The Responsibility of Intellectuals

Abstract

In this chapter I will continue to explore several of the themes in Chomsky’swork that I have set out in earlier chapters regarding issues of knowledgeand power, in order to examine them in the context of his ideas about therole and responsibility of intellectuals. My aim, then, is to assess Chomsky’sideas about the role and responsibility of intellectuals against the claims ofthose critics who have sought to highlight a contrasting narrative of theintellectual tradition. This alternate narrative has tended to focus upon theidea of the Enlightenment as establishing an elitist and authoritarianintellectual tradition (Bauman, 1987). While Chomsky is concerned with whathe sees as the subversion of the role of the intellectual, he still seeks to defendthe idea that the intellectual can, as Edward Said has described it, speak thetruth to power (Said, 1994, Chapter V). The two main sections of this chapterdeal in turn with Chomsky’s account of the role and responsibility ofintellectuals and the challenges such a view is presented with by its manycritics. In particular, I will set out Chomsky’s ideas in the context of twocontrasting accounts of the intellectual tradition, the Public Intellectual andthe Ironist. Second, I will introduce Chomsky’s ideas about the nature andmeaning of ideology, language and power as well as dealing with some ofthe difficulties such a view faces. This section draws out the implications ofcontrasting naturalist and anti-naturalist approaches to these questions ofknowledge, ideology and power. What Chomsky’s work illustrates in thiscontext is the ethical and political implications that can be derived from thesecontrasting approaches to inquiry and, in particular, the divergent answersthat they offer to both Descartes’ and Orwell’s Problems.

At the basis of the modern social order stands not the executioner, but the professor.

Ernest Gellner (Garnham, 1995, p. 364)