May 9, 2008
The world’s leading intellectuals
Who are the world’s 100 leading public intellectuals? Woundingly, I do not appear on the list compiled by “Prospect” and “Foreign Policy” magazines. But at least I sit along the corridor from one of these great brains: Martin Wolf is on the list.
Prospect are now inviting readers to vote for a top five. In the interests of self-aggrandisement by association, I have decided only to vote for colleagues or former colleagues - so my five votes go to Martin, Niall Ferguson (FT columnist), Larry Summers (ditto), Christopher Hitchens (Sunday Correspondent) and Anne Applebaum (The Economist). This seems an appropriately infantile response to an infantile exercise. And anything that stops Noam Chomsky from winning again has to be worthwhile.
I popped next door to congratulate/tease Martin about his eminence. And he made rather a good point. (One would expect no less, of course.) Today’s intellectuals are a rather unimpressive bunch compared to a similar list of “public intellectuals” you could have compiled in 1850. Martin reeled off the names of Marx, Mill and de Tocqueville. To which I would add - Dickens, Tolstoy, Darwin, Balzac.
All of the above were already well known by 1850 and I think they stack up pretty well when compared with Chomsky, Fukuyama, Kagan - or even, dare I say it, Martin Wolf.
So are we living in some sort of intellectual dark age? Or have Prospect and Foreign Policy simply overlooked the great minds of our era?
But how many of those would have actually appeared on a list compiled at that time? I certainly can’t imagine Karl Marx being on the list of a Victorian-era Foreign Policy magazine, for all the impact his thought has had since.
The truth is that the really influential brains of this decade are not yet known - because their influence may not yet have been felt.
I hope that is as much comfort to you as it is to me, Gideon.
Posted by: Anthony Zacharzewski | May 9th, 2008 at 1:10 pm | Report this commentI see Al Gore is on the list (invented the internet).
This looks more like a list of celebrituals (celebrity-intellectuals). The only serious academic I spotted, other than Noam Chomsky, is Daniel Kahaneman. Ridiculous, I agree. And unless you control your predilection for American websites, you’ll keep fishing these pieces of electronic waste.
Nevertheless, I congratulate Martin Wolf. I would certainly include him on a list of journalist intellectuals.
And what about a list of top commenters on FT.com blogs?
Posted by: RCS | May 9th, 2008 at 1:45 pm | Report this commentPerhaps Mr. Wolf’s comparison with the 1850’s misses some points:
- When it comes to great breakthroughs, all the low-hanging (and much of the higher hanging) fruit has been picked. (How many times can the theory of relativity be discovered, for example?)
- The world, perhaps as a result of the above, is a much more complicated place. Any great invention or thought process is likely to be the result of the collaborative efforts of thousands of researchers around the world, many of whom toil in anonymity in university faculties and company laboratories. Few people are quite clever enough to come up with something entirely new, single-handedly.
Giving racy titles to your book (a la Fukuyama and Niall Furguson), is not the same thing as coming up with ideas that will stand the test of time.
- There are many many more universities and research facilities now compared with the mid 19th century and many many more thinkers amnd researchers. It is much harder to shine when there are so many other lights on.
- Nowadays, many influential thinkers are businessmen (the list seems to include none). People like Bill Gates, or the founders of Google, are not directly comparable to de Tocqueville and Balzac but they probably changed the world more.
(BTW, I would like to nominate Richard Dawkins for his tireless campaign on behalf of secularity! - I also think the inclusion of Salman Rushdie and Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a joke that fails.)
Best,
P
Posted by: Pacifist | May 9th, 2008 at 1:57 pm | Report this commentIt is a consequence of universal access to education. In the past just a minority had access to high level education but today there is no much difference for the access any citizen has to the sources of knowledge…so anybody can have an idea and there are thousands, millions of bright people around the World.
Posted by: Enrique | May 9th, 2008 at 2:13 pm | Report this comment[…] [via] […]
Posted by: Top public intellectuals « The Big C | May 9th, 2008 at 2:27 pm | Report this comment‘’Today’s intellectuals are a rather unimpressive bunch compared to a similar list of “public intellectuals” you could have compiled in 1850. Martin reeled off the names of Marx, Mill and de Tocqueville. To which I would add - Dickens, Tolstoy, Darwin, Balzac.’’
The death of intellectualism – IS A GLOBAL PHENOMENON even left bank of Paris is devoid of intellectuals. It is not the intellect that attracts popular support, it is the cause, catastrophic failures of Marxism and leftist tyrants have failed the intellectuals. Romanticiism with Che, Castro and Marx provided fuel to the free flow of thoughts. Che-Guevara revolution finally succeeded but Castro’s Cuba is not an ideal democracy. History is the ultimate judge of intellectual actions. It callously discarded romantic alliance of minds with Marx, Che and Hochi Minh after the capitalists turnaround of Russia under Putin, a neo-capitalist Vietnam under the present rulers and a socialist Cuba as an impoverished state under a sustained tyranny where a free vote is a luxury. The natural constituency of the ‘left’ politically and economically just could not deliver.
Here in Paris since 1978, my best memories are moments spent in these cafes where so much of French intellect and talent got underway. These cafes proudly beat with the heart of the Parisian bourgeoisie, but are also popular with the Gauche Caviar, or leftist caviar crowd. Penniless Mitterrand talking about class struggle on glass of Champagne and caviar was a delight of its own. Bring those leftists back and we have our intellectualism alive and kicking.
These cafes are nestlings in where French intellectualism has thrived. Now it is a dying art here, for simple reason nothing about too much wealth is simply unimpressive, the term “intellectual” once denoted a shared vision whose communal sense originated in the France of the Dreyfus Affair. In 1898, mile Zola published his famous “Lettre au President de la Republique” (the article that became known as “J’accuse”), and the next day the first of the affirmation of the intellectuals appeared, calling for a retrial for Dreyfus. Cafe de Flore and Les Deux Magots have been here since the nineteenth century. In the good old days, when the bourgeois swaggering leftist intellectuals populated the side-streets and cafes of post-war Paris in their droves, Cafe de Flore was labelled as the meagre leftist haunt and the Deux Magots, its neighbour, aristocratic and a little snobbish. One could slip from one terrace to the other and sip various drinks and enjoy two different set of leftists.
Like its celebrated rival Les Deux Magots, Cafe de Flore can claim to have been the heart of the Existentialist Movement during the early part of this century with Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Camus and others regularly meeting here. The ghosts of Sartre and de Beauvoir and Hemingway are surely tired of being invoked. It was in one of these these cafes that Simone de Beauvoir said “Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.” Jean-Paul Sartre, the ‘Sartrean man’ probably was conceived here. The Sartrean man realizes that there is more to existence than merely existing, and that there is more to life than merely living. Confronted with the ambiguity, meaninglessness, and absurdit y of his existence, he then sets forth in a journey towards the rediscovery of his real self. He attempts to surpass himself, and imbedded in that transcendence is the meaning he has been looking for in his life. The search for meaning becomes an act of surpassing. Sartre believed that one is born superfluous unless one is brought into the world with a special purpose of fulfilling an expectation.
At the Cafe de Flore, Sartre held forth, drinking and writing. He and de Beauvoir would stay there all day, especially in cold weather, and it is said they had their own telephone line. Those two, while appearing sociable, were working seriously on their philosophical writings establishing the prevailing philosophy, existentialism. The politics was communist this was the gauche caviar, as well-heeled leftists would come to be called in Mitterand’s time. Surrealists also trace their origins to these cafes. “To Be or Not To Be Surrealist,” Jose Pierre wrote that, “The Surrealists found it grotesque to die for any flag whatsoever, even if its colors were harmoniously composed.” They were repulsed by the very idea of God, and procreation seemed an aberration for them. There was a time when Breton insulted pregnant women in the street, and Benjamin Poret publicly insulted priests and nuns. Only Liberty, Love and Poetry were looked upon favourably, and together these constituted the heart of the Surrealist platform. This great libertarian impulse paradoxically led them to Marxism. Such Intellectuals are a dying breed in today’s Paris.
Once in their glory days, these intellectuals were the bedrock of French cultural institutions like the Sorbonne and the cole normale superieure. It was cafes like Les Deux Magots and Le Flore that served as equally important gathering places for academic dialogue.
Today the cradle of intellectualism in Paris Brasserie Lipp, Cafe de Flore and Les Deux Magots is home of new riches. These were frequented by celebrities, artists and writers, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir. Francios Mitternad and George Marchais. Sorkozy or Chirac with best of womanising could not create the aura that Mitterrand or Sartre did the premature demise of class war and death of left has crippled intellectualism. The ‘mass misery of the east’ and implosion of ‘Marxist Russia’ left Sartre to condemn the ‘left’ more than the right, the protests over Hungary or Czech invasion opened the dichotomy much further. The ‘intellectual of today’ is caught up in this dilemma, on one hand they condemn US intervention of Iraq on the other the free vote, end of mass grave regime and emergence of 200 newspaper and a first free press from Baghdad devoid their intellectual bickering from a ‘moral grandstanding.’ Intellectuals by pedigree are laissez-faire; they talk of down trodden and oppressed and take up their causes, but downtrodden and oppressed of ‘Gulags’ were hardly ever talked about. It was the political blunders of the ‘politburo’ and socialist economic failures’ of the Eastern Europe that romance of the leftist intellectuals with Marxism ended in a tragedy.
Intellectuals ’cause’ need to be redefined and continuous support of ‘lost romantic causes’ needs to be eliminated. There is nothing intellectually rich about being a billionaire, today these left bank cafes are frequented with that kind of well-heeled affluence. The decay is for all of us to see. May be today’s intellectual should have no posture to the right or the left, if a cause is taken up and real oppressed are supported, the art of ‘pragmatic romance’ with new revolutions might be re-established. It was the ‘moral grandstanding’ of a cause that brought a lot of sagacity to the intellectuals of the left, condemning Vietnam was one, but condemning Iraq and Afghanistan where oppressed after going to ballot boxes are being killed by right wing radicals, leave these condemnations hollow. The real oppressed were the ‘female’ of Afghanistan who were denied education and freedom under Taliban. To condemn Afghan invasion by an imperialist power is dear to the ‘left cause’ but the freedom of Afghans from the shackles of tyranny is the contradiction that ‘gauche caviar’ could not answer. Acceptance of lesser evil in face of bigger evil could not make any reasonable grounds within intellectual pastures of Parisian gauche.
The Paris cafe society is fuming with the silly threat of dying French intellectualism and invasion from ‘Starbucks.’ Everybody mourns the death of the espresso shots being replaced by Starbucks takeaway caffe lattes. Perhaps one can argue that the world may not have been sanctified with the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Sartre, had they been fuelled by Starbucks caffe lattes rather than shots of strong espresso in these exalted Left Bank cafes.
Posted by: Iqbal Latif | May 9th, 2008 at 2:32 pm | Report this commentAnother “list”!…the “quality” of someone or something quantified … Into a number that when you think about it, really tell us very little…In general, I dont like the idea of humans beings being quantified…especially those we think of as intellectuals…
Posted by: Lisa-Helene Lawson | May 9th, 2008 at 2:44 pm | Report this commentIf we talk about influence in World Affairs I would say Sammuel Huntington as the World he foresaw after the end of Communism resurects ideas which were dormant, even if different nations behave in different ways according to their own commercial interests no matter of what is the religion of the majority.
Also it is interesting pointing out the studies of Emmanuel Todd about he destiny of immigrants.
And not less, the Information Age by Manuel Castells.
Paul Kennedy´s historical study about the rise and fall of Great Powers.
And of course Fukuyama´s famous end of history, who i think was not well understood by many people, because he was right and we are at the end of history from an ideological (and as we can see intellectual) End of History, as it has been demonstrated that a modern capitalist society, to survive, has to offer several alternatives as there are multiple centers of decission making.
Posted by: Enrique | May 9th, 2008 at 4:04 pm | Report this commentI mean “ideological (and as we can see intellectual) point of view”…
Posted by: Enrique | May 9th, 2008 at 4:11 pm | Report this commentI agree with P, but I think his thesis is not the whole story. There is also a turbulence factor: ages of great upheaval generate greater intellectual output. For instance, the first half of the twentieth century which saw two world wars, also saw great strides in science (relativity, quantum mechanics), technology (the motor car, the aeroplane, the telephone), modern art and architecture, psychology, stream-of-consciousness in literature — you name it. On a smaller scale, the social unrest of the sixties and seventies was accompanied by a great creative outpour in popular music.
The less volatile, the more secure and serene, but also the more bland and uninteresting. There is some truth in the notion that the world is heading towards a depressingly boring age of global uniformity — more prosperous, but less exciting.
Posted by: RCS | May 9th, 2008 at 4:24 pm | Report this commentPerhaps one of the reasons you were left off the list is that you start sentences with words like “woundingly”.
Posted by: John B | May 9th, 2008 at 8:23 pm | Report this comment.
Posted by: jeannick | May 10th, 2008 at 12:27 am | Report this commentIntellectuals need intellects , often young ones ,to thrive .
The present epoch is not conductive to the slow rumination of ideas , more to the sound bite and the multimedia quote .
So we have media stars such as our host .
.
In 1994 the Spanish philosopher and matemathician Javier Echevarria wrote the essay “Telepolis” which describes basically the World we have today.
Posted by: Enrique | May 10th, 2008 at 8:36 am | Report this commentIf the goal is to find people who’s thinking has influenced and changed our World and its people, I am bemused that Osama Bin Laden didn’t make the top 100.
Its a wild guess I know, but I suspect that his words reach and influence a wider audience than Christopher Hitchens?
Posted by: Andy Parkin | May 10th, 2008 at 10:04 am | Report this commentI don’t want to demean Martin Wolf’s achievements to date, but how come he ended up at the University of Nottingham? What’s more, he’s been there for years. Is there any particular reason why he is so attached to Nottingham? Apart from its connection to Robin Hood and his Merry Men, Nottingham isn’t renowned for anything afaik and its universtiy doesn’t even get a mention in the Michelin guide. I’m very under-impressed; GR won’t take this woundingly, hopefully
Posted by: J.J. | May 10th, 2008 at 10:05 am | Report this commentPacifist is, in this instance, absolutely correct! In earlier generations people like Newton, Huygens, da Vinci also could work and excel in multiple disciplines, something that is almost unattainable nowadays. I also agree that bin Laden should be on the list for the sheer effect his ideology has on the world today, in the same vein Vladimir Putin incorporates a very successful return to a fascist ideology and he deserves credits for that. Vlad and Osama pale in comparison to Martin’s intellectual capabilities but Martin isn’t the nexus around which a new ideology or theory is shaping itself.
Posted by: Felix Drost | May 10th, 2008 at 2:47 pm | Report this comment“So are we living in some sort of intellectual dark age?”
It is unfair to compare our era to the 19th century when nearly everything we have today was either invented or at least imagined.
We are living in a period of decadence, at this moment the vigor is in the east. Probably the next crop of great intellectuals will be Chinese, writing in Chinese, for Chinese and we will hear about them slowly., if at all.
Posted by: David Seaton | May 10th, 2008 at 5:42 pm | Report this commentSo, Felix, is that what’s stopping you from becoming the next Newton? As I wrote in my earlier post, I agree with P up to a certain point. But one simple answer isn’t enough: reality is certainly much more intricate than that. However, if such brings comfort to all those would-be great inventors, then whom am I to spoil their blissful self-delusion? But remember our subject is “public intellectuals” — not scientists, not political leaders, not criminals.
David Seaton writes: “We are living in a period of decadence…”. Quite right. He also writes: “Probably the next crop of great intellectuals will be Chinese…”. I doubt it. It didn’t happen with Japan, Taiwan or Singapore. The east’s current renaissance is economic and commercial; we have not witnessed anything cultural or intellectual.
Posted by: RCS | May 10th, 2008 at 6:22 pm | Report this commentRCS:
China is not a Japan, Taiwan or Singapore.
China has been the center of Asian culture for thousands of years. Unlike Japan, China has always shown great originality.
You say, “we have not witnessed anything cultural or intellectual.”
Posted by: David Seaton | May 10th, 2008 at 7:06 pm | Report this commentIt seem you haven’t gone to the cinema much in the last 20 years or read the works of authors such as Mo Yan or attended any international art fairs or read any art magazines recently.
I don´t think we are in a period of Decadence but all the opposite: in a period of intellectual exuberance.
There is more Research and Development now than ever in History.
There are more people with high education than ever in the past.
More people have access to the sources of knowledge than ever before.
During the Victorian Era in Britain they said everything was invented and people lived better than ever before as a consequence of mechanization and trade…
Posted by: Enrique | May 10th, 2008 at 7:14 pm | Report this commentDavid,
I take that back. You’re right that historically China was the centre of Asian culture (and of world technology). I’m not acquainted with the contemporary scene (excepting Gao Xingjian), I hope you’re right about that too.
Posted by: RCS | May 10th, 2008 at 7:20 pm | Report this comment“There is more Research and Development now than ever in History. There are more people with high education than ever in the past.”
Posted by: David Seaton | May 10th, 2008 at 7:22 pm | Report this commentWhat I mean is that despite all those advances you mention, there are no great thinkers or artists working at this moment. Think of the people who were writing, painting and thinking in 1908 and compare them to today. R+D is not the same thing as creativity.
Enrique,
Quantity does not equal quality.
Posted by: RCS | May 10th, 2008 at 7:29 pm | Report this commentBut there is Quality: new products and ideas are coming to the market every day…
Perhaps the difference is that the cost of a genius of past centuries was very high.
Posted by: Enrique | May 10th, 2008 at 7:42 pm | Report this commentAll the 3D art didn´t exist…today art is great but ephimerous, the same way as literature. There is a democratisation of journalists thorough thosands of blogs and a democratisation of artists through thousands of websites.
Posted by: Enrique | May 10th, 2008 at 7:46 pm | Report this commentOne should be considered a great intellectual provided he contributes to the comprehension annd solution of the main problems of his time.
I will isolate just two of these– admittedly two problems which have led the west to a historical impasse and probably will lead to its decline.
One can be called “The Economic Practice ” and the other, “The Political Practice Impasse”
The economic imoasse comes about when
governments remove themselves from the economic sphere, and let a small bunch of private individuals run the the economy for the own benefit under the assumption that this is googd for everybody else. This has has led to the deteriortion of pensions, public education, health transport etc.
Empirically one sees that all these services have
deteriorated.
Decline of regulation has left private investment banks to allocate funds at will
and sell financial products of dubious quality. The spectacular failure of this idea is the sub-prime crisis with milions of americans been forced to abandon their homes.
The second, and related problem is the non-responsiveness of our political institutions to the real needs of the populations. Our parliaments do not act on our behalf but rather in order to make the system safe for the upper 5% of the population. An obedient press acts in the manner of the medieval pope to keep everyone’s state of mind in its place.
(small example: The people of the US, in the last cogresional elections voted for an end to the war. In the end Pelosi chickened out. The referendums on the European Traeaty in France and the Netherlands led to a rejection of the treaty. Instead of this we get the Lisbon treaty i.e the treaty thru the window)
So this electoral scheme is not responding to real needs. People are seeking methods of action which can remedy this. I, personally do not see any so far.
I have looked at the list. Some people
have described some of these mechanisms
of stasis and crisis (eg Wolf) in general however nobody can see the economic picture in the manner of Keynes and propose remedies. When Nixon comes out with “we are all Keynesians now” you can get the influence of this man.
Times have changed and something equivalent has to show up.
In the political field not one has showed up who peoposes an ellective politics.
Sorry people but although some of these people are interesting, their vision is limited.
Posted by: Cassandra | May 11th, 2008 at 11:18 am | Report this comment