Man oh man, this book is incredible. If your activist heart needs some rekindling, as mine often does, this is the book to turn towards.
This is not an 'original' work but instead a small collection of various essays and interviews from Chomsky's career that I think intend to provide just a basic overview of Anarchism and Chomsky's thought. Approached from this perspective, this is a great read. The interviews were very digestible and contained good questions that probed Chomsky's early life, inspirations, and posed challenges to him that he responded well to. Chomsky writes at length in one section about scholarship and bias in regards to historical work on the Spanish civil war and the Anarchist movement there, though it does tend to drag and go on a bit too long.
The section I found most interesting was the last, entitled 'Language and Freedom.' Of course it's interesting to hear about where the two areas cross over, but to me what I found most enlightening and educating about this book and chapter was how …
This is not an 'original' work but instead a small collection of various essays and interviews from Chomsky's career that I think intend to provide just a basic overview of Anarchism and Chomsky's thought. Approached from this perspective, this is a great read. The interviews were very digestible and contained good questions that probed Chomsky's early life, inspirations, and posed challenges to him that he responded well to. Chomsky writes at length in one section about scholarship and bias in regards to historical work on the Spanish civil war and the Anarchist movement there, though it does tend to drag and go on a bit too long.
The section I found most interesting was the last, entitled 'Language and Freedom.' Of course it's interesting to hear about where the two areas cross over, but to me what I found most enlightening and educating about this book and chapter was how Chomsky integrates thought from some of the most important Enlightenment thinkers. When you look at what Rousseau and Kant wrote it is quite obvious that the modern 'Anarchist' movement is merely picking up where they left off. I do not claim to be an expert on the subject, but it seems to me that the two aforementioned philosophers were almost certainly massive influences on the early anarchist movement. Rousseau in particular developed much of the intellectual groundwork on which later anarchist thinkers could build and begin to offer critiques of authority and structures of power. A good introduction to Chomsky's work, but if the chapter on the Spanish civil war starts to bore you, you can pretty safely just move on to the next chapter.
