Noam Chomsky Audiobooks

Noam Chomsky transformed one discipline before he became famous in another. Born in Philadelphia in 1928, he published Syntactic Structures in 1957 and rebuilt linguistics around the idea of a generative grammar, an innate structure underlying every human language. He taught at MIT for more than half a century and later at the University of Arizona.

His political writing began in earnest with opposition to the war in Vietnam and continued across dozens of books on American foreign policy, media and power. Manufacturing Consent, written with Edward S. Herman, set out a propaganda model of how ostensibly free media come to reflect the interests of the powerful, and it remains his most cited political work.

He is unusual among public intellectuals in method as much as in conclusion. The tone is flat, almost affectless; the arguments are assembled from documented record and from the official statements of the institutions he is criticising. Admirers and opponents alike concede that he has been one of the most widely read dissenting voices of the past sixty years.

Global Discontents is the strongest way into his work in audio. It gathers twelve interviews with David Barsamian, his long-standing interlocutor, on the rise of ISIS, mass surveillance, economic inequality, the Middle East and the question running under all of it: what sort of world is being left to the next generation.

Published within the American Empire Project strand, it is read by Chomsky himself, and the conversational format suits the ear far better than his denser written work. At around seven and a half hours it makes a manageable introduction to a very large body of writing.

Internationalism or Extinction, read by Christopher Ragland, is shorter still at a little over two hours, drawn from talks on nuclear weapons and the climate emergency. Have a look at what is available below and start with the conversations.