Noam Chomsky speaking at Chatham House, London, May, 2014. Wikicommons. Some rights reserved.
I am a huge admirer of Decoding Chomsky, and appreciate the ongoing forum that openDemocracy has been running about it. Both Knight and the openDemocracy editors have asked me to contribute to the forum, and I’ve been disappointed that time and obligations have made that more difficult than I’d hoped. Partly that is due to the richness of the ongoing discussion, in which several of the contributions – especially the piece by Randy Allen Harris, with much of which I find myself in strong agreement – echo a lot of what I’d planned to say.
As Knight and some others here have generously pointed out, my own interpretation of Chomsky’s academic career relies less on the question of how his research has been funded, than on questions about why his work should have been taken up so eagerly and rapidly among so many parts of the academy and beyond, especially given that many of Chomsky’s intuitions ran so directly counter to those of the prominent researchers in those fields (especially in Linguistics).
