World's Top 100 Intellectuals

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World's Top 100 Intellectuals

Postby RYP » Wed Jun 25, 2008 12:51 am

Sorry Jumper you didn't make it this year....Turkish and Islamic scholars head the list... Al Gore only came in at 12th!

List: the 100 leading intellectuals

World's top thinkers according to a survey by Prospect and Foreign Policy magazines

* guardian.co.uk,
* Monday June 23, 2008

1 Fethullah Gulen

2 Muhammad Yunus

3 Yusuf al-Qaradawi

4 Orhan Pamuk

5 Aitzaz Ahsan

6 Amr Khaled

7 Abdolkarim Soroush

8 Tariq Ramadan

9 Mahmood Mamdani

10 Shirin Ebadi

11 Noam Chomsky

12 Al Gore

13 Bernard Lewis

14 Umberto Eco

15 Ayaan Hirsi Ali

16 Amartya Sen

17 Fareed Zakaria

18 Garry Kasparov

19 Richard Dawkins

20 Mario Vargas Llosa

21 Lee Smolin

22 Jürgen Habermas

23 Salman Rushdie

24 Sari Nusseibeh

25 Slavoj Zizek

26 Vaclav Havel

27 Christopher Hitchens

28 Samuel Huntington

29 Peter Singer

30 Paul Krugman

31 Jared Diamond

32 Pope Benedict XVI

33 Fan Gang

34 Michael Ignatieff

35 Fernando Henrique Cardoso

36 Lilia Shevtsova

37 Charles Taylor

38 Martin Wolf

39 EO Wilson

40 Thomas Friedman

41 Bjorn Lomborg

42 Daniel Dennett

43 Francis Fukuyama

44 Ramachandra Guha

45 Tony Judt

46 Steven Levitt

47 Nouriel Roubini

48 Jeffrey Sachs

49 Wang Hui

50 VS Ramachandran

51 Drew Gilpin Faust

52 Lawrence Lessig

53 JM Coetzee

54 Fernando Savater

55 Wole Soyinka

56 Yan Xuetong

57 Steven Pinker

58 Alma Guillermoprieto

59 Sunita Narain

60 Anies Baswedan

61 Michael Walzer

62 Niall Ferguson

63 George Ayittey

64 Ashis Nandy

65 David Petraeus

66 Olivier Roy

67 Lawrence Summers

68 Martha Nussbaum

69 Robert Kagan

70 James Lovelock

71 J Craig Venter

72 Amos Oz

73 Samantha Power

74 Lee Kuan Yew

75 Hu Shuli

76 Kwame Anthony Appiah

77 Malcolm Gladwell

78 Alexander De Waal

79 Gianni Riotta

80 Daniel Barenboim

81 Thérèse Delpech

82 William Easterly

83 Minxin Pei

84 Richard Posner

85 Ivan Krastev

86 Enrique Krauze

87 Anne Applebaum

88 Rem Koolhaas

89 Jacques Attali

90 Paul Collier

91 Esther Duflo

92 Michael Spence

93 Robert Putnam

94 Harold Varmus

95 Howard Gardner

96 Daniel Kahneman

97 Yegor Gaidar

98 Neil Gershenfeld

99 Alain Finkielkraut

100 Ian Buruma
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Re: World's Top 100 Intellectuals

Postby shivers » Wed Jun 25, 2008 1:02 am

WTF? Stephen Hawking is not even on the list??
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Re: World's Top 100 Intellectuals

Postby RYP » Wed Jun 25, 2008 1:05 am

or George Carlin...or Yoda...or even Bobby Sands...

its obviously targeted to the readers of Foreign Policy magazine not to cool people...the coolest people usually show up at TED

http://www.ted.com/
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Re: World's Top 100 Intellectuals

Postby Devlin » Wed Jun 25, 2008 1:54 am

What a load of bullshit ! Mojo Nixon is not on there.
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Re: World's Top 100 Intellectuals

Postby friendlyskies » Wed Jun 25, 2008 1:59 am

Does anyone think it's a little weird that the top ten are all Islamic (or Middle Eastern) intellectuals? (I didn't look all of them up, though.) Or that the two top White names are Noam Chomsky and Al Gore? Nothing against Al and Noam, but are they really our best and brightest? And how is General Patraeus a public intellectual, he's never published! It looks like the first Latino doesn't clock in till #20, the first Asian at #33, and I don't even see any obviously African names other than De Waal, ahem. That just seems like a statistically unlikely spread.

And good point about Hawking. I see EO Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Jared Diamond made it on there, all of them biologists who have unusual insights into humanity's place in the natural order of things. Which is cool, I love all three of them, but are their musings so important that all three were included at the expense of the other sciences?
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Re: World's Top 100 Intellectuals

Postby Zero » Wed Jun 25, 2008 2:06 am

Putting Ayaan Hirsi Ali up there was really, really silly. She's great, I read her book, but seriously, it's barely written for a college-level audience, come the fuck on. Most of the names seem to be either prominent leftists receiving guru worship or names recognizable only to insiders.

90 Paul Collier


This guy however, is grossly underrated.
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Re: World's Top 100 Intellectuals

Postby doubleThink » Wed Jun 25, 2008 2:24 am

Better luck next year, George....

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Re: World's Top 100 Intellectuals

Postby Zero » Wed Jun 25, 2008 2:34 am

friendlyskies wrote:Does anyone think it's a little weird that the top ten are all Islamic (or Middle Eastern) intellectuals? (I didn't look all of them up, though.) Or that the two top White names are Noam Chomsky and Al Gore? Nothing against Al and Noam, but are they really our best and brightest? And how is General Patraeus a public intellectual, he's never published! It looks like the first Latino doesn't clock in till #20, the first Asian at #33, and I don't even see any obviously African names other than De Waal, ahem. That just seems like a statistically unlikely spread.

And good point about Hawking. I see EO Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Jared Diamond made it on there, all of them biologists who have unusual insights into humanity's place in the natural order of things. Which is cool, I love all three of them, but are their musings so important that all three were included at the expense of the other sciences?


JM Coetzee is another African...A few more that I don't recognize might be. I have no idea who this list is pandering to, but it is obviously someone. Yay for more foreign-policy types being fixated on semitic people, and the root causes of their hatred for each other/everyone else as opposed to the rest of the real issues in international relations.
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Re: World's Top 100 Intellectuals

Postby Nasir » Wed Jun 25, 2008 2:47 am

I wrote a long reply but deleted it by accident to summarize

Friedman and Hitchens are pathetic they think they are way smarter than they are

and those Islamic guys dont have any real power so they shouldnt have those top spots.
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Re: World's Top 100 Intellectuals

Postby Zero » Wed Jun 25, 2008 2:56 am

Nasir wrote:I wrote a long reply but deleted it by accident to summarize

Friedman and Hitchens are pathetic they think they are way smarter than they are

and those Islamic guys dont have any real power so they shouldnt have those top spots.


http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms. ... ry_id=4349

What the shit? This was a popularity contest open to the public? There are a few names on there that deserve to be on there, a bunch of names that were prominent in the past few decades but are less relevant now, and a bunch of 'lets throw _____ a bone', but for some reason, it was publicized to the people who promoted whackjobs like Imam Penta (Yusuf Al-Qaradawi) to the top of the list. At least Muhammad Yunus (#2) deserves to be on there.
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Re: World's Top 100 Intellectuals

Postby dgold0101 » Wed Jun 25, 2008 3:41 am

Chomsky? Are you fucking kidding me?

Easterly, De Waal, and Sen are brilliant though.

And how can you not like Hitchens? He's what an intellectual should be: Drunk, British, and angry at everyone.
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Re: World's Top 100 Intellectuals

Postby Nasir » Wed Jun 25, 2008 3:41 am

Zero wrote:
Nasir wrote:I wrote a long reply but deleted it by accident to summarize

Friedman and Hitchens are pathetic they think they are way smarter than they are

and those Islamic guys dont have any real power so they shouldnt have those top spots.


http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms. ... ry_id=4349

What the shit? This was a popularity contest open to the public? There are a few names on there that deserve to be on there, a bunch of names that were prominent in the past few decades but are less relevant now, and a bunch of 'lets throw _____ a bone', but for some reason, it was publicized to the people who promoted whackjobs like Imam Penta (Yusuf Al-Qaradawi) to the top of the list. At least Muhammad Yunus (#2) deserves to be on there.

okay that explained alot I can honestly say only Yunus deserves to be in the top 20 I remember when microloans were a big story. Oh yeah and Chomsky cause of chavez

To me they should have called it the top 100 pundits cause intellectuals sounds like a term of respect and most of these people are just people who push their agenda some being hateful.
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Re: World's Top 100 Intellectuals

Postby Jumper » Wed Jun 25, 2008 4:36 am

No kidding. If fucking Chomsky is on that list, then Horowitz should be up there too.
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Re: World's Top 100 Intellectuals

Postby shivers » Wed Jun 25, 2008 4:47 am

It's a list of intellectuals, not political pundits. Chomsky may poke his head into politics and say stuff that's less than brilliant, but he is an accomplished linguist.
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Re: World's Top 100 Intellectuals

Postby dgold0101 » Wed Jun 25, 2008 4:56 am

That doesn't make much sense. The man clearly didn't get in based on his linguistic talents, otherwise you'd have people like William Vollman in there, and Rushdie would be number one. I think he got on based on the merits of his political critiques, which are SHITE.
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