Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Noam Chomsky

I was under the impression that Chomsky's books are well referenced, but this is not so, according to Jeffrey Blankfort:
As a matter of fact, there was an article on Counterpunch by someone from Harvard, who complained that Chomsky's books were not being reviewed by serious, scholarly journals. And I wrote this guy back and said, Chomsky's very lucky because nobody who writes thirty books in thirty years would be considered a serious scholar. A serious book requires a lot of time and research, and Chomsky hasn't done that. And when I decided to do an article called "Damage Control: Noam Chomsky and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict," I didn't realize what a snake pit it is when you're trying to investigate what Chomsky has written because it's more self-referential than a good scholarly work should be. So what happens is that you're reading in a book of his, and you go back to a footnote, it will often refer to another book he's written.