Noam Chomsky is, to put it mildly, a polarizing figure. For a particular species of left-wing campus activist he’s a kind of guru, someone who has penetrated the veil of illusion and seen reality as it really is. For certain conservatives and “serious” liberals he’s an ayatollah of anti-Americanism, a kind of ritual hate figure.

I’d read some Chomsky in the past, such as Profit over People, which is his take on “neo-liberal” economic policies like NAFTA. Recently, after having a conversation with a friend who thinks highly of Chomsky’s work, I picked up Hegemony or Survival, his analysis of post-World War II U.S. foreign policy and the “war on terror” as both the culmination of those trends and an ominous new stage in America’s bid for global supremacy. Much of it seems to be recycled from earlier works, but there is some good discussion of the run-up to the Iraq war in particular.

In terms of policy, I find I actually agree with Chomsky a lot of the time. I tend toward the anti-interventionist side of things and do think that recent developments in U.S. policy, such as the embrace of “preventive” war are malign indeed. Chomsky does seem to give more credence to the legitimacy of the UN than I would, which I find strange. As a self-styled “anarchist,” why does Chomsky think that an organization whose members consist of states be any more legitimate than those states themselves?

Apart from that, what I find least compelling in Chomsky’s style of analysis is what I would call his “dualism.” We might almost call it a form of Manicheeism. The forces of light and the forces of darkness are easily identifiable: the U.S. versus “world public opinion,” corporate and government elites versus the people, “neo-liberalism” versus democracy and so on. He doesn’t offer much in the way of argument for why we should regard one set of those pairs as good and the other as bad. For instance, instead of treating James Madison’s argument against unchecked majoritarianism as self-evidently evil and wrongheaded, Chomsky could provide us with reasons for preferring more purely democratic forms of government.

Instead, Chomsky tends to rely on narrow legal arguments, pointing out inconsistencies between the behavior of the U.S. government, and, say, its professed commitment to enforcing UN resolutions. While there’s certainly something to be said for making those arguments, I’d like to see something in the way of more substantial moral argument. Any political position has to rest, ultimately, on a moral vision of some kind, but by keeping this implicit Chomsky ends up making higly contentious claims as though they were self-evident and only an idiot could disagree.