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We’re referring here to Chomsky’s writings on politics. Wikipedia needs a separate page to list his works, divided into linguistics and politics, and the politics list is about twice the length of linguistics, including, on our count, ninety-two books, some jointly authored, others book-length interviews, but mostly singly authored.⁸⁹

The first of Chomsky’s political works was not published until 1967. By that time there was no more military funding for linguistics. Nor were there prospects for the application of his kind of linguistics in computing generally; or for that matter, to other practical areas of social life such as education.

The cause with which his politicking began was the Vietnam War, though the war was already years old when he began to write about it. In his first foray, a manifesto for the next phase of his career, he asks, what is the responsibility of intellectuals?

Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. In the Western world, at least, they have the power that comes from political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression. For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.⁹⁰

By then a tenured professorship at MIT afforded him this kind of leisure and freedom from the constraints of funding agencies. Not that he considered social analysis legitimate academic work – “Is there anything in the social sciences that even merits the term ‘theory?’” he asks. “That is, some explanatory system involving hidden structures with non-trivial principles that provide understanding of phenomena? If so, I have missed it.”⁹¹ Linguistics, by comparison, was for him properly rigorous in the manner of natural sciences such as mathematical physics. His linguistics was purely theoretical, deducing things about the brain through formalized analysis of logic in syntax. He kept doing that in his day job, never allowing the politics to cross over into his research and teaching.

Chomsky’s political works are of interest to us because, though they don’t fall within the scope of his understanding of grammar, or linguistics, or legitimate academic work, they are within the scope of ours. His political writings address aspects of what we term the function of “interest,” and in particular the closed rhetorics^§AS2.1.1 that he calls “propaganda.” Programmatically, the orientation of propaganda is to assimilate, to bring a message receiver over to the message sender’s point of view. This is appropriate territory for social theory, we would say, and something that cannot be separated either from linguistics, narrowly conceived, nor the more expansive transpositional grammar we have been developing.

In the terms of the theory we have been outlining in this book, Chomsky’s grammar does not extend beyond structure, and, more narrowly still, the form of a sentence in text. But when we arrive at interests in our grammar, these may be as wide as the world and as varied in their forms as our human capacities for synesthesia. Interests are also to be found in sentences, starting with the elementary configurations of agency,^§MS2 though even there, Chomsky ignores interests.

Writing with Edward Herman, Chomsky advances the “propaganda model” of media, an “analytical framework that attempts to explain the performance of the US media” where “the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them.” The “essential ingredients” of the model, say Herman and Chomsky, are “the concentrated ownership, owner wealth and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms,” the influence of advertisers as their primary revenue source, “the reliance of media on information provided by government, business, and ‘experts’ funded and approved by these primary sources, and ‘anticommunism’ as a national religion and control mechanism.”⁹²

The result is “necessary illusions,” created in a system of “thought control.” Even if this is not always “conscious deceit …, [i]n the democratic system, the necessary illusions cannot be imposed by force. Rather, they must be installed in the public mind by more subtle means.”⁹³ This is why in democratic societies “you have to turn to the techniques of propaganda. The logic is clear. Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”⁹⁴

The sources of inspiration for Chomsky’s theory are conservative. He frequently harks back to the founders of the practice of “public relations,” Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays. His phrase “manufacture of consent” is directly from Lippmann. Democracy cannot be left to the ill-informed masses, says Lippmann, living as they do in an environment that is for them “altogether too big, too complex and too fleeting for direct acquaintance.” Hence the need to propagandize “a simpler model.” For “the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government.”⁹⁵

And here is Bernays describing the systems-necessity of what he called “the engineering of consent: … The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society … Our invisible governors … govern us by … their ability to supply needed ideas and by their key position in the social structure.” Born into Jewish Vienna, Bernays was Sigmund Freud’s nephew. He stayed in close, admiring contact with Freud throughout his life.

Democratic societies, Bernays continued, are “dominated by the relatively small number of persons … who understand the mental processes of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.”⁹⁶

Neither Lippmann nor Bernays would say it, but to the extent that their analysis holds true, liberal democracy is a sham.

Chomsky did not disagree with Lippmann’s or Bernays’ analysis of propaganda.⁹⁷ He just disagreed with the moral intent of its narrative and its social effects. His relentless unmasking of propaganda started with the Vietnam War. Why did the US propaganda machine never call it an “invasion?” he asks. Over the decades of his activism and across his massive published output it seems there is no travesty of US imperialism that Chomsky has left unexamined.

Some of his causes his friends as well as critics considered problematic. One was his signing of a petition supporting the right to free speech of Robert Faurisson, a professor at the University of Lyon in France, and a holocaust denier.⁹⁸ Another was his apparent diminution of the atrocities of Pol Pot in Cambodia by comparison with the Indonesians in East Timor, the latter being “far more important for the simple and sufficient reason that something could be done to terminate them.”⁹⁹

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⁸⁹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky_bibliography_and_filmography

⁹⁰ Noam Chomsky, 1967, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” New York Review of Books 8(3): 23.

⁹¹ Alison Edgley, 2000, The Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky, London: Routledge, p. 154.

⁹² Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, 1988 [2002], Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media, New York: Pantheon Books, pp. xi, 2–31.

⁹³ Noam Chomsky, 1989, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, Boston, MA: South End Press, pp. 19, 48.

⁹⁴ Noam Chomsky, 1991, Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, New York: Seven Stories Press, pp. 20–21.

⁹⁵ Walter Lippmann, 1922 [1997], Public Opinion, New York: Free Press, pp. 11, 158.

⁹⁶ Edward Bernays, 1928 [2005], Propaganda, Brooklyn, NY: IG Publishing, pp. 9–10; Edward L. Bernays, 1923, Crystalizing Public Opinion, New York: Liveright Publishing; Edward L. Bernays, 1971, “Emergence of the Public Relations Counsel: Principles and Recollections,” The Business History Review 45(3):296–316.

⁹⁷ Noam Chomsky, 2003, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, New York: Metropolitan Books, pp. 6–8.

⁹⁸ Robert F. Barsky, 2007, The Chomsky Effect: A Radical Works Beyond the Ivory Tower, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 72–77.

⁹⁹ Noam Chomsky, 1989, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, Boston, MA: South End Press, p. 157.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 215–218. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Noam Chomsky’s Theory of Interest §AS2.2d