‘Few disagree that language has been a game-changer for the human species. But just how we came by language remains hotly contested. In Decoding Chomsky, Chris Knight strides into this minefield to bravely replace miraculous leaps and teleology with a proposal that actually makes evolutionary sense.’
– Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, author of Mother Nature and Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding
‘Chris Knight has done the intellectual world a favour by exploring, with a critical and comprehending eye, the twists and turns of the thought of Noam Chomsky, surely one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Anyone who wants to understand the political and intellectual development of ideas that have dramatically altered modern science and political activism should read this book.
We already have a plethora of hagiographies of Chomsky. This more critical examination of the two domains of Chomsky’s thought and sources of his fame is unusual in its insight and in its frankness in “telling it like it is”. Reading this book, I now better understand Chomsky’s fame in terms of the zeitgeist which he rode so well to the zenith of the intellectual world. I strongly recommend Decoding Chomsky to anyone interested in the intellectual history of the last seventy years.’
‘This is Chomsky from a new perspective, the perspective of a social anthropologist. It connects his science with his politics in a novel and convincing way. Knight has dug deeper and made more interconnections than anyone has done before. The result is truly revelatory.’
– Michael Tomasello, author of A Natural History of Human Thinking
‘Decoding Chomsky is one of the most exciting scholarly books I have read in years. Only someone with Knight’s extensive background in both linguistics and politics could have written it. It builds on and synthesizes earlier work on a topic Chomsky has always resisted: the relationship between his linguistic and his political work. Knight suggests that Chomsky’s work played a key role in depoliticizing an academy that was seen as leaning too far to the left. It helps explain how one of the most vocal critics of US militarism can have worked at one of the most militarized universities in the US, and been the recipient of significant direct funding from the military. It also helps to explain why Chomsky’s thinking can have been so remarkably influential. Knight’s book forces readers to rethink key questions about politics and linguistics; it will be required reading for anyone at all interested in the history of intellectual and political thought since the 1950s.’
– David Golumbia, author of The Cultural Logic of Computation
“Extraordinary… will make uncomfortable reading for some because, while Knight celebrates Chomsky’s anti-racist and anti-imperialist politics, he reminds us of the other Chomsky… working in one of the Pentagon’s most prestigious laboratories.”
—Jackie Knight, Labour Briefing
“Trenchant and compelling.”
(Marek Kahn New Scientist 2016-11-01)
“Decoding Chomsky, by Chris Knight, was a decade in the making and may be the most in-depth meditation on ‘the Chomsky problem’ ever published. . . . A compelling read.”
(Tom Bartlett Chronicle Review)
Chris Knight is currently senior research fellow in the department of anthropology at University College, London, focusing his research on the evolutionary emergence of human language and symbolic culture. He lives in London.