SOURCE: “Noam on the Range,” in Dissent, Vol. 42, No. 3, Summer, 1995, pp. 419-23.

In the following review of World Orders, Old and New, Wolin finds fault in Chomsky's biased portrayal of the American government as a wholly negative, “monolithic” power structure.

Toward the third hour of the hagiographic documentary about Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, a moment of truth emerges. Chomsky is lecturing at the University of Wyoming. He has just finished his familiar stump speech: fifty reasons why we live in a totalitarian society. Striving to revive the old thesis about American society as a form of “soft totalitarianism,” Chomsky argues that in the totalitarian societies of old, the state routinely used force to keep the public in line. In so-called democratic societies, he says, gentler techniques must be used to preserve order—thereby implying that though the means differ, the end results are more or less the same...