(born 1928) Dissenting intellectual whose theory of linguistics revolutionized the study of language, but whose following (much of it European) comes from his radical political analyses. Working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s, he dismantled behaviorism, the dominant school of thought in the social sciences. Through the study of linguistics, Chomsky showed that children did not merely respond to outside stimuli, but had innate capacity for language. The Vietnam War turned him towards political analysis, and, in a plethora of works like American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) and the essay “Cold War and the university” (1997), he has dissected American imperialism abroad and the corporate capitalist culture at home.