Chomsky is voted world's top public intellectual

[Dave Monroe]

Chomsky is voted world's top public intellectual

· Missing from list: young, women, and the French
· Honour leaves linguistics professor underwhelmed

Duncan Campbell
Tuesday October 18, 2005

Guardian

He is in his 70s and first became known for his theory
of transformational grammar - and now he is top of the
thinkers' hit parade. Noam Chomsky, the linguistics
professor who has become one of the most outspoken
critics of US foreign policy, has won a poll that
names him as the world's top public intellectual.

Chomsky, who was underwhelmed by the honour, beat off
challenges from Umberto Eco, Richard Dawkins, Vaclav
Havel and Christopher Hitchens to win the
Prospect/Foreign Policy poll.

More than 20,000 voters from around the world took
part in selecting the winners from a list of 100. The
most striking aspect of the list is the shortage of
the young, the female and the French. Only two of the
top 10, Hitchens and Salman Rushdie, were born after
the war, and Naomi Klein is the highest placed woman,
at 11. France provides one name in the top 40, fewer
than Peru and Iran.

Since the poll was for the world's leading
intellectuals, it should come as no surprise that
websites manned by supporters of Chomsky, Hitchens and
Abdolkarim Soroush were used to draw attention to the
poll. Chomsky's supporters are clearly the most
energetic: he took 4,800 votes to Eco's 2,500. Voters
came mainly from Britain and the US. "I don't pay a
lot of attention to them," said Chomsky of the poll
last night. "It was probably padded by some friends of
mine."

Pondering the absence of younger intellectuals from
the list, David Herman asks in the new issue of
Prospect: "Who are the younger equivalents to [Jürgen]
Habermas, Chomsky and Havel? Great names are formed by
great events. But there has been no shortage of
terrible events in the last 10 years." Only two of the
top 20 have yet to reach the age of 50.

The choice of Chomsky will be welcomed and contested
by many of the same names who responded delightedly or
furiously to the award of the Nobel prize for
literature to Harold Pinter last week.

In recognition of this, Prospect offers alternative
perspectives, with Robin Blackburn arguing for
Chomsky's right to head the list as both a brilliant
expositor of linguistics and a vital critic of the US
abroad, while Oliver Kamm dismisses him as a kneejerk
anti-American who is cavalier about his sources.

Top five

1 Noam Chomsky linguistics expert and critic of US
foreign policy

2 Umberto Eco writer and academic

3 Richard Dawkins Oxford professor of public
understanding of science

4 Vaclav Havel playwright and leader of Czech velvet
revolution

5 Christopher Hitchens journalist, author, pro-Iraq
war polemicist

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1594654,00.html


		
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