Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky

by Noam Chomsky

So the American Constitution was basically for white male property-owners, because they’re the only ones who are real people—but the idea was supposed to be that they’re more or less equal, and therefore you want to break down the concentrations of power that are oppressing them. Well, in those days that meant Church power, state power, the feudal system, and so on—and what you were supposed to get was this egalitarian society for “the People,” equals white male property-owners. Well, it didn’t work out that way, even for the white male property-owners, but that was the picture behind it. And to some extent it was achieved—some forms of centralized power were in fact dissolved. And the course of American history since then has just gone on from there. In the nineteenth century, concentrated power began to be located in corporations—that’s another center of power that now has to be dissolved, and if you’re an eighteenth-century-style libertarian, that’s what your main critique will be of today.