Historians as Public Intellectuals

At Crooked Timber, where he's guest-blogging, and The Edge of the American West, Eric Rauchway calls attention to Foreign Policy's"The Top 100 Public Intellectuals," May/June. You're invited to vote for your top five. Last year's voting yielded this list of the top five: Noam Chomsky, Umberto Eco, Richard Dawkins, Václav Havel, and Christopher Hitchens.

There are some obvious biases in this year's list of nominees. Two-thirds of"the top 100" are from North America or Europe; and the list is dominated by political scientists and economists. Discretely, Eric isn't critical of the latter fact at Crooked Timber. At The Edge, however, he names the historians who made the list: Anne Applebaum, Jared Diamond, Drew Gilpin Faust, Niall Ferguson, Ramachandra Guha, Tony Judt, Enrique Krauze, and Bernard Lewis. What does that say about our field, Rauchway asks. The suggestion is that the list says more about Foreign Policy than about historians.

What historians should be on the list? Suggestions at The Edge seem to me to be a mixed lot. Howard Zinn? You're kidding! Eugene Genovese? Probably not. Garry Wills? Yes, indeed. Wills has a range of historical expertise that Genovese's never attempted and both of them have depth of analysis that Howard Zinn's never had.