I’m a public intellectual – get me out of here!
Foreign Policy’s list of one hundred leading, public intellectuals is causing some controversy. We should be grateful that this list has been compiled and that the competition is being promoted by Foreign Policy rather than one of the TV networks. Graham Norton or – heaven forfend! – Jimmy Carr would have been Channel Four’s preferred hosts for ‘The Top 100 Intellectuals’ in a graveyard slot on a Sunday evening and would doubtless have been replete with such witticisms as ‘Richard Posner may have written the definitive work on judicial self-selection, but I bet he’s got a tiny cock’.Were ITV to host it, a hundred intellectuals would be placed on a desert island and forced to compete in various intellectual tasks, such as competing in the bushtucker trial to identify the phenomenal rather than noumenal witchity grub and contestants would be able to leave at any time by shouting ‘I’m a public intellectual – get me a four-page spread in the G2‘.
Worst of all would have been the BBC version, where we would have seen Jeremy Clarkson promoting Bjørn Lomborg. My objection to that is twofold. Firstly, people would be promoting their champions based on their level of agreement rather than the quality of their ideas, their commitment to academic principles or the success in convincing others of their arguments.
Secondly, and more importantly, they would be arguing for people, not ideas. I have no doubt that Christopher Hitchens will do well in a poll such as this not because his ideas are good – they are – or because his arguments convince – they do – but because people have heard of him and because his public persona is, ahem, interesting. While I accept some of the criticisms made by Tiberius – methodology, meaningful comparison between disciplines, sufficient base of knowledge - and Chris Dillow – the people actually on the list and that there may be ‘greater’ intellectuals who do not also fall into the ‘public’ category – the problem is the anthropomorphisation of ideas, so that critics of current US economic practice have the same personality as Joseph Stiglitz and all atheists are a bizarre mix of Richard Dawkins and the aformentioned Mr Hitchens. That leads, obviously, to ad hominem attacks but also makes it harder for someone to take an idea, run with it and develop it. Perhaps this is unfair – Keynesianism is more that Keynes, Marxism more than Marx – but neoliberalism doesn’t have people constantly referring back to the work of Mr Neil Iberal for ‘authenticity’.
That having been said, the project is to be welcomed for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it gives us all new people to read. Secondly, it has at least a nod to intellectual life outside of the Anglosphere. For the record, 37 on the list are from the USA, 11 from the UK, five each from China, France and India, four from Canada, three each from Israel, the Netherlands, Italy and Russia, braces from Ghana, Germany, Iran, Mexico, Turkey and Egypt and single representatives from Pakistan, Indonesia, the Vatican, Denmark, Peru, Uganda, Palestine, Bangladesh, Slovenia, South Africa, Brazil, Singapore, the Czech Republic, Somalia, Bulgaria, Nigeria, Australia, Spain, Qatar and Switzerland. Where someone has two countries against their name, they have been counted as one for each country.
In the meantime, on I’m a Public Intellectual – Get Me Out of Here: xTra’, we have an exclusive interview with Fernando Savater, who has just been voted off the island.
xD.
