American Power and the New Mandarins

Infobox Book
name = American Power and the New Mandarins


author = Noam Chomsky
publisher = Pantheon Books, New Press
release_date = 1969, 2002 (reprinted)
media_type = Paperback
pages = 432
isbn = ISBN 1-5658-4775-X

"American Power and the New Mandarins" is a 1969 book by the US academic Noam Chomsky. It was his first political book and sets out in detail his opposition to the Vietnam War.

He develops the arguments, laid out in "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", that the American intellectual and technical class, in Universities and in government (the New Mandarins) bear major responsibility for the atrocities perpetrated by the United States in Vietnam.

He also argues that US policy in Vietnam was largely successful. In Chomsky's view US policy was to destroy the nationalist movements in the South Vietnamese peasantry rather than to defend South Vietnam from North Vietnamese aggression. He holds that the former was accomplished rather successfully even if at the expense of the latter.

The book was reprinted by New Press in 2002 and contains a new foreword by Howard Zinn, an American historian and the author of "A People's History of the United States".

Contents

* Foreword by Howard Zinn (2002 edition only)
* Introduction
* Objectivity and Liberal Scholarship
* The Revolutionary Pacifism of A. J. Muste: On the Backgrounds of the Pacific War
* The Logic of Withdrawal
* The Bitter Heritage: A Review
* Some Thoughts on Intellectuals and the Schools
* The Responsibility of Intellectuals
* On Resistance
* Supplement to On Resistance
* Epilogue

Several chapters of this book are available online. See external links below.

Publication

*New York, Pantheon Books [1969]
*New York, New Press [2002]

External links

* [http://www.chomsky.info/articles/196709--.htm On the Backgrounds of the Pacific War]
* [http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19670223.htm The Responsibility of Intellectuals]
* [http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19671207.htm On Resistance]