Noam Chomsky has been voted the world's top public intellectual, in a poll conducted by Prospect Magazine and Foreign Policy.
According to FP, Chomsky beat Umberto Eco, Richard Dawkins, Václav Havel, Christopher Hitchens, Paul Krugman, Jürgen Habermas, Amartya Sen, Jared Diamond, Salman Rushdie, Naomi Klein, Shirin Ebadi, Hernando de Soto, Bjørn Lomborg, Abdolkarim Soroush, Thomas Friedman, Pope Benedict XVI, Eric Hobsbawm, Paul Wolfowitz, and Camille Paglia.
It is interesting to note the number of philosophers (in the broad sense) hanging around in the top ten.
Duncan Cambell, in The Guardian, aptly observed "The most striking aspect of the list is the shortage of the young, the female and the French."
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Does the presence of 'philosophers' - such as Chomsky, Eco, and Habermas - point to philosophy being the arena best suited to producing 'public intellectuals'?
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