But he claims that, in Chomsky's case, the conflicts intrinsic to his institutional situation forced him to drive an unusually deep and damaging wedge between his politics and his science.

Knight points out that Chomsky began his career working in an electronics laboratory whose primary technological mission he detested on moral and political grounds.

In fact, a good deal of the [nuclear] missile guidance technology was developed right on the MIT campus and in laboratories run by the university.

By way of evidence, Knight cites George Steiner in a 1967 The New York Review of Books article, "Will Noam Chomsky announce that he will stop teaching at MIT or anywhere in this country so long as torture and napalm go on?

Chomsky said, "I have given a good bit of thought to the specific suggestions that you put forth... leaving the country or resigning from MIT, which is, more than any other university, associated with activities of the department of 'defense.'

[13]In order to maintain his moral and political integrity, Knight argues, Chomsky resolved to limit his cooperation to pure linguistic theory of such an abstract kind that it could not conceivably have any military use.

One damaging consequence, according to Knight, was that scientific investigation of the ways in which real human beings use language became divorced from what quickly became the prevailing MIT school of formal linguistic theory.

To an unprecedented extent, according to Knight, mind in this way became divorced from body, thought from action, and knowledge from its practical applications, these disconnects characterizing a philosophical paradigm which came to dominate much of intellectual life for half a century across the Western world.

Negative In Current Affairs, Norbert Hornstein and Nathan J. Robinson dismiss the book as exhibiting a complete misunderstanding of Chomsky's linguistic theories and beliefs.

[14] In Moment, Robert Barsky wrote that, since Knight was never formally trained in Chomsky's conception of theoretical linguistics, he has no right to comment on whether it stands up as science.

Stone states that, although Knight aligns himself with the political Left, "the level of venom on display here exceeds that of all but the most unhinged of Chomsky’s detractors on the Right."

[27] In Anarchist Studies Peter Seyferth said the book "focuses on all the major phases of Chomsky's linguistic theories, their institutional preconditions and their ideological and political ramifications.

[32] In her most recent book, Father Time: A Natural History of Men and Babies, she praises Knight for dismissing as 'a kind of madness' Chomsky's idea that language somehow emerged in our species suddenly and independently of previous Darwinian evolution.

Later their focus shifted and Knight cites Air Force Colonel Edmund Gaines’ statement that: "We sponsored linguistic research in order to learn how to build command and control systems that could understand English queries directly.

Knight cites other documents that he claims show that Chomsky's student, Lieutenant Samuel Jay Keyser, did apply Chomskyan theory to the control of military aircraft, including the B-58 nuclear-armed bomber.