Q: Your new book on American foreign policy, ''Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance,'' includes a blurb on the jacket that calls you ''arguably the most important intellectual alive.''

I don't like the intellectual label. In the academic world, most of the work that is done is clerical. A lot of the work done by professors is routine.

I assume you are not referring to your own efforts as a professor emeritus at M.I.T. and world-renowned linguist.

I have known people who are working class or craftsmen, who happen to be more intellectual than professors. If you are working 50 hours a week in a factory, you don't have time to read 10 newspapers a day and go back to declassified government archives. But such people may have far-reaching insights into the way the world works.