Noam Chomsky Quotes About Enlightenment

• There have been many measures taken to try to turn the educational system towards more control, more indoctrination, more vocational training, imposing a debt, which traps students and young people into a life of conformity... That's the exact opposite of [what] traditionally comes out of The Enlightenment. And there's a constant struggle between those. In the colleges, in the schools, do you train for passing tests, or do you train for creative inquiry?

  Noam Chomsky

  Educational, Taken, Struggle

• ... an essential feature of a decent society, and an almost defining feature of a democratic society, is relative equality of outcome - not opportunity, but outcome. Without that you can't seriously talk about a democratic state... These concepts of the common good have a long life. They lie right at the core of classical liberalism, of Enlightenment thinking... Like Aristotle, [Adam] Smith understood that the common good will require substantial intervention to assure lasting prosperity of the poor by distribution of public revenues.

  Noam Chomsky

  Lying, Opportunity, Thinking

• Libertarian socialism is properly to be regarded as the inheritor of the liberal ideals of the Enlightenment.

  Noam Chomsky

  Enlightenment, Libertarian, Socialism

  Noam Chomsky (2013). “The Essential Chomsky”, p.115, The New Press

• With the development of industrial capitalism, a new and unanticipated system of injustice, it is libertarian socialism that has preserved and extended the radical humanist message of the Enlightenment and the classical liberal ideals that were perverted into an ideology to sustain the emerging social order.

  Noam Chomsky

  Order, Enlightenment, Development

  Noam Chomsky (2013). “The Essential Chomsky”, p.114, The New Press

• Marx's early manuscripts, with their roots in the Enlightenment and Romanticism, derived fundamental concepts such as alienation from a conception of human nature - what we would call genetically determined.

  Noam Chomsky

  Roots, Enlightenment, Fundamentals

  Source: libcom.org

• Adam Smith is an egalitarian, he believed in equality of outcome, not opportunity. He is an enlightenment figure, pre-capitalist. He says, suppose in England, one landowner got most of the land and other people would have nothing to live on. He says it wouldn't matter much, because the rich land owner, by virtue of his sympathy for other people would distribute resources among them, so that by an invisible hand, we would end up with a pretty egalitarian society. That is his conception of human nature.

  Noam Chomsky

  Opportunity, Invisible Hand, Hands

  Source: pennpoliticalreview.org

• There's a strong nativist tradition - saying, "we have to protect ourselves" - that comes from the founding of the country. If you read Benjamin Franklin, who was one of the leading figures of the Enlightenment in the United States and the most distinguished representative of the movement here, he actually advised that the newly founded republic should block Germans and Swedes because they were too "swarthy" - dark.

  Noam Chomsky

  Country, Strong, Block

  Source: thehumanist.com

• I am a child of the Enlightenment. I think irrational belief is a dangerous phenomenon, and I try to consciously avoid irrational belief. On the other hand, I certainly recognize that it's a major phenomenon for people in general, and you can understand why it would be. It does, apparently, provide personal sustenance, but also bonds of association and solidarity and a means for expressing elements of one's personality that are often very valuable elements. To many people it does that. In my view, there's nothing wrong with that.

  Noam Chomsky

  Children, Mean, Thinking

  Source: chomsky.info

• Thomas Jefferson, the leading Enlightenment figure in the United States, along with Benjamin Franklin, who took exactly the same view, argued that dependence will lead to "subservience and venality", and will "suffocate the germs of virtue". And remember, by dependence he meant wage labor, which was considered an abomination under classical liberal principles.

  Noam Chomsky

  Views, Enlightenment, Principles

  "Education and Democracy". Talk at Michigan State University, March 28, 1995.

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