Comment by NaiveEmpiricist

For decades, Chomsky was the most-cited author who still had a pulse. And a lot of that was for his political writing - maybe 2/3rds? But he still has a lot of cites for his intellectual work, in several different fields.

Linguistics, obviously.

Philosophers love him, because he always gives them an argument, and that's all they really care about.

There probably wouldn't even be cognitive science without Chomsky. And psychology is still responding to Chomsky's nuking of behaviorism in the 1950's.

So, there's a lot there, but admittedly most of it is for politics.