1 See, for example, Stephen Ambrose, ‘Recent Books on International Relations’, in Foreign Affairs, 72:4 (September, October 2003), p. 161.

2 See Noam Chomsky, Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, (eds), Peter Mitchell and John Schoeffel (New York: The New Press, 2002), pp. 227–9; and Milan Rai, Chomsky's Politics (London: Verso, 1995), pp. 94–5.

3 See Alison Edgley, The Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 42–79; James McGilvray, Chomsky: Language, Mind, and Politics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), pp. 177–203; Rai, Chomsky's Politics, pp. 96–7; and Neil Smith, Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 176–188.

4 Marky Laffey is, to my knowledge, the first to have used the phrase ‘left realist’ as well as to have connected it with Chomsky's politics. This paper is substantially a working out of Laffey's critical insight. See Mark Laffey, ‘Discerning the Patterns of World Order: Noam Chomsky and International Theory After the Cold War’, in Review of International Studies, 29:4 (2003), pp. 587–604.

5 See Robert O. Keohane, (ed.), Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), p. 7.

6 Stephen M. Walt, ‘International Relations: One World, Many Theories’, in Foreign Policy, Spring 1998, 110, pp. 29–44.

7 E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (New York: Perennial Books, 1939) p. 10.

8 Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: The New Press, 1969), p. 203.

9 Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War: U.S. Foreign Policy From Vietnam to Reagan (New York: The New Press, 1982), p. 93.

10 Morgenthau as cited in Noam Chomsky, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom (New York: The New Press, 1971), pp. 76–7.

11 Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 19

12 Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, pp. 79–80.

13 Reinhold Niebuhr, ‘Augustine's Political Realism’, in The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, (ed.), Robert McAfee Brown (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 123.

14 The ‘idealistic’ Wilson of international relations textbooks appears in a very different light in Walter Karp's Politics of War, in which he is seen manipulating the public to advance an unpopular war agenda in line with the interests of oligarchic elites and his personal ambitions, and ruthlessly suppressing political dissent and free speech through such draconian measures as the Espionage Act of 1917. See Walter Karp, The Politics of War (New York: Harper and Row, 1979).

15 Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, p. 10.

16 Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, p. 75.

17 Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War, pp. 103–6; see also Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Braintrust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1977).

18 Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, p. 165.

19 Ibid., p. 353.

20 George Kennan, ‘Policy Planning Study 23’, in Thomas H. Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis, Containment: Documents on American Policy and Strategy, 1945–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), pp. 226–7.

21 Kennan as cited in Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1984), p. 107.

22 President Eisenhower explained US policy in Vietnam in 1953 in the following terms: ‘If Indo-China goes, the tin and tungsten we so greatly value would cease coming. We are after the cheapest way to prevent the occurrence of something terrible – the loss of our ability to get what we want from the riches of the Indo-Chinese territory and from Southeast Asia’. Yet tin and tungsten cannot explain the scale and ferocity of America's efforts to pacify Vietnam over the next two decades. ‘The answer is no different in the case of America than in that of any other imperial power’, wrote Bertrand Russell. ‘The objects are domination, markets, cheap labor, raw materials, conscript armies and strategic points from which to control or threaten. If all of these factors do not apply to Vietnam itself, there is certain knowledge in Washington that the example of a successful Vietnamese uprising will destroy the empire by destroying the myth of American invincibility. What can happen in Vietnam can be repeated’. See John Duffett (ed.), Against the Crime of Silence: Proceedings of the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal (New York: O'Hare Books, 1968), pp. 4,19.

23 Niccolò Macchiavelli, The Prince (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1995), p. 9.

24 See Hans Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), p. 6; and Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, p. 73.

25 Chomsky, For Reasons of State (New York: The New Press, 1972), p. xxiv.

26 Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions (New York: South End Press, 1989), pp. 18–20.

27 The willingness of most people to obey orders from perceived authority figures, even to the point of inflicting brutality on strangers, Stanley Milgram observed in his classic psychological experiments, ‘is embedded in a larger atmosphere where social relationships, career aspirations, and technical routines set the dominant tone. Typically, we do not find […] a pathologically aggressive man ruthlessly exploiting a position of power, but a functionary who has been given a job to do and who strives to create an impression of competence in his work’. See Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), p. 187.

28 Chomsky, Understanding Power, p. 268.

29 Chomsky, For Reasons of State, p. xiii.

30 Thucydides, On Justice, Power, and Human Nature: Selections from The History of the Peloponnesian War, (ed.), Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), p. 104.

31 Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, pp. 330–1; see also Chomsky, For Reasons of State, p. 221.

32 Noam Chomsky, Power and Terror: Post 9/11 Talks and Interviews (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003), p. 119.

33 Noam Chomsky, ‘Simple Truths, Hard Problems: Some Thoughts on Terror, Justice, and Self-Defence’, in Philosophy, 80:1 (January 2005), p. 5. Waltzian neo-realists might criticise these statements of Chomsky's on methodological grounds as reflecting a reductive ‘second-image’ level of analysis. It seems to this reader, though, that Chomsky explains structural and systemic aspects of international relations from the most logical perspective available, namely, on the assumption that the structural dynamics of any global order, in an anarchic world, will be dictated by the most powerful states. See Kenneth Waltz, ‘Reductionist and Systemic Theories’, in Neorealism and its Critics, pp. 47–69.

34 See Noam Chomsky, Profit Over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order (New York: Seven Story Press, 1998); and A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor and the Standards of the West (New York: Verso, 2001).

35 Barry Buzan, ‘The Timeless Wisdom of Realism?’, in Steve Smith, Ken Booth and Marysia Zalewski (eds), International Theory: Positivism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 62.

36 Laffey, ‘Discerning the Patterns of World Order: Noam Chomsky and International Theory After the Cold War’, p. 595.

37 Laffey would include Nietzsche on this list as well. Yet while Nietzsche may have inspired Foucault and Weber in critical ways, attempts to appropriate Nietzsche himself as a left political thinker are deeply problematic. Nietzsche's politics, taken on their own terms, are marked by his nostalgia for aristocratic and exploitative social arrangements and his contempt for socialism and anarchism, no less than liberalism, for perpetuating what he saw as insipid Christian beliefs in shared human dignity and equality. Nietzsche is clearly a radical concerned with power. But whatever the utility of his ideas for some left thinkers, he remains, I would argue, a radical of the right. See also Frederick Appel, Nietzsche contra Democracy (London: Cornell University Press, 1999); and Bruce Detwiler, Nietzsche and the Politics of Aristocratic Radicalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

38 In October 2003, Review of International Studies broke long-standing silence about Chomsky by publishing a series of articles on the value of his work for the discipline. Most IR journals, however, continue to studiously avoid any discussion of his politics. Undue marginalisation of Chomsky by IR scholars is even more systematic, Lawrence Woods shows, in IR textbooks. See Lawrence T. Woods, “Where's Noam?: On the Absence of References to Noam Chomsky in Introductory International Studies Textbooks”, in New Political Science, 28:1 (March 2006), pp. 65–79.

39 Hans Morgenthau, ‘Johnson's Dilemma: The Alternatives in Vietnam (1966)’, in Truth and Power: Essays of a Decade, 1960–1970 (New York: Praeger, 1970), pp. 398–9, 407, 422.

40 Ibid., p. 402.

41 Ibid., p. 404.

42 Ibid., p. 424.

43 Thucydides, On Justice, Power, and Human Nature, p. 55.

44 Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, p. 93.

45 William E. Scheuerman, ‘Realism and the Left: The Case of Hans J. Morgenthau’, Review of International Studies, 34:1 (January 2008), pp. 29–51.

46 Ibid., p. 49–50.

47 Chomsky, For Reasons of State, pp. xxxv, xxviii.

48 Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, p. 333.

49 Ibid., pp. 9–11.

50 Chomsky's use of inverted quotation marks when discussing proponents of ‘Kissingerian realism’ should signal to careful readers that he is critiquing not realist analysis as such but what he sees as mendacious use of language, the word realism itself often being employed by state actors as a euphemistic mask for the raw exercise of power. See, for example, Noam Chomsky, ‘Indonesia, master card in Washington's hand’, in Le Monde Diplomatique, June 1998, on the web at: http://mondediplo.com/1998/06/02chomsky.

51 Hans Morgenthau, Human Rights and Foreign Policy (New York: Council on Religion and International Affairs, 1979), pp. 10–11.

52 Stanley Hoffmann with reply by Noam Chomsky, ‘The Ethics of Intervention’, in The New York Review of Books, 12:6 (27 March 1969), on the web at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/11370.

53 Chomsky accepts the basic tenets of just war theory and so allows that violence might in some situations be morally defensible, ‘But the use of violence […] can only be justified on the basis of the claim and the assessment – which always ought to be undertaken very, very seriously and with a good deal of scepticism – that this violence is being exercised because a more just result is going to be achieved’. See Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, ‘Human Nature: Justice Versus Power’, in Fons Elders, (ed.), Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind (London: Souvenir Press, 1974), pp. 183–4.

54 Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, pp. 374–375.

55 George Steiner with reply by Noam Chomsky, ‘The Responsibility of Intellectuals: An Exchange’, in The New York Review of Books, 8:5 (23 March 1967), on the web at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/12148

56 Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, p. 385.

57 Chomsky, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom, pp. 69–76.

58 See Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society (New York: Vintage Books, 1964), pp. 348–349.

59 Michael Parenti, ‘Patricians, Professionals, and Political Science’, in American Political Science Review, 100:4 (November 2006), p. 503.

60 Noam Chomsky, Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and the Social Order (London: Pluto Press, 1996), p. 62.

61 Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins p. 325.

62 See Robert J. Myers, ‘An Approximation of Justice’, in Kenneth Thompson and Robert J. Myers (eds), Truth and Tragedy: A Tribute to Hans J. Morgenthau, (Transaction Publishers, 1984), pp. 126–9; and Jennifer See, ‘A Prophet without Honor: Hans Morgenthau and the War in Vietnam, 1955–1965’, in The Pacific Historical Review, 70:3 (August 2001), pp. 419–47.

63 Eric Herring and Piers Robinson, ‘Too polemical or too critical?: Chomsky on the study of the news media and US foreign policy’, in Review of International Studies, 29:4 (October 2003), pp. 562–3.

64 Alison Edgley, ‘Chomsky's Political Critique: Essentialism and Political Theory’, in Contemporary Political Theory, 4:2 (May 2005), p. 130–1.

65 Herring and Robinson, ‘Chomsky Forum’ and ‘Too polemical or too critical?: Chomsky on the study of the news media and US foreign policy’, pp. 551–2, 568; see also Robert Barsky, Chomsky: A Life of Dissent (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1997), pp. 170–191; and Rai, Chomsky's Politics, pp. 27–30,131–4.

66 Walter LaFeber, ‘Whose News?’, in The New York Times (6 November 1988), p. BR27; and LaFeber as cited in Laffey, ‘Discerning the Patterns of World Order’, p. 598.

67 Samantha Power, ‘The Everything Explainer’, in The New York Times (4 January 2004), p. 8.

68 Samantha Power, ‘A Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Harper Collins, 2002), pp. 146–147.

69 ‘You appreciate that the use of US-made arms could create a problem’, recently declassified transcripts of the 6 December 1975 meeting record Kissinger warning Suharto. ‘It depends on how we construe it; whether it is in self-defense or is a foreign operation. It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly. We would be able to influence the reaction in America if whatever happens happens after we return. This way there would be less chance of people talking in an unauthorized way […] We understand your problem and the need to move quickly […] Whatever you do, however, we will try to handle in the best way possible […] If you have made plans, we will do our best to keep everyone quiet until the President returns home’. See Ben Kiernan, ‘Cover-Up and Denial of Genocide: Australia, the USA, East Timor, and the Aborigines’, in Critical Asian Studies, 34:2 (June 2002), p. 170; and William Burr and Michael Evans, (eds), ‘East Timor: Ford, Kissinger and the Indonesian Invasion, 1975–76’, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No.62 (2001) on the web at: http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB62/doc4.pdf.

70 Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War, pp. 358–92.

71 Chomsky, Understanding Power, p. 297.

72 See Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 84–90, 224; and David Sogge, Give and Take: What's the Matter with Foreign Aid? (London: Zed Books, 2002), pp. 40–65.

73 Chomsky as cited in Smith, Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals, p. 194.

74 Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War, pp. 10–11.

75 Chomsky and Foucault, ‘Human Nature: Justice Versus Power’, pp. 183ff. Foucault may elsewhere offer a more complex (or perhaps contradictory) view of questions of human nature, reason, and justice, but in his debate with Chomsky he clearly takes a radically relativist (and essentially Nietzschean) position on moral/political questions. See also Charles Taylor, ‘Foucault on Freedom and Truth’, in Political Theory, 12:2 (May 1984), pp. 152–83.

76 Smith, Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals, p. 181.

77 Chomsky and Foucault, ‘Human Nature: Justice Versus Power’, p. 185; see also Chomsky, Understanding Power, p. 361.

78 Chomsky as cited in Milan Rai, ‘Market Values and Libertarian Socialist Values’, in James McGilvray (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Chomsky (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 227.

79 Noam Chomsky, On Language: Chomsky's Classic Works Language and Responsibilityand Reflections on Languagein One Volume (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. 88–91; and McGilvray, Chomsky, p. 17.

80 Laffey, ‘Discerning the Patterns of World Order’, pp. 599–600; and McGilvray, Chomsky: Language, Mind, and Politics, pp. 244–5.

81 Chomsky, On Language, p. 5.

82 Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, p. 339.

83 Chomsky, Understanding Power, pp. 229.

84 Ibid., pp. 227–9.

85 J. Ann Tickner, ‘Gendering a Discipline: Some Feminist Methodological Contributions to International Relations’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 30:4 (Winter 2005), pp. 2174–6.

86 See Laffey, ‘Discerning the Patterns of World Order’, p. 603; Edgley, ‘Chomsky's Political Critique’, pp. 130ff; and Edgley, The Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky, pp. 180–4.

87 Chomsky, For Reasons of State, p. xli.

88 Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, p. 5.

89 Noam Chomsky, The Chomsky Reader (New York: Pantheon Books, 1987), pp. 13–14, 55; and Chomsky as cited in Barsky, Chomsky: A Life of Dissent, p. 212.

90 Chomsky as cited in Rai, Chomsky's Politics, p. 58.

91 Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1961), p. 73.

92 Edgley, The Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky, pp. 180ff.

93 Noam Chomsky, Chomsky on Democracy and Education, C.P. Otero (ed.), (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 106–7.

94 Noam Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), p. 231

95 Chomsky, Chomsky on Democracy and Education, p. 391.

96 ‘Preparatory to Porto Alegre: Chomsky interviewed by various interviewers’, January 2002, on the web at: http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/200201–.htm

97 Edgley, The Social and Political Thought of Noam Chomsky, pp. 108–11.

98 Ibid., pp. 50,87.

99 Noam Chomsky, letter to the author (13 August 2007).

100 Herring and Robinson, ‘Too polemical or too critical?: Chomsky on the study of the news media and US foreign policy’, p. 563.