At the Celebrity Culture conference, we very nearly had that panel on academic celebrity. On the Monday morning drive down to Ayr, Phil, David P. Marshall (Keynote) and I debated the potential merit of raising this subject in the programme, which is implict of many debates surrounding the public intellectual. However, as the conference kicked-off, Phil and I became embroiled in the media frenzy, David lost his luggage, Diane couldn't get into the country, the fire-alarm went off and, in any case, we didnt really have enough time on the programme to put it together.
So, perhaps a follow-up meeting on this subject is in order? I mention this now after having seen Prospect Magazine's list of Global Public Intellectuals. Noam Chomsky tops the bill followed by:
Position Name Total votes
2 Umberto Eco 2464 3 Richard Dawkins 2188 4 Václav Havel 1990 5 Christopher Hitchens 1844 6 Paul Krugman 1746 7 Jürgen Habermas 1639 8 Amartya Sen 1590 9 Jared Diamond 1499 10 Salman Rushdie 1468 11 Naomi Klein 1378 12 Shirin Ebadi 1309 13 Hernando De Soto 1202 14 Bjørn Lomborg 1141 15 Abdolkarim Soroush 1114 16 Thomas Friedman 1049 17 Pope Benedict XVI 1046 18 Eric Hobsbawm 1037 19 Paul Wolfowitz 1028 20 Camille Paglia 1013 21 Francis Fukuyama 883 22 Jean Baudrillard 858 23 Slavoj Zizek 840 24 Daniel Dennett 832 25 Freeman Dyson 823 26 Steven Pinker 812 27 Jeffrey Sachs 810 28 Samuel Huntington 805 29 Mario Vargas Llosa 771 30 Ali al-Sistani 768 31 EO Wilson 742 32 Richard Posner 740 33 Peter Singer 703 34 Bernard Lewis 660 35 Fareed Zakaria 634 36 Gary Becker 630 37 Michael Ignatieff 610 38 Chinua Achebe 585 39 Anthony Giddens 582 40 Lawrence Lessig 565 41 Richard Rorty 562 42 Jagdish Bhagwati 561 43 Fernando Cardoso 556 44= JM Coetzee 548 44= Niall Ferguson 548 46 Ayaan Hirsi Ali 546 47 Steven Weinberg 507 48 Julia Kristeva 487 49 Germaine Greer 471 50 Antonio Negri 452 51 Rem Koolhaas 429 52 Timothy Garton Ash 428 53 Martha Nussbaum 422 54 Orhan Pamuk 393 55 Clifford Geertz 388 56 Yusuf al-Qaradawi 382 57 Henry Louis Gates Jr. 379 58 Tariq Ramadan 372 59 Amos Oz 358 60 Larry Summers 351 61 Hans Küng 344 62 Robert Kagan 339 63 Paul Kennedy 334 64 Daniel Kahnemann 312 65 Sari Nusseibeh 297 66 Wole Soyinka 296 67 Kemal Dervis 295 68 Michael Walzer 279 69 Gao Xingjian 277 70 Howard Gardner 273 71 James Lovelock 268 72 Robert Hughes 259 73 Ali Mazrui 251 74 Craig Venter 244 75 Martin Rees 242 76 James Q Wilson 229 77 Robert Putnam 221 78 Peter Sloterdijk 217 79 Sergei Karaganov 194 80 Sunita Narain 186 81 Alain Finkielkraut 185 82 Fan Gang 180 83 Florence Wambugu 159 84 Gilles Kepel 156 85 Enrique Krauze 144 86 Ha Jin 129 87 Neil Gershenfeld 120 88 Paul Ekman 118 89 Jaron Lanier 117 90 Gordon Conway 90 91 Pavol Demes 88 92 Elaine Scarry 87 93 Robert Cooper 86 94 Harold Varmus 85 95 Pramoedya Ananta Toer 84 96 Zheng Bijian 76 97 Kenichi Ohmae 68 98= Wang Jisi 59 98= Kishore Mahbubani 59 100 Shintaro Ishihara 57