Is Chomsky the most important intellectual alive?

Question

http://www.zmag.org/chomskybooks.htm

Answer 1

I've heard of him, originally when I was researching some of the same types of books that you've listed there. He's got quite a bit of leftist literature and I've seen much of his stuff promoted by FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting). Because of how much he contributed to that area, I was surprised to learn in my psychology class that his main accomplishment was actually in linguistics where he proposed that all people have an innate ability to understand languages and that there is a "universal grammar."

However, I think to say that he is the most important intellectual alive would be a great overstatement. I looked at Wiki and found the same poll that you probably were looking at. As the bottom of the article explains, quite a few were excluded. I personally would have gone for Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, Brian Greene, and Peter Singer, but I have plenty of my own biases. I think that any labelling of someone as the most important intellectual requires going through all the geniuses in many different fields of study and labeling some area of study as more important than the others, which isn't very fair. Even within each area of study, picking the most important person would probably still be more of a popularity contest than anything else.

Answer 2

chomsky's good, but he is good at analysis, at trying to get americans to see that we are an extremely manipulated citizenry of an imperial power. does he offer many solutions?

Answer 3

Couldn't possibly be never heard of him:-)