In 1955, Chomsky joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he still holds a professorship. Two years later, he published his first major book, Syntactic Structures, which laid the foundation for his highly influential work on linguistics and cognitive psychology, including the concept of "universal grammar". Chomsky has since published more than 100 books.



In the late 1960s, Chomsky rose to prominence as an activist and dissident, particularly with regard to the Vietnam war. This photo shows him in 1967, marching on the Pentagon, Washington DC, with other intellectuals: the marchers include, from left, political activist Marcus Raskin, Chomsky, writer Norman Mailer, poet Robert Lowell, labour and anti-war activist Sidney Lens, peace protestor Dagmar Wilson, unknown, and paediatrician Benjamin Spock.



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In 1969 he published American Power and the New Mandarins, the first of many books harshly criticising US foreign policy as neo-imperialist and terrorist. Chomsky has described his political views as libertarian socialist and/or anarcho-syndicalist; he regards all forms of power as corrupting and suspect.



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In 1988, he published Manufacturing Consent: The political economy of the mass media (with Edward Herman), which argues that the US mass media are essentially propaganda organs for government and big business.



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The Arts and Humanities Citation Index reported in 1992 that Chomsky was the world's most highly cited living scholar. Only Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato and Freud had been cited more.



In 1993, he published The Minimalist Program, a major overhaul of his earlier work on linguistics that aims to reveal the inner workings of language as a simple set of general rules.



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In 2006, the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez, began an address to the General Assembly of the UN with a recommendation of Chomsky's 2003 book Hegemony or Survival: America's quest for global dominance, a survey of US foreign policy since the second world war. He went on to describe the US president of the day, George W. Bush, as the devil.



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