An American Jew of Russian origin, Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia in 1928. He studied philosophy and mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, later specialising in linguistics under the guidance of Zellig S. Harris and Roman Jakobson. He revolutionised linguistic studies with generativist theory, of which he is the founder and leading figure, and which has had a fundamental impact on psychological, logical and philosophical research. He has been awarded numerous honours by many universities and currently teaches in the Department of Linguistic and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

He is an authoritative member of prestigious American and international scientific associations, among them the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Science. The author of hundreds of scholarly articles published in the leading international specialist journals, Noam Chomsky has written and continues to write not only about linguistics and philosophy but also about current affairs, human rights, economics, and American and foreign policy. A prolific author, his views are set out in a long series of books, many of which have been translated into Italian.

Noam Chomsky's political choices

He has always alternated teaching and research with passionate political engagement, taking part in a great number of heated debates on globalisation and war — above all against aggressive and colonialist American policy, both economic and cultural — and standing in the front ranks of the struggles of the American radical left, in support of an equally radical pacifism.

A tireless and acute observer of international affairs, with particular attention to South America and the Middle and Far East, Noam Chomsky is one of the most representative intellectuals of the movement of movements. The critiques he has been making for years of neoliberalism — denouncing its brutalities and its dangers — are lucid and thought-provoking. One of the central messages of his thinking is that the manipulation of consciousness and information creates the ideal conditions for domination over society, which is then there to be exploited.