Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Because We Say So
    Because We Say So
    Because We Say So
    Audiobook5 hours

    Because We Say So

    Written by Noam Chomsky

    Narrated by James Patrick Cronin

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Because We Say So presents more than thirty concise, forceful commentaries on U.S. politics and global power. Written between 2011 and 2015, Noam Chomsky's arguments forge a persuasive counter-narrative to official accounts of U.S. politics and policies during global crisis. Find here classic Chomsky on the increasing urgency of climate change, the ongoing impact of Edward Snowden's whistleblowing, nuclear politics, cyberwar, terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Israel, and the Middle East, security and state power, as well as deeper reflections on the Obama doctrine, political philosophy, the Magna Carta, and the importance of a commons to democracy.

    Because We Say So is the third in a series of books by Chomsky published by City Lights Publishers that includes Making the Future (2012) and Interventions (2007), a book banned by U.S. military censors. Taken together, the three books present a complete collection of the articles Chomsky writes regularly for the New York Times Syndicate, and are largely ignored by newspapers in the United States. Because We Say So offers fierce, accessible, timely, gloves-off political writing by America's foremost public intellectual and political dissident.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 3, 2016
    ISBN9781515976387
    Because We Say So
    Author

    Noam Chomsky

    Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia in 1928 and studied at the university of Pennsylvania. Known as one of the principal founders of transformational-generative grammar, he later emerged as a critic of American politics. He wrote and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, contemporary issues. He is now a Professor of Linguistics at MIT, and the author of over 150 books.

    More audiobooks from Noam Chomsky

    Related to Because We Say So

    Related audiobooks

    Politics For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      What Universities Owe to the Liberal Project

      Jan 25, 2023

      We live in an era fraught with challenge. From a global pandemic to rising authoritarianism and a European war, the world is as fundamentally unsettled as it has been in nearly a century. Domestically, Americans face rising levels of polarization and

      14 min read

    • Article

      Unjust: Social Justice And The Unmaking Of America

      Nov 1, 2020

      By Noah Rothman Washington, D.C.: Regnery Gateway, 2019. Pp. xvi, 272. $28.99 hardcover. Social justice is all the rage nowadays. And all the rage is about social justice. Students are taking to university quads to demand action be taken on behalf of

      6 min read

    • Article

      Liberalism, More or Less

      Jul 11, 2022

      Liberalism, More or Less
      6 min read

    • Article

      Pankaj Mishra: We Committed Intellectual Suicide After 9/11

      Mar 20, 2017

      Historian and intellectual Pankaj Mishra’s latest book Age of Anger: A History of the Present, published earlier this month, presents what Mishra calls “an emotional history” at a time of “worldwide emergency” when rage fills the global political sph

      6 min read

    • Article

      'Can Democracy Work?' Considers The Perils And Pitfalls Of The Institution Across Time

      Oct 5, 2018

      Author and academic James Miller examines the idea of democracy in five distinct moments throughout human history, and chronicles how vastly different each iteration has been.

      3 min read

    • Article

      City Hall

      Dec 30, 2020

      City Hall
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Lesson of Virtue

      Jul 28, 2022

      Harvard Law School professor Adrian Vermeule recently launched his new book Common Good Constitutionalism. In last week’s edition of Beijing Review, Vermeule and John Pang, Malaysian senior fellow at Bard College in New York, described the shared cla

      4 min read

    • Article

      Why Are Famous Writers Attending the World’s Most Important Security Conference?

      Feb 17, 2017

      From February 17 to 19, the world’s powerful will gather in the south of Germany for the Munich Security Conference (MSC), a key event on the global political agenda. Over 100 ministers, 30 heads of state, and key decision makers including Mike Pence

      4 min read

    • Article

      We Need To Reframe The Way We Thinkabout “Free Speech”

      Jun 29, 2023

      NO IDEA IS MORE LOATHED TODAY, especially on the Right (how times change), than censorship. Nothing is worse, we are told, than being “censorious”, and seeking to end “vigorous debate” in the “marketplace of ideas”. But what exactly ensures that a de

      11 min read

    • Article

      Much Ado About Nothing

      Aug 17, 2020

      Much Ado About Nothing
      3 min read

    • Article

      Beware of Bad Ideas

      Dec 23, 2020

      Beware of Bad Ideas
      9 min read

    • Article

      The Mirage of Democratic Excesses: Hayek’s Law, Legislation, and Liberty

      Jan 1, 2020

      In the 1950s, Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) was already a well-respected intellectual, with important contributions to monetary theory, the theory of business cycles, the methodology of economics, and capital theory. Furthermore, he had already begun h

      14 min read

    • Article

      The American Crisis

      Sep 12, 2018

      The American Crisis
      5 min read

    • Article

      Introduction: Populism, Self-Government, and Liberty

      Aug 4, 2021

      Populist and neoliberal are epithets: anyone who uses one of these terms as a description doesn’t belong to the group being described. The more extreme stand-ins— socialist for the Left and fascist for the Right—are hyperbolic and hackneyed, so popul

      15 min read

    • Article

      A Crisis Of Truths

      Jan 27, 2022

      A Crisis Of Truths
      9 min read

    • Article

      What Does It Mean To Be ‘Conservative’ In The Trump Era?

      Jan 11, 2019

      The outsider presidency has challenged core conservative principles, such as commitment to free markets and limited government spending. As factions seek to define this new era, what is replacing “official conservatism?”

      7 min read

    • Article

      Introduction: The Political Economy of Great Works of Literature

      Nov 1, 2020

      The Independent Review aims to be an “interdisciplinary journal devoted to the study of political economy and the critical analysis of government policy,” which covers “economics, political science, law, history, philosophy, and sociology.”1 This iss

      6 min read

    • Article

      Power To The People

      Jan 17, 2022

      Power To The People
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, And The Struggle For The Soul Of Libertarianism

      Feb 2, 2024

      By Matt Zwolinski and John Tomasi Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2023. Pp. x, 416. $35 hardcover. The Individualists is a work of academic philosophy at once remarkably ambitious and highly accessible. Seasoned academics and general aud

      6 min read

    • Article

      Blame It All On John Locke?

      Jul 17, 2020

      Blame It All On John Locke?
      14 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Because We Say So

    4.5/5

    96 ratings8 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      Extraordinary book as I highly recommend it! A must read!

      3 people found this helpful

    • 1/5
      I've read a couple of Noams books and let me first say I value his clear eyed perspective as to American exceptionolism as well as regarding a few other hypocrisies and subjects such as climate and Snowden. I think he comes across better and more balanced in interviews than in his articles. Now to the point. In his articles I found a an exposition followed by condemnation, in my opinion very hypocrily and without depth and broad understanding. Also I was disturbed by selective fact use. For example: he compares extradition to Cuba, with whom there is no such treaty, to extradition from Sweden or somewhere where there is, and calls it hypocrisy. He would like Arabs to defend themselves including with nuclear Arsenal's, and disregards threats they make to use such. He also naively considers any nations word to be good and any nations use of a power vacuum to be benign, except for the United States. I also find him unduly obsessed with Israel. Fully a quarter of the book with the remainder on the United States. No other nation is mentioned. So forgive me for discussing Israel as well. I find chompsky misleading in quoting the world in saying the us is the greatest threat to peace, which might be true, but does not mean it is bad nor that without this policing the world would not have a far greater threat to peace from elsewhere. In his mind Israel should keep the Oslo accords one sidedly, a hypocrisy, and also should be held to have captured territory taken in defensive action in '48 and '67, a war he by the way that he claims Israel started, which I false. Nowhere does he even mention Arab aggression except to tell about a poor protester with a sign saying I was bombed and so I shot rockets. What about the wars of extinction fought multiple times by massive armies against a un given charter? Why are all nations benign and all organizations cheritible except American and Israeli? In chapter 34, the last one, he talks about Hamas as a wonderful organization wanting a reasonable two state solution, forgetting that it's charter demands Israel's extinction. In the same chapter he falsley claims Israel kept Sinai instead of a peace with Egypt which is a lie from whole cloth. I am quite upset at chompsky and would recommend reading only chapters 27, 29, 30, 32. I found the remainder misleading and hypocritical when not outright false. Wether you agree or not I think the most damning thing I can say is that this book did not leave me feeling enlightened and with a broader and better grasp of the world; the reason I picked it up.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 1/5
      Not sure what the goal of this book is.
      It you are past the 20 minutes into glorifying Noah Chomsky, you are presented with nothing but criticism of what is all wrong in the world (because corporatism is all evil supposedly, socialists view) with no analysis or even an attempted solution.
      Alex Jones narrating it would have been a perfect fit for the presentation of the content, criticism after criticism with no contribution of any solution, or if so, only to a level of a random guy you pick of the street.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Great book . I full of facts about us behavior around the world
    • 5/5
      Eye opener and clearly explains why we are where we are.
    • 5/5
      Grat book!!! The interventions of the US all around the words affairs is shameful.
    • 2/5
      Chapters cut off. The book itself is good. The quality of the reading is not.
    • 5/5
      Whatever the world may think, U.S. actions are legitimate because we say so. The principle was enunciated by the eminent statesman Dean Acheson in 1962, when he instructed the American Society of International Law that no legal issue arises when the United States responds to a challenge to its “power, position, and prestige”.Because We Say So contains thirty short articles by Noam Chomsky written between 2011and 2014. Chomsky is a world-renowned academician who is often considered ‘the father of linguistics’ and is Professor Emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he has taught since 1955. But he is probably best known for his political activism and radical commentary – as Henry A. Giroux points out in the Foreword, something of an American tradition but which have made him ‘appear to be an exile in his own country by virtue of his constant dissent, the shock of his acts of translation, and his displays of fierce courage’. So much so, in fact, that Interventions, a collection of his commentaries released in 2007 was banned for distribution in Guantanamo Bay by the U.S. military. Yet, despite the fact that he gets little notice by the mainstream media in the US and is frequently shunned by both conservatives and liberals, he is probably the most well-known and respected American intellectual throughout most of the rest of the world. Given that he is an outspoken critic of America’s role in the world and its refusal to sign accords concerning such issues as poverty, making the Middle East a WMD-free zone, and climate change all of which he discusses in these essays, it is perhaps not surprising. But, unlike too many intellectuals and academicians, Chomsky never uses ‘university-speak’ and he never talks down to his audience – he speaks from his knowledge and his intellect, yes, but he also and always speaks from his heart.And these short essays go a long way in explaining why he holds such a place of renown throughout most of the world. His commentaries always provide a well-informed, well-thought-out and principled counterpoint to the messages offered by the mainstream media whether it is the accepted justification for drone strikes, giving aboriginal or ‘unpeople’ a voice, the falsehoods of accepted history, the urgency of climate change, or what constitutes the Common Good. Whether you agree or disagree with his arguments, they are always well-researched, well thought out, cogent, on point, and timely and they give you a perspective you will never get in those mainstream news outlets including the so-called liberal ones.