American Power and the New Mandarins

Chomsky's 1969 collection — the political-essays debut that established him as a public intellectual

Tradition: American left-libertarian socialism / anti-imperialism / political philosophy of US foreign policy

Chomsky's 1969 political debut — the New Mandarins and US conduct in Vietnam

Published by Pantheon in 1969, 'American Power and the New Mandarins' is Chomsky's first major collection of political essays and the book that established him as a major public intellectual outside the narrow community of generative linguistics (Chomsky had been the leading younger linguist of the post-1957 generative-grammar revolution; his political writing had been confined to occasional pieces in the early 1960s before the major 'Responsibility of Intellectuals' essay of 1967). The book is built around 'The Responsibility of Intellectuals' (1967, originally published in the New York Review of Books) — the essay that had made Chomsky's anti-war reputation. The essay argues that intellectuals — the 'new mandarins' of US policy, the academic-political-bureaucratic class who staff the institutions of contemporary state power — have a special responsibility to expose the lies that underwrite imperial violence; the historical record of US conduct in Vietnam (and earlier in the Caribbean, Latin America, the Philippines, and the broader twentieth-century US imperial project) is not a matter of well-intentioned mistakes but of deliberate deception about the actual interests of US power. The other essays in the collection treat: the historical background of the Vietnam War; US Cold-War foreign policy; the failure of liberal-cold-warrior intellectuals (Arthur Schlesinger, Walt Rostow, McGeorge Bundy — the so-called 'best and brightest'); the moral logic of American imperial power; the relations between scholarly social science and state-imperial purposes; the question of what alternatives to the imperial system are conceivable. The book is methodologically distinctive in combining careful documentary-historical research (Chomsky's anti-war work was characterised throughout by careful citation of US government documents, congressional testimony, and primary historical sources) with sharp moral-political argument. It established Chomsky as a major American public intellectual and inaugurated the political-philosophical career that would extend through dozens of subsequent books across five decades.