influential in order to protect the interests of the wealthy and influential from conflicts with the non-wealthy and non-influential.
Noam Chomsky, a well known linguist and outspoken critic of American democracy feels as Rousseau. Chomsky agrees with Rousseau that civil society and political machinery are the tools of the rich (and, therefore, powerful) to maintain their dominance over the poor (and, therefore, weak) and to protect their riches. As Chomsky affirms in The Chomsky Reader, Rousseau believed that there was no justice afforded by politics, much like Thucydides. Instead, he argued that politics was actually the means by which those living under its rules and laws were deprived of their right to freedom, “Hypocritically, the rich call upon their neighbors to institute regulations of justice and peace to which all are obliged to conform, which make an exception of no one, and which compensate in some way for the caprices of fortune by equally subjecting the powerful and the weak to mutual duties” (Peck 142).
However, according to Rousseau and Chomsky, this political system of laws was only a ruse where the common man is concerned. According to Chomsky, the rich and powerful devised such a system of seeming justice to fool the poor masses into believing they had some measure of equality with the rich and powerful—guaranteed through a political system based on equal justice for all under the law. As we have seen in the O. J. Simpson trial, hardly is there an equal justice for the rich and famous and the poor and infamous in American society or politics. As Chomsky writes:
By such arguments, the poor and weak were seduced: All ran to meet their chains thinking they secured their freedom… Thus society and laws gave new fetters to the weak and new forces to the rich, destroyed natural freedom for all time, established forever the law of property and inequality, changed a clever usurpation into an irrevo...