Gatekeepers and the “Chomskian revolution”

The widely believed folk history of the confrontation between an established neo-Bloomfieldian generation and the revolutionary advances of transformational grammarians bears little relation to the open access to publication that Noam Chomsky encountered in the 1950s. Although a rhetoric of revolutionary conflict appeared, it cannot be attributed to attempts by the established generation to suppress new ideas, as in Thomas Kuhn's morphology of scientific revolutions. The central neo-Bloomfieldian gatekeeper, Bernard Bloch, fostered the diffusion of Chomsky's ideas and promoted the careers of Chomsky and Robert Lees. Other prominent neo-Bloomfieldians, regarding Chomsky as continuing the work of his teacher Zellig Harris, were sympathetic to his ideas and ready to concede his advances in syntactic theory. Nonetheless, Chomsky and his followers adopted an aggressive stance, denying the value of preceding work in structuralist linguistics. Although the case is anomalous for Kuhn's theory, it fits a sociological theory of scientific revolutions.