March 20, 2007
Amazon Rankings and Noam Chomsky Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:15 AM EST Alexander Burns writes, “In the case of Mr. Buchanan, his latest book, State of Emergency, has an Amazon.com sales rank of 6,763. In comparison, Noam Chomsky’s latest, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy, is ranked at 12,783. The latter is probably a good example of the kind of academic disliked by Mr. Barone, but if Amazon is any guide, his following is rather less impressive than the supposedly marginal Buchanan’s.” I don’t think it is any reliable guide. This morning State of Emergency is at 6,655 and Failed States at 4,180. When the rankings are this low, selling two books can push the book’s rank way up for a day. Both books have been out for more than six months, which is the period within which most books sell 95 percent of all the copies they are going to sell. While I have not read his books (I’d rather read almost anything else), Noam Chomsky, it seems, is indeed the very apotheosis of the America-hating academic. While perhaps the world’s greatest living linguist, in the completely unrelated field of international politics, he seems to be the victim of an intellectual disorder, an idée fixe that America is this monstrous imperial state bent on world domination. If Chomsky is right, then America is certainly a remarkably incompetent monstrous imperial state. And, of course, if one assumes his premise, than the conclusion is inescapable that the American people are 300 million supine sheep, content with the shadow of democracy while being led by the evil shepherds of the military-industrial complex. That’s not the American people I know. And the American media must either be a vast conspiracy in cahoots with the evil shepherds or too stupid to know what is going on. As George Orwell famously wrote, “There are some ideas that are so stupid only an intellectual could believe them.” Were his deserved reputation in linguistics less formidable, Noam Chomsky would be regarded as a nut case when it came to politics.
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