In other countries, Chomsky is a superstar whose speeches attract crowds of thousands, sometimes tens of thousands. Illustration by David Levine

On Thursday evenings at M.I.T., Noam Chomsky, one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century and one of the most reviled, teaches a class about politics. There are nearly two hundred students and not enough chairs, so latecomers sit or lie down on the floor, which gives the class the air of a teach-in. On a recent evening, the students came to hear Chomsky speak about Iraq. He sat with his arms folded, a little hunched over on his stool, and began to talk into a microphone. He was wearing what he usually wears: shirt, sweater, jeans, sneakers. His hair curled toward the middle of his neck and looked as though he didn’t pay it much attention. He spoke in a quiet monotone.

“When I look at the arguments for this war, I don’t see anything I could even laugh at,” he said. “You don’t undertake violence on the grounds that maybe by some miracle something good will come out of it. Yes, sometimes violence does lead to good things. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor led to many very good things. If you follow the trail, it led to kicking Europeans out of Asia—that saved tens of millions of lives in India alone. Do we celebrate that every year?”

Chomsky told the students that the current Administration was essentially the same as the first Bush Administration and the Reagan Administration, and therefore could not be trusted to replace a tyrant. “The first foreign leader invited to the White House by George Bush No. 1 was Mobutu, who was one of the worst gangsters in modern African history,” Chomsky said. “Another one they loved was General Suharto. His record easily compares with Saddam Hussein’s. Another one they adored was Marcos of the Philippines. In every single one of these cases, the people now in Washington supported them right through their worst atrocities. Are these the people you would ask to bring freedom to Iraqis?”

A student wearing a red V-neck sweater raised his hand to ask a question. “I just was wondering whether this is really a strong argument if you are talking about the motives of the government,” he began, in a european accent.

“I’m talking about expectations,” Chomsky interrupted.

“If Saddam is a monster,” the student went on, “what does it matter, actually, who is going to get rid of him? If you look at the Second World War, the alliance with Stalin was also not a very nice thing, but it was absolutely necessary.”

“Well, let’s pick a worse monster than Saddam Hussein,” Chomsky said. “Suppose we could get Saddam Hussein to conquer North Korea. Would you be in favor of it?”

Chomsky can be brutal in argument, but except for the words themselves there is no outward indication that he is attacking. The expression on his face doesn’t change. He never raises his voice. In fact, his voice is so quiet that, unless he uses a microphone, it is difficult to hear him. He gives his words so little force that they scarcely leave his mouth. His eyes, too, are recessed deeply into his face; they are so narrow that they are almost closed, the right eye more than the left, and are protected by metal-framed glasses.

“The Second World War is a slightly different story,” Chomsky continued. “The United States and Britain fought the war, of course, but not primarily against Nazi Germany. The war against Nazi Germany was fought by the Russians. The German military forces were overwhelmingly on the eastern front.”

“But the world was better off,” the student persisted.

“First of all, you have to ask yourself whether the best way of getting rid of Hitler was to kill tens of millions of Russians. Maybe a better way was not supporting him in the first place, as Britain and the United States did. O.K.? But you’re right, it has nothing to do with motives—it has to do with expectations. And actually if you’re interested in expectations there’s more to say. By Stalingrad in 1942, the Russians had turned back the German offensive, and it was pretty clear that Germany wasn’t going to win the war. Well, we’ve learned from the Russian archives that Britain and the U.S. then began supporting armies established by Hitler to hold back the Russian advance. Tens of thousands of Russian troops were killed. Suppose you’re sitting in Auschwitz. Do you want the Russian troops to be held back?”

The student was silent.

Chomsky always refuses to talk about motives in politics. Like many theorists of universal humanness, he often seems baffled, even repelled, by the thought of actual people and their psychologies. He says he has no heroes, and he doesn’t believe in leaders.This refusal to talk about political motives is in one sense a great weakness, because it amounts to a refusal to take seriously the difference between Administrations, or even between countries, and is by extension a refusal to consider the possibility, short of revolution, of significant political change. It also results in what have become characteristically outrageous Chomsky comparisons. When Chomsky likened the September 11th attacks to Clinton’s bombing of a factory in Khartoum, many found the comparison not only absurd but repugnant: how could he speak in the same breath of an attack intended to maximize civilian deaths and one intended to minimize them? But, in another sense, Chomsky’s argument was a powerful one. For him, the relevant issue was not whether the bombing was conducted specifically in order to kill people (motive) but whether it could be reasonably expected to do so. If there was a reasonable possibility that the factory manufactured medicine rather than arms, then the potential effects of a bombing upon Sudan’s citizens (the number of people who would die without the drugs it supplied—several thousand, according to the Boston Globe) was properly part of the moral calculus. Chomsky’s logic is the unforgiving, mathematical logic of tort law: the philosopher Avishai Margalit has called him “the Devil’s accountant.” His moral calculus is a simple arithmetic. Nothing exculpates or complicates the sheer number of the dead.

Chomsky’s refusal to consider motives in politics is not just a moral impulse; it is also an intellectual position. He believes that a discussion of individual motives is pointless because politics is driven by the economic interests of élite institutions. “Take Robert McNamara,” Chomsky says. “I’m sure he’s a nice man. The actions that he was responsible for are outrageous because of the social and economic institutions within which he was acting more or less reflexively.” The word “reflexively” is significant—it sounds, at times, as though Chomsky were describing a kind of political behaviorism. But he is a rationalist: central both to the linguistics for which he first became famous and to his political thinking is the belief that the human mind contains at birth the structures of thought—even moral thought—through which it perceives the world. Élites, then, in his view, act selfishly, on their own behalf, but this selfishness follows an institutional logic rather than an individual one. They are morally culpable, and yet they can scarcely act otherwise.

It might seem strange that an anarchist libertarian like Chomsky, committed to the idea that people are free and self-determining, should think about politics in such institutional terms, but this is an old paradox. By rejecting, in the name of individual freedom, the idea that people are formed by their circumstances (he is not a Marxist), Chomsky dismisses as inessential everything that makes people individual—all their culture and history and experience. This move follows from the rationalist tradition: if reason is what is most important about humans—what separates them from animals—and if reason is universal, then it follows that humans should be, at core, the same. Chomsky finds this idea congenial: being of a logical rather than an anthropological or literary temperament, he has never been attracted to the notion that psychological originality or cultural variety is essential to what it means to be human. Politically, though, this has always been a dangerous move (the Jacobin move), for it allows the theorist not to take seriously any argument that departs from rationality as the theorist defines it. There is no need to pay attention to motive—what people say they want and why they want it—because their true desires are already written in the logic of their reason. There can be no disagreement, then, only truth and error; no differences, only mistakes, or lies.