The two most striking
things about this poll are the number of
people who took part and the age of the
winners. Over 20,000 people voted for
their top five names from our longlist
of 100, and they tended to reinforce the
trends of the original list. More than
half of the top 30 are based in North
America. Europe, by contrast, is
surprisingly under-represented-a cluster
of well-known names in the top 20 (Eco,
Havel, Habermas) but then it is a long
way down to Kristeva (48) and Negri
(50). The most striking absence is
France-one name in the top 40, fewer
than Iran or Peru.
There is not one woman in the top ten,
and only three in the top 20. The big
names of the left did well (Chomsky,
Habermas, Hobsbawm) but there weren't
many of them. Scientists, literary
critics, philosophers and psychologists
all fared badly. And voters did not use
the "bonus ball" to champion new faces.
The top two names, Milton Friedman and
Stephen Hawking, do not represent new
strands of thought. (In fact, Friedman
was specifically named in last month's
"criteria for inclusion"-along with
other ancient greats like
Solzhenitsyn-as an example of someone
who had been deliberately left off the
longlist on the grounds that they were
no longer actively contributing to their
discipline.)
The poll was in one sense a victim of
its own success. Word spread around the
internet very quickly, and at least
three of our top 20 (Chomsky, Hitchens
and Soroush), or their acolytes, decided
to draw attention to their presence on
the list by using their personal
websites to link to Prospect's voting
page. In Hitchens's and Soroush's case,
the votes then started to flood in.
Although it is hard to tell exactly
where voters came from, it is likely
that a clear majority were from Britain
and America, with a fair sprinkling from
other parts of Europe and the
English-speaking world. There was also a
huge burst from Iran, although
very little voting from the far east,
which may explain why four of the bottom
five on the list were thinkers from
Japan and China.
What is most interesting about the
votes, though, is the age of the top
names. Chomsky won by a mile, with over
4,800 votes. Then Eco, with just under
2,500, Dawkins and Havel. Only two in
the top nine-Hitchens and Rushdie-were
born after the second world war. And of
the top 20, only Klein and Lomborg are
under 50. This may reflect the age of
the voters, choosing familiar names.
However, surely it also tells us
something about the radically shifting
nature of the public intellectual in the
west. Who are the younger equivalents to
Habermas, Chomsky and Havel? Great names
are formed by great events. But there
has been no shortage of terrible events
in the last ten years and some names on
the list (Ignatieff, Fukuyama, Hitchens)
are so prominent precisely because of
what they have said about them. Only one
of these, though, is European, and he
lives in Washington DC.
You can read more elsewhere in this
issue about Chomsky. Even if you
disagree with his attacks on US foreign
policy, there are two reasons why few
would be surprised to see him at the top
of the poll. First, his intellectual
range. Like a number of other figures in
the top ten, he is prominent in a number
of areas. Havel was a playwright and
statesman; Eco a literary critic and
bestselling author; Diamond was a
professor of physiology and now has a
chair in geography at UCLA, and writes
on huge issues ranging over a great time
span. Second, and more important,
Chomsky belongs to a tradition which
goes back to Zola, Russell and Sartre: a
major thinker or writer who speaks out
on the great public issues of his time,
opposing his government on questions of
conscience rather than the fine print of
policy.
I said last month in my commentary on
the original Prospect/Foreign Policy
list of 100 names that it seemed to
represent the death of that grand
tradition of oppositional intellectuals.
The overwhelming victory for Noam
Chomsky suggests that we still yearn for
such figures-we just don't seem to be
able to find any under the age of 70.
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