The Hindu : International : A list of intellectuals

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Oct 02, 2005

International

International

A list of intellectuals

Patrick Barkham

Noam Chomsky favourite to win poll for first five

LONDON: It pits Noam Chomsky against Paul Wolfowitz, Germaine Greer against Pope Benedict XVI and Yusuf al-Qaradawi against Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Heated and catty conflict on campuses around the globe is inevitable after Prospect magazine drew up a list of 100 eminent thinkers and asked people to vote for the top public intellectual in the world.

Ordinary intellects can now choose their top five from the academics, novelists, clerics, politicians and journalists, chosen in collaboration with Foreign Policy, the global affairs magazine. To qualify, the philosophers, psychologists, physicists and other experts were considered still active in their field with a talent for communicating their ideas beyond it.

Chomsky is an early favourite with more than 14,000 votes already cast in the poll. If anyone is shocked by the absence of Simon Schama or Milton Friedman, they can add a nomination of their own. The inclusion of Christopher Hitchens has raised eyebrows in academia, and David Goodhart, the editor, admitted that controversy was raging over the list with the inclusion of just 10 women certain to spark debate. "Eric Hobsbawm was at our birthday party last night denouncing the list — which was fairly ungenerous, as he is on it. He was arguing that you can't judge these things across cultures."

Majority from the U.S.

The list is dominated by intellectuals who work in English, with the majority of them being from the U.S., including Camille Paglia, Steven Pinker, Paul Krugman, Robert Kagan and Francis Fukuyama. Mr. Goodhart denied the list was Western-centric. He cited five Chinese intellectuals, and architects, analysts and economists from 30 different nations, including Shia cleric Ali al-Sistani, based in Iraq, former Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and the Danish climate change revisionist Bjorn Lomborg. "The Anglo-American world is a big part of the global intelligentsia," he said. "If you look at objective measures, like Nobel prizes or citations in journals, the bias would be much greater towards the west. We're not making any great claims for authority or objectivity, but there are definitely some bigger trends captured by it, such as the decline of critical theory and the decline of the Left."

The youngest is Ayaan Hirsi Ali at 35; the oldest is 89-year-old British historian Bernard Lewis, who is based at Princeton University. Larry Summers, who was Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton between spells at Harvard, is one of a number of thinkers on the list who have played a role in American politics.

One of the Britons on the list, Anthony Giddens, a former Director of the London School of Economics and theorist of the Third Way, said he felt he was a "public intellectual" but Britain was unique in its lack of regard for thinkers who play an active role in the public sphere.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

International