Customer Reviews

Problems of Knowledge and Freedom: The Russell Lectures

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This text is a collection of lectures given by Noam Chomsky that relate to his insights into Linguistics, human knowledge, and politics to intellectual Bertrand Russell, whom Chomsky shared many points in common. The first half of the book provides a brilliant and succinct explication of his linguistic discoveries and its implications on human nature and general cognition, but it will surely be challenging to any reader not familiar with linguistics. The second half is an essay on Western Imperialism, particularly as it pertains to the Vietnam War, and for those who have read Chomsky's American Power and the New Mandarins this lecture comes off as a rehash of old material, although it does provide a devastating examination of the state-influenced intellectuals who control the political ideology or our insitutions, and of the threat of nuclear war and the extinction of the human species.

Looking through my bookshelves, I realized that all of my Chomsky books were from 1990 and up. Curious as to what his earlier writing was like, I decided to pick up this short text.

Not being familiar with linguistics, the first chapter was difficult for me to get through. The material is very dense and I wouldn't have expected that getting through those first fifty pages would have taken so long.

As for the second chapter, I was struck by how much his writing style has changed over the years. Chomsky can rightly be criticized for being too overtly moral sometimes. By this I mean that he makes predictable moral arguments, without acknowledging that others probably won't act with such moral conviction. This makes for a tricky situation, and while Chomsky is always "right," he's not always practical. Anyway, his political writing in this book comes across as being much more focused and more academic than anything he's written in the last 15 years. The same sense of moral indignation is there, but it's very different from a book like Hegemony or Survival, for example.

I really think that if you've only read more recent Chomsky books, you should really take the time to go through some of his earlier work. Problems of Knowledge and Freedom is a good place to start (at least the second half). It's short and relatively cheap. This book really hints at what I'm expecting to be a much more in-depth body of work from earlier in his career. I look forward to reading more of his earlier books.