It’s hard to imagine a world without Noam Chomsky. For over sixty years, he has been the most visible and prolific left intellectual on the planet. There is scarcely a corner of the world where his writing and tireless fight for justice hasn’t touched people’s lives.

My mother was once sitting in a café in a tiny little Midwestern town, having a conversation with a friend about him, when someone two tables away turned to her and asked, “excuse me, are you talking about Noam Chomsky?” And with that, a two-way conversation became communal, involving people who were complete strangers moments ago now forming an instant bond. There have only been a handful of intellectuals in modern history with this kind of reach, this kind of resonance for millions upon millions of people.

More than any other thinker in the postwar era, Chomsky has embodied Karl Marx’s favorite dictum: “nothing human is alien to me.” Noam hasn’t just pointed to injustice where he saw it, no matter how remote — he has felt it. The Vietnamese, the Palestinians, the East Timorese, the Kurds — all of them saw Noam adopt their struggle as his own, with a passion that only comes from someone who sees their suffering as an affront to his own sensibility. And for that, everyone with any humanity returned their love and respect to the man.