Figure of Speech

There is an interesting moment about halfway into Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick’s 1992 NFB film Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media. The titular character explains he has never been able to find an intellectually satisfying connection between the work that he has done on language (his concept of generative grammar, which he laid out in 1957’s Syntactic Structures and refined in 1965’s Aspects of the Theories of Syntax, was a discipline-defining revolution) and his political work (his long history of uncompromising criticism of U.S. foreign policy beginning with the Vietnam War and continuing right on up through Obama’s drone warfare). This is the sort of problem that has led to the joke that there must be two guys named Noam Chomsky: one a path-breaking linguist fully engaged in -cutting-edge scientific work largely having to do with cognition and then some other guy writing furiously about American imperialism. Gee, it must be a more...