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Noam Chomsky is one of the most recognized names of our time, and in 2005 he was voted the most important public intellectual in the world today, the result of his winning 4,827 of 20,000 votes cast in a poll conducted jointly by a British monthly called Prospect and the Washingtonbased journal Foreign Policy. This result is hardly surprising; his contributions to linguistics and his theories regarding the workings of the human mind have rocked the intellectual world for more than fifty years, beginning with the critical reception of his early work on syntactic structures and his appeal to what he called the Cartesian approach to language. His crusade against the Vietnam War and his on-going critique of American foreign policy, his analyses of the Middle East and Central America, his long-standing local and international activism, and his assessment (sometimes with Edward Herman) of how media functions in contemporary society have made him a darling of political dissenters around the world who take from Chomsky both useful analysis and, moreover, a whole approach that is valuable in the struggle against oppression. He is at once a beacon to the downtrodden, and, as much of the world witnessed on September 20, 2006, from a televised speech delivered at the United Nations General Assembly, he is also an inspiration to the likes of President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, who recommended to representatives of the governments of the world that they read Chomsky’s recent book Hegemony or Survival. Chomsky’s vicious and persistent attacks against “Stalinist” politicians, “commissar” academics, greedy members of the managerial classes, poser liberals, “scientific” Marxists, self-aggrandizing social scientists, authoritarian pedagogues, lackey media types, and fanatical sports fans has also created a vicious set of adversaries who commit remarkable amounts of effort to discredit, admonish, critique, or ignore Chomsky’s approach. In the face of it all, Chomsky stands forth, now eighty years old and yet as energetic, fearless, and courageous as ever, perhaps even more so as the years bring him new kinds of experience, optimism and disgust; he is indeed, as U2’s Bono has called him, the “rebel without a pause.” As a consequence, most everyone has strong feelings (positive and negative) about Noam Chomsky, and the effect that he has upon people extending across national, social, and institutional lines is a fascinating phenomenon, and is a remarkable testament to what an intellectual can accomplish when engaged beyond the ivory tower.

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сучасна філософія -- політекономія