Intellectual center, harmless radicalism, and the Chomsky question

By Cemil Gözel

The debate sparked by Noam Chomsky’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein has been framed in some circles as a moral scandal. But the issue runs much deeper than that. When you think about the intellectual persona Chomsky built on his critiques of imperialism, the media, and state violence, reducing the whole thing to a morality scandal traps the discussion in the narrow realm of personal ethics and drains it of political substance from the beginning.

Despite his “hardline” critiques of imperialism, Chomsky remains one of the most comfortable figures in academia. He’s welcomed at universities, featured in prestigious publications, and a permanent invitee at international conferences. This is often explained as intellectual courage. But that isn’t persuasive. The real question is this: if a critique aimed at the system can circulate this freely, is that proof of its radicality or of it being structurally contained?

Imperialism doesn’t crush every form of criticism. The kind that doesn’t seek power, doesn’t name an organized historical subject, and translates class struggle into moral outrage is often tolerated, sometimes even amplified. Because while such critiques may expose the system, they don’t generate a political path to overcome it. In that sense, the system ends up using its own critics as a kind of conscience mechanism, a pressure-release valve.

This is where I see the main fracture in Chomsky’s thought. He treats capitalism as a deviation run by elites making wrong decisions. He views the state as a repression machine per se. Organizations, parties, or the question of power are authoritarian to him. What you get in the end is a theory politically held in suspension.

At first glance, this might seem at odds with his early emphasis on anarcho-syndicalism, but the tension in his thought also mirrors a deeper contradiction in how he relates to the very system.

I need to say this: Chomsky’s theory politically held in suspension doesn’t make him a conscious ideologue of the ruling class. But it does turn him into a representative of a type of critique that the system can comfortably tolerate, even need. And in all ways, that’s more dangerous. While it doesn’t legitimize the system outright, it keeps the doors that might lead beyond it systematically shut. So, even if Chomsky’s critique looks radical, it is structurally harmless. And when I say “harmless,” I mean the “harm” here from the standpoint of the power bloc’s permanency.

I think this is the aspect from which the Epstein affair should be read. Epstein wasn’t just a finance guy; he built a network that converted intellectual prestige into a tool of legitimacy. Ties with scientists, philosophers, and academic “stars” helps buff the sheer force of money with a sheen of respectability. When figures like Chomsky are involved in that network even tangentially, it points to something bigger than immorality on personal level, a structural outcome of intellectual centralization. These centers are spaces where power circulates not only through money and coercion, but through knowledge and prestige as well.

Universities, top-tier journals, international conferences aren’t neutral arenas. They decide which critiques count as reasonable and which get dismissed as excessive. “Radical thought” gets into circulation as far as the filter of these centers permits. And yes, there’s a price of permission: you must abstract away the question of power, turn class struggle into a pedagogical narrative, and make theory stand in for politics.

The “intellectual center” might sound overly abstract. It might even suggest that anything centralized becomes automatically negative. What I mean with that is the threshold where knowledge gains legitimacy. Today, for an idea to earn the status of “valid theory,” mostly it has to pass through certain institutional networks. What makes these networks and structures into centers is precisely their filtering function, is that they determine what gets into circulation and what gets pushed to the margins.

So, the issue isn’t centralization by itself. After all, scientific production inevitably requires some level of centralized organization. The problem begins when that centralization turns into an ideological sieve. In that sense, the intellectual center is where thought gets its stamp of validity.

Is genuinely knowledge production in a revolutionary sense possible without breaking this centralization? Difficult but not impossible. However, the path forward isn’t a sort of romantic anti-academicism. The main issue isn’t the setting, it’s the chain of accountability. Academic knowledge answers to its funding streams, peer reviewers, and the prestige economy. Revolutionary knowledge, by contrast, answers to an organized political subject, to struggle, to lived historical practice. Unless that nature of academic knowledge changes, no matter how radical it looks, it falls short of being revolutionary. The key distinction is whether a critique labeled “dangerous” can move beyond abstract radicalism and build this alternative relation of accountability.

That’s why, through the Chomsky example, I’m not discussing the consistency of a single thinker. What we should be after is how imperialism metabolizes critique. It can coexist quite comfortably with criticism that morally condemns it but doesn’t aim to overcome it. In fact, it needs that kind of critique. The real danger lies in mistaking the limits of this criticism for the limits of radical thought itself. Putting Chomsky in his proper place, then, means recognizing that he isn’t a carrier of revolutionary theory. At most, he is imperialism’s “conscientious” witness.

Chomsky’s involvement in Epstein’s network shows even critical discourse can end up boxed inside imperialism’s architecture of legitimacy. Even the “sharpest critique” of imperialism can earn a respectable seat in worlds shaped by Epstein-like networks so long as it doesn’t converge with an organized politics aimed at power. What we’re seeing with Chomsky is less about individuals and more about critique absorbed by the system, and the nature of intellectual centralization.