Chomsky, the State and the True Believer

Abstract

The best way to begin Noam Chomsky's For Reasons of State is to read the epigraph, a lengthy quotation from the nineteenth-century anarchist saint, Mikhail Bakunin, from which the title is taken. Central to it is an impassioned assertion that “the entire history of ancient and modern states is merely a series of revolting crimes” and that kings, ministers, statesmen, bureaucrats and warriors, past and present, “if judged from the standpoint of simple morality and human justice, have a hundred, a thousand times over earned their sentence to hard labor or to the gallows.” It is a fiery and, in more ways than Chomsky may have intended, an entirely appropriate invocation. This is the Bakunin who appears later in the book, in “Notes on Anarchism,” as the eloquent sniffer-out of the coming “red bureaucracy,” the confessed “fanatic lover of liberty,” the prophet of thai “intelligent and truly noble part of youth” that will ultimately adopt the cause of the people.