Noam Chomsky is the most famous critic of US empire. No single living intellectual comes close. Indeed, as Daniel Bessner points out, “Chomsky is not just one of the most cited writers on the subject of US foreign relations; he’s that rare scholar who has made the leap from academia to popular culture.” In film, music, network TV sitcoms, he is referenced and name-dropped incessantly. If ordinary Americans know one intellectual it’s almost certainly Chomsky: Generations have read his works, which fiercely and forensically pick apart the horrors of American power abroad. But has his anti-imperialist politics changed over time? And what about its continuities still speak to our own age? In an essay-review of a new book by Chomsky and Nathan Robinson, Bessner examines the evolution of Chomsky’s anti-imperialist thinking and considers what core principles of his worldview still help explain the contemporary world. “Like almost all of Chomsky’s books,” Bessner writes of The Myth of American Idealism, “it fulfills the intellectual’s responsibility to speak the truth and to expose lies—including what Chomsky views as the biggest falsehood of them all: Americans’ naïve belief that their country is ‘committed to promoting democracy and human rights’ around the world.” But does it offer us a political vision to resist empire today—and in particular to capture and remake the American state? “If the left ever hopes to change US foreign policy,” writes Bessner, it will have to do more than just organize mass protests and resist propaganda. It will also need to develop an “understanding of how state power functions”—and one that cannot only critique empire from outside its halls of power but from within them too. Read “The Worlds of Noam Chomsky”