SOURCE: “Noam Chomsky: Anarchy in the U.S.A.,” in Rolling Stone, May 28, 1992, pp. 42, 45-7, 70-3.

In the following interview, preceded by an overview of Chomsky's career, Chomsky discusses his political and social views, his objection to media control and ideology, and his book Deterring Democracy.

When Michael Albert went to Poland in 1980, he discovered that the Poles assumed there were two Noam Chomskys. “In linguistics, he's the Freud,” says Albert, Chomsky's editor at Z Magazine and a friend since the Sixties, when Albert, then a physics student, was organizing antiwar protests at MIT. “All the branches of modern linguistics stem from his work. And for over a quarter century his political analysis has inspired the peace movement. The Poles had no idea that one person could do all that.”

Maintaining two full-time careers has required sacrifice, of course. On a recent Saturday Night Live, as an obvious...