He does not say, with the post-liberal thinkers, that academic intellectuals need a whole new vocabulary to understand reality. He does not think of historical writing as a pathway to power, tenure, faculty club dinners, fund-raising, or anything else of this sort. He does not leave a clear idea of power in view, in part because his anarchism teaches him to view social status as a form of domination.
This explanation might be crude, but it can explain how the current generation of professional historians, many of them beginning in the restless mood of the 1960s and 1970s, have fitted themselves so effortlessly into the hierarchical arrangements of academic life. They have liberalized it to include once-marginalized social groups, but have done nothing to reverse the repression of labor power. The difference between a free professional and a university employee ought to be as wide as possible. Today the difference has been erased, and the history’s professional societies have left it undefended. The historians now preside over a structure of domination far greater in its scope and power than at any time in the past.
The question of power also explains why even history journals dedicated explicitly to radical analysis have ignored Chomsky. The Radical History Review has reviewed exactly one of his books, which it called "absurd." Whatever else the RHR has achieved since its founding in the 1970s, it represents the triumph of the career radical, the academic historian who is not merely unpunished for radical statements, but actively rewarded with money, prestige, book contacts for "radical readers," and so on. It is damnably difficult nowadays to tell the difference between a young business executive and a "radical historian."
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