First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

17 Responses

1. Caspar Henderson says:

   November 20, 2008 at 12:13 pm

   First, not a direct answer, but a question about your criteria. Gulen’s ideas may be ‘interesting’ but they are not progressive, to put it mildly. To millions, Sean Hannity or the authors of the Left Behind series are ‘interesting’. For some, Nick Griffin is ‘interesting’.

   To me, your list looks a bit light on those who have made progressive contribution on science and environment. In the UK this might include Martin Rees. In the U.S. — among many others — the likes of Dan Esty - now, I think, an environ advisor to Obama.

   And, of course, more non-Anglosphere
2. James Crabtree says:

   November 20, 2008 at 12:17 pm

   Thanks Caspar - good points. Can i ask that we not make this too much of a meta conversation? I know we all disagree on what a public intellectual is, but nonetheless we all know one when we see one - Hitch, Chomsky, Hutton, Gulen, etc. Why not make a case for one thinker who has made a real contribution this year? Why not make the case for Dan Esty - who, i have to admit, i’ve never heard of. jc
3. Tom Chatfield says:

   November 20, 2008 at 12:17 pm

   Can I start the “who?” ball rolling with a suggestion that it slightly pains me to confess: Malcolm Gladwell for most influential intellectual, and not just because so many people read his books.

   I recently sat down to digest my advance copy of “Outliers” positively bristling with the conviction that what this Gladwell needed was to be taken down at least two pegs, perhaps three, by someone. A one-man industry, his I-name-a-new-trend-every-three-years schtick seemed to getting old.

   Having read his ideas outlined in synopsis, moreover, there seemed little more the book itself could add (”genius”=innate ability plus the opportunity to flourish plus the application of around 10,000 hours of dedicated labour plus a few personal skills). And having once read Richard Posner’s devastatingly good critique of “Blink,” back in 2005, I felt that Gladwell’s number had long been up: his over-easy, under-expert technique picked apart at its seams.

   All well and good. Then I read “Outliers” and, damn, if it wasn’t eloquent and clever and resonant. Not, I think, comprehensive or even entirely right. But if public intellectual means anything to me, it means this kind of book: one committed to breeding further thought in others, and informed by a belief in the value of intellectual labour. “Outliers” says insightful, important things with integrity; it’s the kind of book I would want my children to read, partly because it’s the kind of book that I think would make them want to read lots of other books…

   So, in despite of all the sour grapes increasingly being thrown his way (and Gladwell as a “phenomenon” is both enviable and a little boring, as he probably recognises himself): Gladwell for the brainy man of my year. Not “the” year, please note. I’m not making a universal claim here. But you should go read his book; I promise it will make you think.
4. Tim & Vanessa says:

   November 20, 2008 at 2:10 pm

   Dear Sir:

   According to a rich Arab sheikh, Michael jackson is an intellectual too and deserves some accolade for his inpsirational songs such as Beat It and Earth Song - songs which changed public shibboleths.

   Alas our sheikh friend has turned out to be a fair-weather friend for Michael and is suing the poor singer for some alleged breach of some verbal contract, despite avowing eternal friendship and saying that he is a great inspiration.

   Double standards on the part of the Bahrain royals seems to be the problem here - if this is his friend and he treats him thus when the wood is green, what does our Arab friend to to his enemies? Contradictions abound in this case.

   It is surprising that the High Court has even looked at it - given the health of the singer and the court’s own submission that the singer is a vulnerable adult. Unscrupulous Arabs should be asked to return to their bedouin tents.

   Tim
5. Jan-Emmanuel De Neve says:

   November 20, 2008 at 2:30 pm

   James, think of James K. Galbraith–son of–as public intellectual. He’s really hit the spotlights this past year and is also influential behind the scenes (partially wrote the US congress bailout plan). His book The Predator State is a #1 Amazon and NYTimes bestseller: in October he and his father’s The Great Crash (1929) were 1 and 2 on Amazon Economics bestsellers!
   oh, and may I add that he gives the best interviews: funny, incredibly informed, and more often than not contrary to conventional wisdom.
6. Aaron Banks says:

   November 20, 2008 at 4:31 pm

   The definition of public intellectual seems to be heavily skewed towards my gender. Where are the women? As that noted public intellectual Ron Burgundy once said: “I’m a man who discovered the wheel and built the Eiffel Tower out of metal and brawn. That’s what kind of man I am. You’re just a woman with a small brain. With a brain a third the size of us. It’s science.” Something to look at and discuss in future years, I hope.

   That said, I pick Paul Krugman. Economics is a lot like baseball, in that you can fail 70% of the time and still be a star. By that measure, Krugman is Ted Williams. (Apologies for using a baseball analogy on a British website, but if you don’t like it, don’t rely on our Trident missiles for your nuclear shield.) Anyway, Krugman’s prescience in the months leading up to and his insights during this crisis has made him an invaluable resource to laymen like myself. The Nobel proves that he packs some punch amongst big thinkers and opnion leaders, too. The only downside I can see, is that we have to endure Krugman beginning everything he says/writes with “As I predicted back in May/2007/1885…”
7. David Killen says:

   November 20, 2008 at 5:24 pm

   I’d like to make a case for Daniel Barenboim. This may seem odd, or even frivolous under current circumstances, but I think we need him now more than ever. Philosophies have come and gone, great thinkers have given birth to tyrannies or impotently witnessed the collapse of civilisation after civilisation and political system after economic orthodoxy. Constant, throughout all of this, has been the centrality of art — and particularly music — to the condition of human existence: a mysterious centrality that Schopenhauer saw as humanity’s only glimpse beyond the reach of our senses or rational thought.

   Barenboim, one of the world’s greatest musicians, is also a profound and subtle thinker. His writings, culminating in this year’s “Everything is connected: the power of music,” constitute the most lucid and intellectually compelling advocacy of art’s lasting importance. He is also a great communicator: his 2006 Reith lecture, during which he urged the audience to listen to the silence before and between the opening notes of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” was spellbinding stuff. He seeks to demonstrate that art is not something beyond society and politics but at the heart of human affairs. And he puts his money where his mouth is. The West Eastern Divan, the Israeli-Palestinian project he co-founded with Edward Said, is about as messily political as it gets. Amidst the modern world’s defining conflict, music – its structure and form, and the skill required to perform it — becomes a metaphor for life.

   It may be difficult to argue the importance of art when much contemporary art is manifestly unimportant. I believe we get the art we deserve: we have ceased to look or listen or think seriously about the sounds and images we passively consume. Barenboim asks us to silence the cacophony, to sweep away the clutter, to abandon our culture of desecration and re-sacralise ourselves by the power of art.
8. James Crabtree says:

   November 20, 2008 at 5:48 pm

   This is from Paul Miller, CEO of the school of everything,who, for some reason can’t leave a comment like this because our filter thinks its spam!

   ___________________________________________________________

   The technology world has its own public intellectuals who might not make it onto the op-ed pages very often but are getting more important to the way we live our lives and think about the world. Tim O’Reilly, Clay Shirky, Umair Haque and Fred Wilson are my favourites.

   Each in their own way has been pushing us to get serious about what the internet can do to solve social and environmental problems.

   They’ve taken the debate away from advertising and how many eye-balls you can get to view a web page and encouraged people to think about how the internet can create new models for organising and improving the world.

   Take this post from Fred about hacking education:

   http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2008/11/hacking-educati.html

   Or this one from Umair about the value technology can provide in reorganising old systems:

   http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/haque/2008/06/a_manifesto_for_the_next_indus_1.html

   Or this from Tim O’Reilly railing against developers spending their time coding sheep throwing applications for facebook and asking them to change the world:

   http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/09/web-meets-world.html

   And of course, Clay did it the old fashioned way and published a book:

   http://www.amazon.co.uk/Here-Comes-Everybody-Clay-Shirky/dp/0713999896

   Interestingly they’re all twitter users as well. Maybe there’s something about being able to sum up your ideas in 140 characters….
9. Mary Abdo says:

   November 20, 2008 at 5:57 pm

   Let’s throw Christopher Buckley into the ring. His embrace of Obama and subsequent departure from the National Review typified Republican in-fighting, sent the right into a tailspin and were the strongest signs - among many - that the era of US conservatism as we know it is over.
10. Tom Wright says:

    November 20, 2008 at 6:59 pm

    Since the President Elect is the first since JFK to be a bona fide intellectual surely there is a strong case to be made that he is the preeminent public intellectual of the year. This, of course, begs the question whether his impact was due primarily to organization and politics rather than ideas but one could point to the speech on race, the unity themes more generally, and the echoes of Niebuhr. It may also be said that he is a consumer rather than a producer of original thought but the same can and should be said of Gladwell, Levitt, and others who regularly top these sorts of lists.

    Another person who springs to mind is General Petraeus (PhD) ably assisted by a number of other military folk also with doctorates in counterinsurgency. Would any of the progress in Iraq have occurred were it not for his thought processes on counterinsurgency doctrine, the minimal use of force, how to think about local diplomacy, and so on. More generally, he may have done more to change the culture and behavior of the world’s largest military than any other person with the possible exception of Andrew Marshall.

    Finally, obviously the financial crisis is the issue de jour and Roubini deserves the praise he is getting but for most of the others, including Wolf and Summers—both of whom who I greatly admire– I would add a note of caution. The standard here is Keynes and his real time analysis of the economic crises of the first half of the 20th century. Generally, our era has yet to produce anyone of that stature. By and large, our financial intellectuals failed to grasp the nature and scale of this crisis, although Summers is closer than anyone. No fault there—it is seismic and may take decades to completely understand—but it is a cloud over the entire profession.
11. James Crabtree says:

    November 21, 2008 at 8:04 am

    Here is another contender, or, rather a second vote for America’s favourite General. This is from Bartle Bull, Prospect’s dashing foreign editor.

    ______________________________________________________________

    Has to be Petraeus.

    After his tour in Mosul, having done a Master’s and Doctorate at Princeton long before, he spent 16 months re-writing America’s counter-insurgency doctrine. Then he went back into theatre and used this intellectual output to win a war considered unwinnable by every other serious public intellectual.

    When was the last time a war was remembered by the single General who won it? This war will be Petraeus’s forever. When was the last time that a war-owning General not only possessed a world-class PhD but also won his war after an extended intellectual retreat involving academic study, philosophical reflection, and the writing of a classic?

    The doctrine document alone is worth the prize: it’s probably the only written piece of intellectual output in the last two years that has made a direct difference to the lives of millions of people and an indirect but real contribution to huge swathes of the economic and political real world — and the only written achievement from that period that will be discussed, much less read, in 20 or 100 years.

    Outside of the hard sciences, the rest is fairly frivolous by comparison.
12. El Cid says:

    November 21, 2008 at 11:36 am

    I would like to nominate Borgoñes Toro for his intelligence, extreme bravery, and coolness under fire. One of the hallmarks of a great intellectual is an intolerance for bullshit - and that’s Borgoñes through and through.
13. David Herman says:

    November 21, 2008 at 2:06 pm

    Most influential:

    1) Paul Krugman (won 2008 Nobel prize for Economics and regular columnist for op-ed pages of New York Times), was very involved in debates about the financial crisis in the US and lent his authority as Nobel prize wnner to his support for Obama and government intervnetion in the economy.

    2) Thomas Friedman (also new York Times), the most influential journalist in the world, whose column is syndicated to 100+ newspapers around the world, pro-Obama and has just brought out a book on why America needs to go Green and kickstart a new Green revolution worldwide, which hasd already sold hundred sof thousands of copies and may singlehandedly have a huge impact on the debate about environmentalism (I say ‘may’ — too early to say since the book has only just come out).

    3) Mark Mazower. His acclaimed history book, ‘Hitler’s Empire’ (Allen Lane, 2008), was well reviewed, but - morte important for the long term - will I think have a huge impact on the way we think about Nazism and put together with the rest of his recent work will have a big impact on seeing wartime Europe from an east and south-east European rather than west European perspective.

    David Herman
14. Taylor Owen says:

    November 21, 2008 at 4:28 pm

    Two suggestions:
    First, Krugman for the twin effort of getting much of the financial meltdown right, for doing so in public while being largely ridiculed, and for wining a nobel on the side, for something entirely different, and wholly academic. The tripartite of public intellectualism.
    Second, Ignatieff, for putting his money where is mouth is, and jumping into the political world. After a loss in the last leadership, due primarily to his being out of the country for too long, he put his head down and engaged in tireless retail politics for two years. Not without costs, he has revisited many of his past positions with a degree of honestly and thoughtfulness that few politicians dare. He is now the frontrunner going into another leadership race, one which I would bet he wins. If he does, he is likely to become Prime Minister. A potential PM who wrote for the New Yorker, is there a better definition of a public intellectual?
15. Hugh says:

    November 21, 2008 at 6:32 pm

    Do we really need another book about the Second World War? And how relevant is a new perspective on the Nazis to understanding the world in 2008? I find it slightly disappointing that a youngish academic like Mark Mazower has chosen to go back to Adolf Hitler.

    Ignatieff’s New Yorker mea culpa was very slippery based on the (avowedly anti-intellectual) premise that his errors in judgment had something to do with the mindset of academia versus the mindset of practical politics. The corollary being don’t worry it’s okay to listen to him now because now he’s a politician.

    With the shattering of free market orthodoxy over the banking crisis there was the opportunity for someone to seize the moment as Fukuyama did in 1989, but no one’s come near.
16. saint says:

    November 23, 2008 at 1:26 pm

    Obama is an intellectual? Bwahahahahahaha. Even his wife says he hasn’t done anything yet.
17. Caspar Henderson says:

    November 24, 2008 at 3:11 pm

    I’d like to challenge Bartle Bull’s suggestion of Gen. Petraeus. Yes, Petraeus is astute, but one can imagine an historian of Iraq, for example, saying that the most important thing he’s done is to oversee the return (for now) of some power (back) to the Sunni tribes on whom Saddam relied. The British and the Ottomans did this too. No intellectual breakthrough in that (?)

    The thinker credited in some quarters with making one of the most significant contributions to the U.S. military re-frame is the Australian counterinsurgency specialist David J Kilcullen.

    But if choosing amongst (Anglo) theorists, commentators and actors on/in the greater West Asia mess, I’d be tempted to go for Rory Stewart. See, for example, his 23 Nov NYT op ed The ‘Good War’ Isn’t Worth Fighting.

    Apologies not to have come back yet with a case for Esty, or even James Hansen, the distinguished climate scientist who has suggested prosecutions of coal and oil company bosses.