Pig Herder

Well, Mr. Summers is right that Chomsky is ignored in the academic journals, and he has come up with a rather elegant explanation of why that might be. But there's a much simpler and sensible answer: Chomsky is ignored because his work is not serious work. It has nothing do with Chomsky's faux-anarchism or his discomfiting aging tenured radicals--and I would remind Mr Summers that Chomsky does his work from a comfortable tenured perch at a major university--and has everything to do with the fact that Chomsky's works are not scholarly works of history or politics, but deceptively-written propaganda masquerading as scholarship. Basically, large chunks of them are fiction, and so the journals don't review his books for the same reason they don't review comic books or Danielle Steel novels.

Mr. Summers says he began recently to read Chomsky "seriously." But there's the rub: Chomsky can't be read seriously, because Chomsky himself pays no attention to even basic rules of evidence or argument. If he needs to invent material to support an argument, he does, and then audaciously creates an empty footnote to make it appear as though he's done his homework and is referencing an actual fact. In his article, Mr. Summers lauds Chomsky's scholarship, but I defy him to do what I did in The Anti-Chomsky Reader, and actually try to follow some of Chomsky's footnotes. As every scholar knows, the whole point of references are to allow other scholars to replicate your research and thus confirm or debate your interpretation, but Chomsky's references are meant to obscure the fact that he's basically making stuff up. When you have, for example, footnotes that support important and controversial points by referencing four or five books in their
*entirety*--including, most often, Chomsky's own books--that's not only lousy scholarship, it's a terrible insult to the reader.

So, in my view, Chomsky's invisibility in the academic world has nothing to do with his politics or his views on "power," and everything to do with the fact that his books are really fundamentally silly and not worth the time or attention of a serious reviewer. I've written a lot of book reviews in my career, and as we all know, they take a lot of time and intellectual energy. Since Chomsky doesn't bother to respect his readers--and I have come to suspect that Chomsky knows that most of his readers are not intellectually equipped to really evaluate either his arguments or his methods anyway--why should serious readers bother to respect his works or treat them as though they were written in a true spirit of scholarly inquiry, which they so obviously were not?