Noam Chomsky: Biography of an Anti-System Linguist

Today there are few thinkers and researchers with the renown of Noam chomsky. His interventions in the media are constantly circulating on the Internet, interviews that it offers have massive audience levels and has even sneaked into the odd song, What this from Espaldamaceta.

It is not strange. Chomsky is a controversial person, and curiously it is not for selling his life in pieces of exclusives or for having a groundbreaking aesthetic, as is common in today's celebrities. Noam chomsky he is known for his ideas in two seemingly disconnected fields: politics and linguistics (wave psycholinguistics).

Next we will go over the details of his life trajectory until today.

Chomsky's childhood

Noam Chomsky was born in 1928 in the American city of Philadelphia, into a family formed by the marriage of William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, both scholars of the Hebrew language and originally from Eastern Europe (present-day Ukraine and Belarus, respectively). Both Noam Chomsky and his younger brother, David Eli Chomsky,

were brought up in an environment of respect for the Jewish roots of their lineage, and they were also impregnated with the activist spirit of his parents, very influenced by the left-wing Zionism that in Israel was taking shape in the appearance of the kibbutz communes.

During his childhood and his entry into adolescence, Noam Chomsky developed a vocational habit based on reading essays on politics. This, coupled with the fact that from a very young age he frequented environments related to the anti-establishment left, led him to ideologically position himself in anarchism. Like researchers like Viktor franklHe began to write his reflections at a very young age, before he was 13 years old.

The entrance to the university

In 1945, Chomsky began a university career in the world of the humanities and, specifically, of philosophy and Semitic languages, all from the classrooms of the University of Philadelphia Contacting the linguist Zellig harris during his college years he made her decide to focus her studies on linguistics. In 1949, in addition, he would marry Carol Doris Schatz (later known as Carol Chomsky), who would also become a well-known linguist.

But Noam Chomsky's studies and interests went far beyond the study of languages ​​themselves. His first investigations, carried out from Harvard between 1951 and 1955, came to have implications on other issues of the incumbency of the psychology, like the processes by which the language and the mental structures can appear. This led him to confront the behavioral explanation of the appearance and learning of the languages ​​that he held B. F. Skinner, among others.

In the field of psycholinguistics, Noam Chomsky is known for his theory of Universal Grammar and his ideas on language development based on in genetic inheritance, something that was used by evolutionary psychologists such as Steven Pinker to explain the nature of language in human beings humans. You can read more about this topic at this article on Chomsky's theories.

The activist Noam Chomsky

Parallel to all these research activities, Noam Chomsky's curiosity about issues related to the politics and development of capitalism did not cease. That is why this researcher he was combining his studies on linguistics with the reading of political essays, the writing of reflections and articles and the realization of conferences in which he has been fiercely criticizing the system of structural relations and the distribution of wealth that he relates to the essence of capitalism, while he has also criticized certain aspects of the left that he calls authoritarian.

Noam Chomsky has also targeted the politics of the United States and its repressive role at the level of his dialectical darts. favoring coups d'état and intervening militarily in foreigners for reasons that can hardly be related to the self defense. It is not surprising that he was directly opposed to the participation of his country in the Vietnam War, for which he was arrested..

Noam Chomsky today

In recent years, due to his advanced age, Noam Chomsky has retired from teaching, but continues to appear in the media to support new left-wing initiatives. Since the 1990s especially, Noam Chomsky has been focusing on commentary on the political agenda and the development of inequalities, something that has earned him many enmity in a country as liberal as the United States.

The fact that he offers visibility to ideologies related to anarchism and that he has shown support for movements such as Occupy Wall Street They have turned him into a person who despite not being excessively spoiled by the mass media, arouses a lot of interest.

Noam Chomsky has also remarried, following the death of his first wife in 2008. Her current partner is named Valeria Wasserman.