Noam Chomsky (b. 1928) grew up in New York City, and studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where he majored in Linguistics. By the turn of the 1960s, he was coming to be recognized as a leader in his field, pioneer of a powerful new approach to syntax and an incisive critic of the prevailing behaviourist ethos in cognitive psychology. Not long afterwards he also emerged as one of the boldest opponents of the US war in Vietnam. His essay ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals’, published in the New York Review of Books in early 1967, was a J’accuse for its time and place, a meticulous, unflagging indictment of Washington’s serviceable policy and technical intelligentsias, their key role in sustaining the war and their personal investments in doing so. The book-length version of the essay came out as American Power and the New Mandarins in 1969—the year in which he gave this interview.

Within twelve months, in May 1970, as the war and the resistance alike grew fiercer, troopers of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a peaceful campus demonstration at Kent State University. Four students died and nine were injured; the anti-war movement responded with a country-wide strike involving some four million students. The Paris Peace Accords ending direct US military involvement in Vietnam were signed eighteen months later, in January 1973.

Chomsky has continued to make major contributions to linguistics, cognitive psychology and the philosophy of mind. American Power and the New Mandarins was the first of his forty or more works of political advocacy and exposure.