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?
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