Noam Chomsky (born 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and political commentator who has been called the father of modern linguistics. His 1957 work Syntactic Structures revolutionized the study of language by proposing that the ability to generate and understand an infinite number of sentences from a finite set of grammatical rules is an innate capacity of the human mind—a theory known as generative grammar. This challenged the dominant behaviorist view that language is learned entirely through conditioning and positioned linguistics within cognitive science. His concept of "universal grammar" suggests that the deep structure of all human languages shares common principles hardwired into the brain. Independently of his academic work, Chomsky has been one of the most prominent critics of U.S. foreign policy and corporate media since the 1960s. His Manufacturing Consent (with Edward Herman) analyzed how mass media serve elite interests, making him a central figure in left-wing intellectual life worldwide.