Top 100 Public Intellectuals: The Results

Through September and October, the UK's Prospect magazine - in conjuction with the US journal Foreign Policy- conducted a poll to find the world's top public intellectual. The only criteria were that the individual be alive and currently active in his or her discipline. The longlist of 100 generated some controversy, containing only ten women and - bar a handful of individuals - dominated by thinkers based in the West.

The results were announced the other day. The top twenty are:

1. Noam Chomsky

2. Umberto Eco

3 Richard Dawkins

4 Václav Havel

5 Christopher Hitchens

6 Paul Krugman

7 Jürgen Habermas

8 Amartya Sen

9 Jared Diamond

10 Salman Rushdie

11 Naomi Klein

12 Shirin Ebadi

13 Hernando De Soto

14 Bjørn Lomborg

15 Abdolkarim Soroush

16 Thomas Friedman

17 Pope Benedict XVI

18 Eric Hobsbawm

19 Paul Wolfowitz

20 Camille Paglia


A full list is printed here.


The list is fairly predictable in some ways; it's unsurprising to see Chomsky at the top, and in fact he tallied nearly double that of Umberto Eco at number two. This month's edition of Prospect carries an interesting article about the pros and cons of the Boston-based linguist and political commentator. No reaction yet from Chomsky's nemesis of recent years, Christopher Hitchens, to being placed four rungs below him.

What was also faintly depressing was the paucity of women in the upper echelons of the table (and the highest placed being Naomi Klein, whose credentials as an 'intellectual' are suspect to begin with). Also the tail end of the list was made up with Asian-born or based individuals, which likely reflects the Western-centric nature of those who voted. And quite what Pope Benedict XVI has done in his first eight months in charge to scrape into the top twenty is beyond me. Still, it represents a fairly interesting snapshot of global critical thinking in the year 2005.