Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship

Why should a liberal intellectual be so persuaded of the virtues of a political system of four-year dictatorship? The answer seems all too plain.—from Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship

Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship is Chomsky's powerful indictment of a liberal intelligentsia that provided self-serving arguments for war in Vietnam—legitimizing US commitment to autocratic rule and intervention in Asia as the tasks of "pacification theory." Including Chomsky's analysis of the Spanish Civil War as a revolutionary war from below, this book lays bare the reluctance of scholarly elites to engage in mass movements and social change, revealing not objectivity, but its opposite—the use of ideology to mask self-interest. Hailed by The Nation as "the first significant work of social and political thought to come out of the Vietnamese catastrophe," Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship is an indispensable lens through which to consider mainstream punditry today.