Serious wisdom

Check out the May issue of Prospect magazine for my review of Charlie Leadbeater's We-Think, Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody and Lee Siegel's Rage Against the Machine. You'll have to pay the read it -- but this is a smart investment because reading Prospect will make you wiser about the world.

Speaking of serious wisdom, Prospect is once again running a readers' poll to discover the world's leading public intellectual. You can vote here from a long short list of 100. Last time around, in 2005, Noam Chomsky was elected, beating Umberto Eco into a distant second place. But things have changed in the public intellectual business over the last three years. We are now living in a Christopher Hitchens world -- as proven by Prospect's rather dodgy decision to put Alexander Linklater's portrait of Hitchens on the cover of its public intellectual issue. In 2005, Hitchens came in fifth, two places behind co-atheist Richard Dawkins. But that was before God is Great and the Hitchification of Anglo-American media.

Who would get my vote? Certainly not Chomsky, a crazy fossil of the archaic American left miraculously brought back to life by the idiocy of the Bush regime. Hitchens is unChomsky: a work-in-progress, omnivorous, always-on. He's my own personal role-model of a subverter of subversions -- although, like Dawkins, I think he's a bit too self-inflated with comfortable English common-sense to be the world's leading intellectual. Jurgen Habermas (#6 in 2005) is full of anything but common sense, but his problem is just the opposite -- too much academic theory and not enough clarity. If you want an American king, then how about New York Times columnist Paul Krugman (#7 in 2005) -- who wins my vote for the world's most public-spirited and coherent economist.

In 2005, a crowd of 20,000 people voted in the Prospect poll. The election of the crazy fossil Chomsky (who got 4,800 votes) doesn't speak highly of the wisdom of that crowd. Anyone-but-Chomsky is my candidate, with Hitchens as the odds-on favorite to be crowned as the next intellectual master of the universe.

Comments

[Stephen Smoliar]

Andrew, I wish you well with your review; but, after reading your poll summary, I question your claim about PROSPECT making one "wiser about the world." The fact that Eco would place AT ALL, let alone a distant second, leads me to believe that PROSPECT readers are more easily swayed by clever turns of phrase (even better if seasoned with a bit of Marxism) than they are by intellectual substance! I look forward to the day when you get published in THE NEW YORK REVIEW and start playing to the theater of serious intellect!

[andrew]

so Stephen -- who would be on your list?

[Stephen Smoliar]

Funny you should ask, Andrew! I recently wrote a blog post on a similar topic about pianists:

http://therehearsalstudio.blogspot.com/2008/03/top-five-pianists.html

It gave me a chance to rant about what I call "top-dog thinking!" As with pianists (and dogs), there are too many "breeds" of intellectuals to rank order the whole pile. So, if you don't mind, let me shift the question a bit:

Given all the stuff out there, who are the authors I read, regardless of the specific subject matter? Ironically, three of them are in the current issue of THE NEW YORK REVIEW. Ordered alphabetically, they are Ian Buruma, Tony Judt, and Gary Wills. I would probably add Richard Lewontin, and I definitely take Robert Solow over Paul Krugman any day!

Do any of the PROSPECT authors have that kind of a draw on you?

[Epi Wonk]

"Chomsky, a crazy fossil of the archaic American left miraculously brought back to life by the idiocy of the Bush regime." True, but so be it. When I ask my medical school students (or rather ex-students; I'm retired) what they think is the best source of foreign policy information, those against the invasion of Iraq say Chomsky's books. Those in favor of the invasion say right-wing blogs, such as that of Daniel Pipes. Just reporting my observations. Make your own judgments.