American Power and the New Mandarins

American Power and the New Mandarins

Author	Noam Chomsky
Publisher	Pantheon Books, New Press
Publication date	1969, 2002 (reprinted)
Media type	Paperback
Pages	432
ISBN	1-56584-775-X
OCLC	50727554

American Power and the New Mandarins is a book by the US academic Noam Chomsky, largely written in 1968, published in 1969. It was his first political book and sets out in detail his opposition to the Vietnam War.

He develops the arguments, laid out in The Responsibility of Intellectuals, that the American intellectual and technical class, in universities and in government (the New Mandarins), bear major responsibility for the atrocities perpetrated by the United States in Vietnam.

Chomsky argues, however, that US policy in Vietnam was largely successful. In Chomsky's view US policy was to destroy the nationalist movements in the South Vietnamese peasantry rather than to defend South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression. He holds that the former was accomplished rather successfully even if at the expense of the latter.

His fundamental point on the New Mandarins is that we should not uncritically accept the claim that technocratic approaches are neutral and beneficial. Chomsky writes: 'Quite generally, what grounds are there for supposing that those whose claim to power is based on knowledge and technique will be more benign in their exercise of power than those whose claim is based on wealth or aristocratic origin? On the contrary, one might expect the new mandarin to be dangerously arrogant, aggressive and incapable of adjusting to failure, as compared with his predecessor, whose claim to power was not diminished by honesty as to the limitations of his knowledge, lack of work to do or demonstrable mistakes.'

He also suggests that common presumptions about the greatness of the West and the modern age are misguided. He writes that these assumptions are created automatically regardless of real social conditions: 'one would expect any group with access to power and affluence to construct an ideology that will justify this state of affairs on the grounds of the general welfare.'

The book was reprinted by New Press in 2002 and contains a new foreword by Howard Zinn, an American historian and the author of A People's History of the United States.

Contents

• Foreword by Howard Zinn (2002 edition only)

1. Introduction
2. Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship
3. The Revolutionary Pacifism of A. J. Muste: On the Backgrounds of the Pacific War
4. The Logic of Withdrawal
5. The Bitter Heritage: A Review
6. Some Thoughts on Intellectuals and the Schools
7. The Responsibility of Intellectuals
8. On Resistance
9. Supplement to On Resistance
10. Epilogue

Several chapters of this book are available online. See external links below.

Synopsis

In his introduction, Chomsky predicts that Vietnamese opposition to U.S. involvement in the war would continue and that the U.S. would be unable to defeat the Viet Cong. He explains that many of the chapters originated as articles or lectures that he gave during his involvement in the anti-war movement, although admitted that he came to feel a "falseness" in these arguments because by entering into an intellectual argument with the proponents of the conflict, and thereby "accepting the presumption of legitimacy of debate on certain issues, one has already lost one's humanity".

Main arguments

Chomsky saw a Viet Cong victory in the war to be inevitable.

Publication

• New York, Pantheon Books [1969]
• New York, New Press [2002]

External links

• Book chapters available online: Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 6, Chapter 7
• Debate between Noam Chomsky & William F. Buckley, Jr., on Firing Line, over the book