Noam Chomsky — "The state is an instrument of violence in the hands of the ruling class."
The state is an instrument of violence in the hands of the ruling class.
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More from Noam Chomsky
"It is not a matter of 'speaking truth to power.' It is a matter of speaking truth to the people."
"The United States has devoted a great deal of effort to trying to ensure that democracy does not function in the Middle East."
"The United States is an imperialist power."
"The whole history of the United States is one of expansion and conquest, often under the guise of spreading democracy and freedom."
"The United States has been carrying out a major terrorist war against Cuba for 50 years."
About Noam Chomsky (born 1928)
American linguist whose generative-grammar revolution (Syntactic Structures, 1957) reshaped linguistics, and whose Manufacturing Consent (1988, with Edward Herman) reshaped media criticism. Closely associated with Edward S. Herman (media-criticism co-author) and Howard Zinn (left historian peer and friend). For an intellectual contrast, see B.F. Skinner, Harvard behaviorist psychologist (1904-1990) — Chomsky's 1959 review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior is the most-cited demolition in 20th-century psychology — the moment behaviorism's dominance ended and the cognitive-science era began. Skinner's stimulus-response account of language and Chomsky's innate-faculty account are the cleanest 'environment vs nature' linguistic poles.
The standard scholarly entry points to Noam Chomsky's work: Robert F. Barsky (Vanderbilt, Chomsky biographer) — Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissent (1997); James McGilvray (McGill, philosophy of language) — The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky (ed., 2005). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Noam Chomsky.