[In the following review, Osborne discusses Chomsky's political activities and offers positive assessment of The Chomsky Reader and The Culture of Terror.]

There was much concern among American political scientists in the late 1970s about the spread of something they called “Vietnam Syndrome”. This was not, as might be supposed, anything to do with the US government's apparently incurable tendency to intervene militarily in the internal affairs of foreign states. Rather, it was a condition taken to be affecting the American people themselves: a morbid aversion to the consequences of just such interventions.

If, despite the tactical adjustment represented by the use of proxies in Central America, this syndrome remains at all widespread (and there is evidence to suggest that it does), it is largely thanks to Noam Chomsky and those like him, who have devoted their time and energy to publicising and documenting the human rights abuses which are so integral a part of US foreign policy. More than anyone else, perhaps, Chomsky has acted as the moral conscience of the American people; holding up a mirror to the acts of government in order to show just what it means to the people of Third World countries for their governments to become the recipients of “humanitarian aid” from the USA.

Chomsky is probably best known in Britain for his work in linguistics. Yet, as the lengthy interview about his intellectual development which prefaces The Chomsky Reader reveals, politics and its morality (or, more generally, its lack of it) has always been his main concern. Brought up in the cauldron of Jewish radicalism amongst the East coast immigrant communities of the United States before the war, Chomsky's political roots lie deep in the European anarchist and syndicalist traditions of the 1930s. And it is anarchist themes which continue to dominate his work: the critique of the state and of the complicity of intellectuals in justifying and sustaining its abuses of power; the violence and hypocrisy which underlie the liberal-democratic “consensus”; and, perhaps most important of all, an emphasis on the role of popular-democratic movements in the maintenance and extension of political freedoms.

The pieces collected together to form The Chomsky Reader range across the spectrum of Chomsky's political writings: from his essays on the responsibilities of intellectuals from the mid-'60s to excerpts and articles from the '80s on the New Cold War, the Middle East and Central America. A number of things stand out. One is the sheer geographical range of his interests, as he records the grim consequences of America's global role. Another, the thematic unity which nonetheless underlies and structures his depiction of that role. A third is the single-mindedness and moral seriousness with which he pursues his theme: the steady accumulation of evidence, the clarity and directness of the narrative line, the incisive use of historical and cross-cultural comparisons.

The argument—that economic self-interest, pursued by violence abroad and secrecy and deceit at home, lies at the core of American history—is a familiar one. It is in the detail of the demonstration and the disgust at its consequences (exemplified once more in his two recent pieces in the New Statesman) that the power of Chomsky's writing lies. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms (freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear), he argues, have in practice always been subordinated to a Fifth: “the freedom to rob, to exploit and dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced”. It is through a deepening of his sense of the complexity of the processes through which this “Fifth Freedom” is exercised that Chomsky's writings have grown in strength over the years.

The renewed vigour which this gradual deepening of political perspective has imparted to Chomsky's work is displayed at full strength in The Culture of Terrorism, the latest in a series of analyses of the current operational state of US policy. The book began life as a postscript to certain foreign editions of Turning the Tide (1985). This was subsequently expanded and appears now as what is effectively a companion volume to Chomsky's recent Managua lectures, published in the USA in 1987 as On Power and Ideology. Its topic is the twists and turns of policy which have followed the Iran-contra scandal since the autumn of 1986; its theme: the light which this episode throws upon the basic character of American political culture, and upon the possible constraints which may nonetheless be imposed upon the exercise of power within this culture, however indirectly, by popular protest.

In particular, Chomsky is concerned to stress the “not insubstantial achievement” of popular oppositional movements in forcing US state terror underground in the late 1970s. For, he argues, this created the conditions for the foreign policy scandals of the mid-1980s. These have, if only temporarily, both weakened the government's position and given a fresh impulse to the opposition. This, in turn, has created a small “window of opportunity” for regional attempts to secure an alternative basis for the resolution of current conflicts. And what Chomsky maintains is that the “passive compliance” of those who fail actively to oppose the existing system is at base no different, morally, from that of those who chose “to look the other way” during the persecution of Jews in Germany in the '30s.

One may have reservations about the way in which, in certain of his more theoretical pieces, Chomsky seems to over-generalise his critique of American political science to throw doubt upon the usefulness of any social scientific approach to human behaviour; or harbour doubts about the moral simplicity of his populism. Yet it is precisely in this simplicity that the distinctiveness of Chomsky's contribution to the political thought of the time lies.