Top Public Intellectuals list turns out to be a dud

Or at least that seems to be the sense of the write-up of the results by David Herman in Foreign Policy magazine, which co-sponsored the Internet poll with Prospect. Here are the top 20:

1 Noam Chomsky
2 Umberto Eco
3 Richard Dawkins
4 Václav Havel
5 Christopher Hitchens
6 Paul Krugman
7 Jürgen Habermas
8 Amartya Sen
9 Jared Diamond
10 Salman Rushdie
11 Naomi Klein
12 Shirin Ebadi
13 Hernando de Soto
14 Bjørn Lomborg
15 Abdolkarim Soroush
16 Thomas Friedman
17 Pope Benedict XVI
18 Eric Hobsbawm
19 Paul Wolfowitz
20 Camille Paglia

Top Write-in Votes
1 Milton Friedman
2 Stephen Hawking
3 Arundhati Roy
4 Howard Zinn
5 Bill Clinton

But what can you expect from a list where Thomas Friedman was nominated but Milton Friedman was not? Herman churlishly denounces the write-in vote for Uncle Miltie:

In fact, Friedman was specifically named in last month’s criteria for inclusion—along with other ancient greats like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—as an example of someone who had been deliberately left off the long list on the grounds that they were no longer actively contributing to their discipline.

And we're supposed to believe that the #1 public intellectual, Noam Chomsky, is actively contributing to his discipline of linguistics? Chomsky's big breakthrough in linguistics came in 1958. Chomsky's evidence that humans possess an innate talent for language was a major early blow against the reigning blank slate theory, but Chomsky hasn't contributed much since then because he declined to look for the Darwinian roots of language. That opened the door for his former acolyte Steven Pinker to surpass him.

I don't despise Chomsky's punditry because his political stance is idiosyncratic -- a sort of romantic left anarchism, or something like that -- but I hardly feel the need to pay attention to it. Friedman is in his 90s now, but I quoted his latest views on Pres. Bush as recently as last June, which is more than I can say for Chomsky.

Similarly, Solzhenitsyn's latest two books -- a two volume history of the relationship between Russians and Jews -- haven't even been published in the United States yet. And not because they are irrelevant to present day life but because they are too hot for the NYC publishing world to touch.

In general, the poll merely adds to my sense that we are living in an age of pygmies, when thought is valued mostly as a fashion accessory.

Let's do my list of Senior public intellectuals (about age 75 and up):

Top 5

Milton Friedman

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Edward O. Wilson

Tom Wolfe
Thomas Sowell

Honorable Mention

Freeman Dyson

Peter F. Drucker

Jacques Barzun

Samuel P. Huntington

James Q. Wilson

Among the younger generation, I know enough of the contenders to not want to get into publicly deciding who and who wouldn't make my list.

But here's a question for you: Based just on what they've written in this decade, where would "Gary Brecher" deserve to fall among the list of 100 official nominees (assuming that he had been nominated)? He looks like definite Top 10 material to me, which says a lot about the current quality of most of the nominees.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer