The Responsibility of Intellectuals

The Responsibility of Intellectuals is an essay by the US academic Noam Chomsky which was published as a special supplement by the The New York Review of Books on the 23rd of February 1967.

The article is an attack on the intellectual culture in the United States which Chomsky argues is largely subservient to power. He is particularly critical of social scientists and technocrats who he believed were providing a pseudo-scientific justification for the crimes of the state in particular those relating to the Vietnam War. He notes that those who opposed the war on moral rather than technical grounds are "often psychologists, mathematicians, chemists, or philosophers...rather than people with Washington contacts, who, of course, realize that 'had they a new, good idea about Vietnam, they would get a prompt and respectful hearing' in Washington."

The topic was inspired by articles of Dwight Macdonald published after the Second World War who "asks the question: To what extent were the German or Japanese people responsible for the atrocities committed by their governments? And, quite properly...turns the question back to us: To what extent are the British or American people responsible for the vicious terror bombings of civilians, perfected as a technique of warfare by the Western democracies and reaching their culmination in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely among the most unspeakable crimes in history."

The article brought Chomsky to public attention as the leading American intellectual in the movement against the Vietnam war.

Let me finally return to Dwight Macdonald and the responsibility of intellectuals. Macdonald quotes an interview with a death-camp paymaster who burst into tears when told that the Russians would hang him. "Why should they? What have I done?" he asked. Macdonald concludes: "Only those who are willing to resist authority themselves when it conflicts too intolerably with their personal moral code, only they have the right to condemn the death-camp paymaster." The question, "What have I done?" is one that we may well ask ourselves, as we read each day of fresh atrocities in Vietnam—as we create, or mouth, or tolerate the deceptions that will be used to justify the next defense of freedom.

— Chomsky, The Responsibility of Intellectuals 1967