One other dimension to Chomsky books: When I meet a Chomsky fan among my students, they are absolutely appreciative of his message, but suspect that part of that appreciation comes from the difficulty of finding anything similar. I suspect that a reader of Huntington or Nye would not have much trouble finding a similar message elsewhere.
On Sat, Apr 06, 2002 at 03:39:34PM -0500, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Michael Perelman wrote:
>
> >Doug, I wonder what mass following means. Wall Street was a successful
> >book, just like Chomsky's. Would you say that you have a mass following?
>
> Heavens no. Noam is a global star. You don't get to be among the 10
> most cited authors around (though I do wonder about the details of
> that claim) and not get noticed. What serious intellectual sells more
> books than Chomsky? I bet he sells many times more than Samuel
> Huntington or Joseph Nye. Of course they're ruling class
> intellectuals, which is why they're in the NYT. But you can't exactly
> say Chomsky is ignored. As Zizek said in my interview with him, it's
> not that people don't "know" things - ideology is a harder nut to
> crack than that.
>
> Doug
-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu