Originally delivered in 1971 as the first Cambridge lectures in memory of Bertrand Russell, Problems of Knowledge and Freedom is a masterful and cogent synthesis of Noam Chomskys moral philosophy, linguistic analysis, and emergent political critique of Americas war in Vietnam.

In the first half of this wide-ranging work, Chomsky takes up Russells lifelong search for the empirical principles of human understanding, in a philosophical overview referencing Hume, Wittgenstein, von Humboldt, and others. In the following half, aptly titled On Changing the World, Chomsky applies these concepts to the issues that would remain the focus of his increasingly political work of the periodhis criticisms of the war in Indochina and the Cold War ideology that supported it, of the centralization of U.S. decision-making in the Pentagon and the growing influence of multinational corporations in those circles, and of the politicization of American universities in the postWorld War II years, as well as his analyses of the Cuban Missile Crisis and Nixons foreign policies.