Necessary Illusions

1989 book by Noam Chomsky

0-89608-366-7OCLC19457706

Dewey Decimal

302.2/3 19LC ClassP95.8 .C48 1989

Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies is a 1989 book by United States academic Noam Chomsky concerning political power using propaganda to distort and distract from major issues to maintain confusion and complicity, preventing real democracy from becoming effective. The title of this book borrows a phrase from the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr.

Nearly the entire first half of the book is based on Chomsky's five 1988 Massey Lectures on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio from November 1988 and extends his and Edward S. Herman's propaganda model to a variety of new situations. The remaining appendices address criticisms of the work and provide additional detail.

Linguistics	Syntactic Structures (1957) Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (1964) Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (1965) Cartesian Linguistics (1966) Language and Mind (1968) The Sound Pattern of English (1968) "Remarks on Nominalization" (1970) "Conditions on Transformations" (1973) Reflections on Language (1975) The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory (1975) Lectures on Government and Binding (1981) Knowledge of Language (1986) The Minimalist Program (1995) New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind (2000)
Politics	"The Responsibility of Intellectuals" (1967) American Power and the New Mandarins (1969) For Reasons of State (1973) Counter-Revolutionary Violence (1973), with Edward S. Herman The Fateful Triangle (1983) Manufacturing Consent (1988), with Edward S. Herman Necessary Illusions (1989) Deterring Democracy (1991) Letters from Lexington (1993) The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many (1993) World Orders Old and New (1994) Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship (1997) Hegemony or Survival (2003) Failed States (2006) Requiem for the American Dream (2017)
Collections	Class Warfare (1996) Middle East Illusions (2003) Imperial Ambitions (2005) Interventions (2007) Gaza in Crisis (2010) 9-11: Was There An Alternative? (2011) Making the Future (2012) Occupy (2012) On Palestine (2015), with Ilan Pappé