Goodbye Paris, hullo America: The world's top 100 public intellectuals

Who are the world’s leading public intellectuals? Kevin Drum, Tyler Cowen, Professor Bainbridge, The Observor blog, Clive Davis, the Mises Institute and others on the blogosphere report that Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines have compiled their list of who they regard as the world's top 100 public intellectuals. Needless to say it is hugely dominated by the west and above all America. David Herman writes in the Prospect cover story that Europe has lost its mojo:

A huge number of names come from the US and Britain. Almost a third are American citizens; one in seven are British. However the real story is not about nationality: almost half these people live in the US. Wherever you look in the intellectual culture—from DNA and AI to the new novels by Rushdie and Zadie Smith, from literary theory to economics—America is where the action is.

In Britain, most of the names come from Oxbridge and London. In the US, from the northeast, from Washington DC to Harvard and MIT. Europe has become America's intellectual poor relation. Not only are there relatively few European names, the quality is dubious. Too many of the names rest on old laurels, or are quirky (Negri? Sloterdijk? Zizek?). The almost complete disappearance of Paris as a centre of global ideas is most striking of all.

This Anglocentric bias will cause some controversy in continental Europe. There are, for example, as many Canadians and Australians represented as Germans (three each). Only four French intellectuals made the cut, compared to 14 British. The lack of women is also notable.

The list includes 9 economists, but they are quite a mixed bunch: Gary Becker (US), Jagdish Bhagwati (India, US), Hernando de Soto (Peru), Kemal Dervis (Turkey), Fan Gang (China), Paul Krugman (US), Jeffrey Sachs (US), Amartya Sen (India), Lawrence Summers (US). Richard Posner is listed as a "judge, scholar, author", but could just as easily been dubbed an economist. So too could Daniel Kahneman, labelled a "psychologist" despite winning the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002.

I wasn't surprised by Krugman's or Sachs' inclusion - the two highest-profile economists in the United States right now - but disappointed that the two most influential economists of the last half century, Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman, were excluded. There was another stunning oversight: Alan Greenspan. He has certainly been the most powerful economist of the last two decades, with financial markets analysing every syllable he utters. Other notable missing economists include Joseph Stiglitz, Eugene Fama, Douglass North and Charles Kindleberger.

Readers are invited to vote for a maximum of five names from the top 100 here. My five choices are people who not only have a high public profile, but who have made a major original contribution to modern science and thought:

1) Amartya Sen (economist, India)

2) Peter Singer (philosopher, Australia)

3) Richard Posner (judge, scholar, author, US)

4) Daniel Dennett (philosopher, US)

5) Daniel Kahneman (psychologist, Israel and US)

My write in is Milton Friedman, though I do so with some discomfort. I disagree with many of his views, and thought monetarism quite loopy in its heyday. But his huge influence on both economics and public policy around the world is undeniable. Other notable economists missing from the list include Paul Samuelson, Joseph Stiglitz, Charles Kindleberger and Eugene Fama.

Reading other blogs, Stephen Pinker seems popular - though I agree with Socratic Gadfly that Daniel Dennett "is a far better representative than also-listed Steven Pinker, as well as having a broader range of intellectual interests". The popularity of Lawrence Lessig among bloggers is no surprise, nor that of pop-science authors Richard Dawkins or Jared Diamond.

Of course, some commentators have been more concerned about who should not have made the list than who was missed out. On voting, Tim Worstall warns:

Anyone who answers Paul Krugman, Thomas Friedman, Tim Garton Ass, Germaine Greer or Naomi Klein (!) Chomksy (!!)  should and will be shot.

And the Joy of Curmudgeonry is quite splenetic about Slavoj Zizek:

Now, if I might venture here upon an expression of my own view, I should say that professor  Zizek is a purveyor of ugly, senseless and frivolous tat – in other words, everything one expects from a celebrated intellectual fraudster – and that reading his dumbfounding works is the closest one is ever likely to get to an armchair lobotomy.

Of course any list of this nature is subjective and somewhat arbitrary. As Daniel Drezner, points out, part of the problem is that the criteria used is quite muddled. Foreign Policy magazine (emphasis added) explains the criteria thus:

What is a public intellectual? Someone who has shown distinction in their own field along with the ability to communicate ideas and influence debate outside of it.

Candidates must have been alive, and still active in public life (though many on this list are past their prime). Such criteria ruled out the likes of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Milton Friedman, who would have been automatic inclusions 20 or so years ago. This list is about public influence, not intrinsic achievement.

So is it only public influence, or influence and distinction in their own field? One can't help thinking the list is more about popularity and public prominence (or notoriety) than anything else. As for Milton Friedman, he's not exactly on the hustings these days but his ideas still influence. Have none of the list compilers visited Central or Eastern Europe in the past decade?

Comments

[PrestoPundit]

Milton Friedman is the lead author of the Official
Ballog "Argument in Favor of Proposition 75" out here
in California. If this proposition passes (it has
a strong lead in the polls) it will revolutionize politics
in America's largest and most influential state.

Not bad for an old man.

[PrestoPundit]

It's also worth noting that Friedman's school voucher
idea most likely will be instituted in the Gulf region
by the U.S. government. Like them or not Friedman's
policy ideas have legs.

[Barry]

Um, this was a survey conducted by english language journals?

That might bias it a bit.

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