> Does this mean that Chomsky is sympathetic to the conservative
> argument? Wouldn't that be to concede too much to The Individual as
> the basic atom of society? It's not far from that to "there no such
> thing as society, only individuals and their families," is it? What's
> wrong with undermining market principles? Isn't there something
> positive to the emergence of the corporation as a planning unit? Or
> is Chomsky taking a libertarian position here, and dismissing the
> Marxian reading of the corporation as partly progressive?
>
> Doug
Or: how much does libertarianism resemble libertarianism?
I don't presume to know what goes on in Chomsky's head, but I suppose that the key term is "planning unit." If the relevant function of coorporations is to coerce workers and distribute tasks in an authoritarian fashion for the sake of extracting their labour, then I think Chomsky would indeed take the libertarian line. But if the relevant aspect is something about the technical structure of production - say, the need to have a unit of 2,000 people to build a cat scan machine - then I guess this would fall into Chomsky's "justified authority" clause. (There is a precedent for that in his discussion of US economic organization in WWII, incidentally.) Or perhaps you can organise 2,000 people (or 20,000; or a million) without coercion. It's pretty nebulous stuff. I guess the retort would be that such questions have to be settled on a case-by-case fashion, there is no overall theory, there are no Knowable Facts in human affairs, our social sciences have not Progressed enough, etc.
Thiago, who has read far too much Chomsky for his own good.
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