What comes to mind when we think of an anarchist? Most likely, it’s some punk wearing a bandana throwing Molotov cocktails at riot-control officers. We don’t typically imagine anarchists as elderly, soft-spoken professors, but there’s probably more of the latter than one would think.
Best known for his revolutionary work in linguistics and cognitive science, Noam Chomsky is an avowed anarchist. It seems a like a contradiction. Anarchy is so often portrayed as chaos for chaos’s sake, a perverse impulse to implode a society that’s the product of thousands of years of social progress. What business does a celebrated thinker have advocating for something that seems so fundamentally thoughtless?
Our conception of anarchy has been colored by its most visible proponents — the black-clad protester breaking shop windows with a baseball bat and spray-painting a circled “A” in red. But, like most philosophies, anarchism and anarchists come in a variety of flavors. Mohandas Gandhi, for instance, has been described as an anarcho-pacifist. Noam Chomsky is an anarcho-syndicalist.
