The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Noam Chomsky’s classic essay, is now approaching its 50th anniversary. His mighty polemic was written as his country, the US, moved deeper and deeper into national and international crisis. The tonnage of high explosive dropped on Vietnam finally exceeded the entire total of Allied bombs dropped on Europe during the Second World War. The American nation’s response to this horrifying display of brute power was a combustible mixture of more-or‑less approving indifference and, especially in the universities, passionate dissent, ardent opposition and, on the part of some thousands of young men awaiting conscription, the criminal, high-minded and public burning of draft cards.
Chomsky was completely on their side. He joined the famous march on the Pentagon in 1967 and – as elderly academics perhaps now recall with a faint reheating of once-radical blood vessels – was arrested and charged with Norman Mailer while demonstrating alongside Robert Lowell, Father Berrigan and Dr Spock. At the same time as this enactment of his public duty, Chomsky, the leading theoretical linguist in the world, was writing an astounding sequence of lengthy essays, each mustering the requisite and copious machinery of bibliographic reference that the most exacting scholar could demand, variously detailing the policies of the official elite in the Pentagon and the White House as they sought, in the happily chosen phrase of the day, “to bomb Vietnam back into the Stone Age”, a policy more or less fulfilled by Richard Nixon.