Founder of modern linguistics, social critic, political activist, and prolific writer, Noam Chomsky is an intellectual giant of the twentieth century. Citation indexes for the arts and humanities, the social sciences, and the "hard" sciences show that Chomsky has been cited thousands of times in the works of others. His output of dozens of books and hundreds of articles on wide-ranging topics once led historian Howard Zinn to refer jokingly to "Noam Chomsky's latest book, as of this morning."

Chomsky revolutionized the discipline of linguistics in the 1950s and 1960s by rooting it in cognitive psychology. His theories of language generation became the paradigm for the field and made connections to other disciplines possible. An early and outspoken critic of American involvement in Vietnam, Chomsky has written dozens of densely argued critiques of the behavior of governments, the media, and corporations. A popular lecturer, he has traveled the...