Noam Chomsky

American linguist, cognitive scientist, and public intellectual (b. 1928), founder of generative grammar and a prominent political dissident.

Chomsky transformed linguistics with the theory of an innate language faculty, and for six decades has been one of the most-cited critics of concentrated power, media, and foreign policy.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: contemporary. Chomsky is a parallel dissident intellectual of R. Buckminster Fuller's later era, appearing in the corpus alongside Fuller and Russell in the discussion of technological abundance and the reorganization of work. Like Fuller, he argues from the premise that a society's productive capacity vastly exceeds what its institutions distribute — reaching, from a political-economy direction, conclusions that rhyme with Fuller's design-science claim that scarcity is now an organizational choice rather than a physical fact.

See Also

• Everything I Know (Everything I Know) — Fuller's lectures on world resources, work, and abundance
• Bertrand Russell (Bertrand Russell) — the earlier philosopher-dissident in the same corpus pairing

Sources

• Bertrand Russell and Buckminster Fuller on why we should work less (source reference) — situates Chomsky in the abundance-and-work discourse