Top 100 Public Intellectuals

Baiting The Left 75 Comments

A reader emails;

Foreign Policy is having a poll of the top 100 intellectuals. The vast majority of the names that I recognized in their top 100 list are lefties. However there is a provision for writing in a candidate. The criteria is: “Although the men and women on this list are some of the world’s most sophisticated thinkers, the criteria to make the list could not be more simple. Candidates must be living and still active in public life. They must have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence wider debate, often far beyond the borders of their own country.”
Under this criteria, I chose to write-in Mark Steyn, Canada, Author.

If ever there was a poll to go horribly wrong… here’s the link; http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4262

75 Replies to “Top 100 Public Intellectuals”

  2. To the commie above that said intellectuals have to consider both sides of an argument: then that means no leftists are intellectuals then doesn’t it?

  4. General David Petraeus
    Christopher Hitchens
    Ayaan Hirsi Ali
    Bjorn Lomberg
    write in: Vaclav Klaus
    Too bad they allowed only one write-in.

  5. Dawkins had -one- idea 40 years ago and hasn’t shut up about it since. Yep, another great mind right up there with Algore and David Snoozuki.

  6. I put Mark down as well. I think he would like this kind of lark. Besides I hardly noticed any name I know.

  7. As soon as I saw Al Gore’s name on the list I stopped reading as Al Gore would belong in a list of the worlds 100 greatest morons.
    My list would include:
    Oliver Sacks – worlds best known neurologist
    Raymond Kurzweil – polymath
    Bjorn Lomberg – rational environmentalist
    Alexander Shulgin – psychonaut and organic chemist
    Antonio D’Amasio – neurologist and writer
    If I could include more than 5 I’d also add:
    Stephen Wolfram – creator of mathematica
    I’ve included the people above because they are well known. I wouldn’t include Steyn as I don’t think he fits in the intellectual category (nor would I include PJ O’Rourke whose work I enjoy immensely).
    I think that anyone who is not working in a scientific area should be excluded unless they start first in science and then develop an interest in other non-scientific areas. Anyone who is innumerate shouldn’t qualify and this would disqualify a large number of the literary types. The only writers that I would include would be hard SF writers as they usually have a strong science background. For writers I’d find it hard to chose between:
    Greg Bear
    Larry Niven
    Neal Stephenson

  8. Phantom: I think Dawkins’ contribution has more to do with his recent PR work, and less to do with the thesis behind The Selfish Gene. Despite what you might think the field of evolutionary biology has come a long way since TSG. Dawkins was a big part of that, and he continues to make his presence felt as a skeptic, secular humanist, consummate scientific rationalist and Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford.
    Sorry we can’t all meet your towering standards of intellectualism. Dawkins will have to do until you can show us how it’s all done.

  9. Kathy Shaidle ;
    Canada’s answer to the Tasmanian devil, only this one has She before devil.
    I do think the Ladies aquited themselves well in such a pond of ignorance. Tip o’h the hat to you both.

  10. No Thomas Sowell? NO THOMAS SOWELL?
    That’ll tell you a lot about the broadness of the intellectual horizons of the people making the selections.

  11. Thomas Sowell, Chalres Krauthammer, Victor Davis Hanson, and, to really rub it in, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly.

  14. “How does a general qualify exactly?”
    Ask Napoleon. Or Sun Tzu. Or Colonel John Boyd.
    If you don’t think there’s an overwhelming intellectual component to being a strategist, then you have absolutely no idea what it is that military leaders–especially the best among them–actually do. David Petraeus is the architect of, among other things, the US military’s revised counter-insurgency doctrine, which he and General Odierno proceeded to put into effect in Iraq with rather dramatic results. He is quite simply the best military mind that West Point has produced since at least Eisenhower, arguably since Robert E. Lee.

  16. I saw Samual Huntington’s name on the suggested list.
    In case anyone has forgotten, he was the author of the book “The Clash of Civilizations”, which has been discredited by leftists worldwide (in other words, it is full of hard hitting, politically incorrect, facts).
    He got my vote…along with Mark Steyn.

  17. They missed one of the greatest intemalectuals of them all….Homer J Simpson.

  18. “Intellectuals are capable of considering both sides of an argument, not making gross generalizations about the other side and dismissing it summarily.”
    and here I thought that an intellectual is someone who’se shit doesn’t stink.
    Oh well!
    Horny toAD

  20. Well Anon, if PR work is the standard (as you agree it obviously is) I submit my choice of Limbaugh, Drudge and Kate make a hell of a lot more sense than yours do.
    That was kinda my point, eh?
    The selfish gene is simplistic crap and has been the whole time, just like gun control and global warming but with less money involved.
    You want an influential -intellectual-, a guy who actually breaks ground and doesn’t just gas off, try Roger Penrose. Or William Shockley, but he died.

  21. So essentially this is a grade school popularity contest on a global scale? If we all agree to make Al Gore the prom king will he go away?

  22. Actually Conrad Black for sure should be in the top ten along with Mark Steyn.
    Adding Gore to the list makes the whole list bogus. That fat arsed phoney in no intellectual.

  24. Anon,
    What form of skeptic is Dawkin’s? Skeptical of…just curious.
    I would have to concur with you, I know well the notion of Dawkin’s “selfish gene” and the arguments made by the sociobiologists, and evolutionary theorists like Buss.
    Was it Phantom who suggests that Dawkin’s TSG is now simplistic simply via the natural progression of science? That seems to miss the mark-inherently. Would phantom like examples of eminent scientists and/or theory’s that have become more simplistic with the “advancement” of a particular field of study? Where are our phrenologists? Yet, did they contribute to the zeitgeist? Inarguably, yes.
    Returning to Dawkin’s and Buss (et. al) One of the ‘things they did was to show (or in the least demonstrate) that there is a hierarchy in which those closest genetically (or similar in ways such as facial features that might be genetic markers) tend to garner the “affection and emotional interest” of both people and other animals. (perhaps why conservatives are seen as ‘knuckledraggers. Lol.) Metaphorically, this hierarchy does not address the point that the amount of “affection and emotional interest” is not limited and can be expanded. If Dawkins remains ones sin qua nine I suggest, as an alternative, a review of the large literature on altruism, much of which is not reducible to this biological perspective….yet.
    The current level of human evolution, the tragedy of the commons is too often valid. I think the laissez faire notion of self-organizing is a dream that has to pass.

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