Patrick Barkham: Great Minds Disagree Over List Of 100 Top Intellectuals
Noam Chomsky is up 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 most contentiously of all, journalists, chosen in collaboration with Foreign Policy, the American 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.
Mr Chomsky is an early favourite with more than 14,000 votes already cast in the poll, which marks Prospect's 10th birthday. If people are shocked by the absence of Simon Schama or Milton Friedman, they can add a nomination of their own.
The inclusion of Christopher Hitchens has already raised eyebrows in academia, and David Goodhart, the magazine's 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 said. He was arguing that you can't judge these things across cultures."
The list is dominated by intellectuals who work in the English language, with the vast majority of them being from the United States, including Camille Paglia, Steven Pinker, Paul Krugman, Robert Kagan and Francis Fukuyama.
Mr Goodhart denied the top 100 list was western-centric, citing five Chinese intellectuals, and architects, analysts and economists from 30 differentcountries, including the Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, based in Iraq, the 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," said Mr Goodhart. "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."
Ordinary intellects can now choose their top five from the academics, novelists, clerics, politicians and most contentiously of all, journalists, chosen in collaboration with Foreign Policy, the American 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.
Mr Chomsky is an early favourite with more than 14,000 votes already cast in the poll, which marks Prospect's 10th birthday. If people are shocked by the absence of Simon Schama or Milton Friedman, they can add a nomination of their own.
The inclusion of Christopher Hitchens has already raised eyebrows in academia, and David Goodhart, the magazine's 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 said. He was arguing that you can't judge these things across cultures."
The list is dominated by intellectuals who work in the English language, with the vast majority of them being from the United States, including Camille Paglia, Steven Pinker, Paul Krugman, Robert Kagan and Francis Fukuyama.
Mr Goodhart denied the top 100 list was western-centric, citing five Chinese intellectuals, and architects, analysts and economists from 30 differentcountries, including the Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, based in Iraq, the 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," said Mr Goodhart. "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."