Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship

by Noam Chomsky

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565848586
• ISBN13: 9781565848580
• Release Date: September 2003
• Publisher: New Press
• Length: 131 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.5" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

Intellectual Climates

Iraq is a debacle largely because of Neo-Conservative assumptions about the reach of military might and the rightness of America's mission to reshape the Middle-East. The broader public is just now waking up to the calamities of these assumptions and their broader meaning at home and abroad. Older Americans may recall a similar hubris of 40 years ago that drove policy into the infamous morass of Vietnam. Only then, it was not a right-wing consensus that led the way; it was a liberal consensus (led by JFK and LBJ), whose assumptions revolved around the ability of educated experts to solve complex social-political problems, such as the growing insurrection in southeast Asia. Borrowing techniques from the behavioral sciences, American advisors sought to reshape Vietnamese society into a more anti-communist, Westernized polity. Those experts (think Robert Mc Namara) drew their appeal from the prestige of these sciences as a source of hard-headed objectivity. Their methods dealt strictly in cold-blooded statistics and verifiable research results, offered up by some of the nation's leading academic institutions. Emotional rhetoric or other such subjective factors were scorned as soft-headed and unscientific. As I recall, it was said their work with linear graphs and trend lines was extremely impressive, gaining converts in government by the bucket loads. The ironic result was a last minute bug-out from the embassy's roof-top as triumphant NVA forces swept through Saigon. The first half of Chomsky's reprinted 1967 work deals critically with the intellectual climate of that period, and comes from a time when it was not yet respectable to challenge the wisdom of liberal interventionism. Perceptive readers may draw parallels between the assumed right to intervene in Vietnam and the assumed right to invade Iraq. The fact that both Republicans and Democrats share such assumptions decade after decade forms (in my view) the cornerstone of America's far-flung empire that both parties endorse but neither wants to admit exists. However that may be, Chomsky analyzes many of the behaviorist assumptions applied to Vietnam, laying bare the phony claim of "objectivity" underlying them. This is well worth the read, both as a lesson from the past and a warning for the future. The book's second half is much less perspicuous, dealing as it does with the convoluted complexities of the Spanish Civil War. His point here, however, remains an interesting one. Namely, that liberal analysis of that bloody conflict shows a systematic bias against mass social movements (read the Spanish anarchists) and their capacity for self-organization apart from a political elite to lead them. This of course runs counter to hallowed Jeffersonian and liberal assumptions about the capabilities of the common man, and amounts to a rather odd outcome for professedly liberal scholarship. Still and all, the many players in that long ago drama (anarchists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, bougeious liber

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This outstanding essay is included in Chomsky's book American Power and the New Mandarins. Great as it is, I would recommend spending a few dollars more to get American Power and the New Mandarins which contain this same text as well as chapters on "the responsibility of intellectuals," "the revolutionary pacifism of A.J. Muste," "on resistance," and much else.