Public intellectuals: The list

A clash of civilizations, of sorts, upended the British magazine Prospect's list of the world's 100 top public intellectuals this year -- as compared with 2005, the only other time the magazine compiled such a roster.

As the website Arts & Letters Daily put it, a bit insensitively, the Prospect's top ten slots, as determined by more than a half-million online votes, were occupied by "Muslims you never heard of." Astride the very peak was Fethullah Gulen, a 67-year-old Sufi Turkish intellectual presently living outside Philadelphia, whose work seeks to reconcile Islam and modernity. His victory, Prospect reported, was fueled by a get-out-the-vote campaign waged by Turkish publications close to Turkey's ruling AK party, to which Gulen has close ties. And other Muslim intellectuals no doubt benefited from the publicity the pro-Gulen campaign created. (Go here for the Prospect's edifying profile of Gulen.)

To Western ears, the most familiar of the next nine names on this intellectual Top 100 would be the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk and Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss-based scholar of Islam famously denied a visa by the United States. (Others include Muhammad Yunus, Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, and Aitzaz Ahsan. Eat your heart out, Christopher Hitchens, languishing at No. 27.)

But what about, you ask, the local angle? Noam Chomsky, the No. 1 public intellectual of 2005, according to Prospect -- and an M.I.T. professor -- slid to 11 as a result of the Muslim surge. Still, he remained the highest ranked American, and was joined by two other M.I.T. scholars: Esther Duflo (a list newcomer), founder of the Poverty Action Lab, and Neil Gershenfeld (ranked 87 last time out), who heads the university's Center for Bits and Atoms.

Any ranking like this is bound to be arbitrary, if not outright ridiculous. No two people seem able to agree even what a public intellectual is. Must such a creature display great range, for example, as the fabled (and, by now, clichéd in these discussions) New York Intellectuals of the '50s did? Or "simply" make a great contribution in one area of great interest to the public?

Whatever the answer, people seem to think that Harvard is chockablock with P.I's. Landing on the list were economist Amartya Sen (16), political scientist Samuel Huntington (28) -- aka the creator of the clash-of-civilizations thesis -- biologist E.O. Wilson (39), historian and president Drew Faust (51), poet Wole Soyinka (55), psychologist Steven Pinker (57), historian Niall Ferguson (62), economist (and ex-president) Lawrence Summers (62), author and humanitarian activist Samantha Power (73) -- but not her new husband, the hyperprolific Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein! -- architect Rem Koolhaas (88), psychologist Howard Gardner (95), and the government professors Robert Putnam (93) and Alexander de Waal (78). That's nearly three times the number posted by Harvard's closest university rival, list-wise, which would be Princeton.

Princeton's Peter Singer, incidentally, who has defended infanticide in some extreme and rare cases, edged out the Pope, 29 to 32.