MIT Press, “How George Orwell Paved Noam Chomsky’s Path to Anarchism”

Unlike the many members of the left who captivated him as a young man — such as Dwight Macdonald, George Orwell, and Bertrand Russell — Noam Chomsky himself did not come to left-libertarian or anarchist thinking as a result of his disillusionment with liberal thought. He quite literally started there. At a tender age, he had begun his search for information on contemporary left-libertarian movements, and did not abandon it. Among those figures he was drawn to, George Orwell is especially fascinating, both because of the impact that he had on a broad spectrum of society and the numerous contacts and acquaintances he had in the libertarian left. Chomsky refers to Orwell frequently in his political writings, and when one reads Orwell’s works, the reasons for his attraction to someone interested in the Spanish Civil War from an anarchist perspective become clear.