Vote for the world's top public intellectuals: How did we decide who should be on this list? The criteria are relatively simple. Candidates have to be living, and still active in public life. They have to have shown distinction in their particular field as well as an ability to influence debate across borders.
The countdown of the world’s ‘public intellectuals’: These days, we cannot get enough of lists, top 10s and countdowns, of ranking everything, regardless of a total lack of grounds for comparability. It is a comparatively recent phenomenon, with its roots, I suspect, in the most bovine elements of pop culture. And, even given the strange confines of Prospect’s list, how do you choose between the biologist Richard Dawkins and Vaclav Havel, the former Czech president? How do you weigh them up, those titans from utterly different disciplines? You don’t - it’s dumb. It doesn’t make much sense when the formula is applied to television comedy programmes or pop songs, but it’s even dumber when considering these rather arbitrarily defined intellectuals, even if it’s done in a faux-ironic manner.
The second oxymoron lurks in the title itself: “public intellectual”. What on earth is that when it’s at home?
