Objectivity And Liberal Scholarship

Why did most of the American mainstream liberal intelligensia remain silent while atrocities were being committed in Vietnam? Chomsky's answer is that they not only participated, but provided the ideas that fuelled the war.

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Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship is Chomsky’s powerful indictment of a liberal intelligentsia that provided self-serving arguments for war in Vietnam, legitimizing U.S. commitment to autocratic rule, to intervention in Asia and, ultimately, the “pacification” of millions. Over thirty years after their first printing, these are prophetic words, as today America effects “regime change” in Iraq and an increasingly boisterous militarism around the globe. Included here is Chomsky’s classic counter-analysis of the Spanish Civil War as a revolutionary war from below, as he lays bare the hostility of even liberal scholarly elites to engage in mass movements and social change, revealing not objectivity, but its opposite—the use of ideology to mask self-interest and obeisance to power. Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship is a crucial signpost of Chomsky’s searing contribution to our age, and an indispensable lens through which to consider mainstream punditry today.

This is the fourth in a series of Chomsky’s classic political books reissued by The New Press. The others are American Power and the New Mandarins, For Reasons of State, and Problems of Knowledge and Freedom.