April 21, 2008
Foreign Policy's Top 100 Public Intellectuals
In its May-June issue, Foreign Policy has teamed up with Prospect magazine to compile a list of the world's top 100 public intellectuals. Here's a post from FP's wonderful blog, Passport, explaining how you can vote for your own top five; and here's a link to the list itself. The criteria is quite simple—the editors seem to have chosen subjectively, rather than attempt any algorithm for calculating public influence (as did Richard A. Posner, who made the FP list, in his 2001 book Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline). Christopher Hitchens has written an essay "on the burdens and pleasures of making a living by ideas in our modern age," but it is only available to subscribers.
The editors' attempt to seek out those with public influence is ratified by my own experience as a reader: Despite the fact that many of these intellectuals specialize in fields in which I have little specific interest, in the past three years I've read articles, read books, or attended lectures by approximately two-thirds of those who made it.