follow-up articles from Frederick J.Newmeyer, Randy Allen Harris, Les Levidow and David Golumbia. Here I will contend with Les Levidow’s argument.
In the first instance one would not expect a forum like openDemocracy to let loose on a venerable old man who has agitated much more for open democracy than any of the above contributors put together. While Chomsky is subject to critique like everyone else, one would expect a critique of Chomsky to be well founded and well argued. Reactionaries from the right of the political spectrum have always attacked Chomsky on an utterly groundless basis, and from all directions, be it personal, regarding his public personae, or his manifestation as a linguist. To lead the charge from the left field, as does Knight and his cohorts, is somewhat surprising, unless one unmasks these people as agent provocateurs. Their rhetoric is almost Shakespearian in endlessly reciting ‘Brutus/Chomksy is an honorable man but …’, lulling the unsuspecting reader into believing that the critique is well-intentioned and largely pro-Chomsky but ending up in a wild goose chase that reveals Brutus/Chomsky to be a traitor. As such Levidow begins his treatise, lauding Chomsky:
