The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters

by Tom Nichols

The expert community is full of such examples. The most famous, at least if measured by impact on the global public, is the MIT professor Noam Chomsky, a figure revered by millions of readers around the world. Chomsky, by some counts, is the most widely cited living American intellectual, having written a stack of books on politics and foreign policy. His post at MIT, however, was as a professor of linguistics. Chomsky is regarded as a pioneer, even a giant, in his own field, but he is no more an expert in foreign policy than, say, the late George Kennan was on the origins of human language. Nonetheless, he is more famous among the general public for his writings on politics than in his area of expertise; indeed, I often encountered college students over the years who were quite familiar with Chomsky but who had no idea his actual field of expertise was linguistics, rather than politics or international affairs.