Top 100 Public Intellectuals Poll

The Top 100 Public Intellectuals Poll was conduced in November 2005 and June 2008 by Prospect Magazine (UK) and Foreign Policy (US) on the basis of a readers' ballot. The objective was to determine the 100 most important public intellectuals that are still alive and ACTIVE in public life.

The 2005 List

1. Noam Chomsky
2. Umberto Eco
3. Richard Dawkins
4. Václav Havel
5. Christopher Hitchens
6. Paul Krugman
7. Jürgen Habermas
8. Amartya Sen
9. Jared Diamond
10. Salman Rushdie
11. Naomi Klein
12. Shirin Ebadi
13. Hernando de Soto
14. Bjørn Lomborg
15. Abdolkarim Soroush
16. Thomas Friedman
17. Pope Benedict XVI
18. Eric Hobsbawm
19. Paul Wolfowitz
20. Camille Paglia
21. Francis Fukuyama
22. Jean Baudrillard
23. Slavoj Zizek
24. Daniel Dennett
25. Freeman Dyson
26. Steven Pinker
27. Jeffrey Sachs
28. Samuel Huntington
29. Mario Vargas Llosa
30. Ali al-Sistani
31. Edward O. Wilson
32. Richard Posner
33. Peter Singer
34. Bernard Lewis
35. Fareed Zakaria
36. Gary Becker
37. Michael Ignatieff
38. Chinua Achebe
39. Anthony Giddens
40. Lawrence Lessig
41. Richard Rorty
42. Jagdish Bhagwati
43. Fernando Henrique Cardoso
44. JM Coetzee
45. Niall Ferguson
46. Ayaan Hirsi Ali
47. Steven Weinberg
48. Julia Kristeva
49. Germaine Greer
50. Antonio Negri
51. Rem Koolhaas
52. Timothy Garton Ash
53. Martha Nussbaum
54. Orhan Pamuk
55. Clifford Geertz
56. Yusuf al-Qaradawi
57. Henry Louis Gates Jr.
58. Tariq Ramadan
59. Amos Oz
60. Larry Summers
61. Hans Küng
62. Robert Kagan
63. Paul Kennedy
64. Daniel Kahneman
65. Sari Nusseibeh
66. Wole Soyinka
67. Kemal Derviş
68. Michael Walzer
69. Gao Xingjian
70. Howard Gardner
71. James Lovelock
72. Robert Hughes
73. Ali Mazrui
74. Craig Venter
75. Martin Rees
76. James Q. Wilson
77. Robert Putnam
78. Peter Sloterdijk
79. Sergei Karaganov
80. Sunita Narain
81. Alain Finkielkraut
82. Fan Gang
83. Florence Wambugu
84. Gilles Kepel
85. Enrique Krauze
86. Ha Jin
87. Neil Gershenfeld
88. Paul Ekman
89. Jaron Lanier
90. Gordon Conway
91. Pavol Demes
92. Elaine Scarry
93. Robert Cooper
94. Harold Varmus
95. Pramoedya Ananta Toer
96. Zheng Bijian
97. Kenichi Ohmae
98. Wang Jisi
99. Kishore Mahbubani
100. Shintaro Ishihara

Demographics

According to location of birth, roughly 40% came from USA and Canada, 25% from Europe and Russia, 22% from Middle and Far East. The other locations received less than 5% -Latin America with 4 and Africa and Australia with 3. Only 8% are women.

Criticisms

As it happens with many free votes over the Internet, the poll may be a victim of organized voting campaigns and biases introduced by the nationality and language of the organizer. This may be true in the present case, since the number of Iranian intellectuals represented in the list is above that of entire Latin America, Nigeria has almost the totality of votes in the entire Africa and France is underrepresented.

The 2008 List

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. E.O. Wilson
40. Thomas Friedman
41. Bjørn 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. V.S. Ramachandran
51. Drew Gilpin Faust
52. Lawrence Lessig
53. J.M. 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. Therese 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

External links

• The Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals - Prospect/FP's pick of the top 100 (registration required)
• Prospect/FP Top 100 Public Intellectuals Results - Results of the ranking vote. (registration required)
• The Global Intellectuals Poll. Prospect Magazine, November 2005.
• Who are the world's leading public intellectuals? - Results with field and country listing.
• The 2008 Top 100 Public Intellectuals Poll. Prospect/FP June 2008.

pt:Enquete sobre os Intelectuais de 2005 ro:Primii 100 de intelectuali ai lumii - 2005 fi:Maailman intellektuellit 2005 -äänestys zh:2005年全球知识分子投票 uk:Список глобальних інтелектуалів 2005