Yep, if you do some background it got a lot of coverage in the Turkish media, so the entire list vote wise got really skewed as far as ranking (the FP team chose who you could vote for, but then it was done the will of the people, or at least the will of the turkish people).
Perhaps this list should just be called "Top 20 public figures" Most of these people couldn't qualify as an intellectual in even the broadest sense of the term, they would be more concisely described as politicians.
AlGore is NOT an intellectual he goes around talking about the work of intellectuals. That makes in a public speaker, aka a politician.
Hilarious. "The Hack of The Faithful". Muslims vote up their co-believers for "Best Intellectual" on the Foreign Policy list, until the The Top 10 is made up solely by - Muslims. Hey, they do care, while others don't! Noam Chomsky makes "Best Non-Muslim" at rank 11 (for old time's sake, perhaps). Al Gore, representing Christianity, follows on 12. Bernard Lewis - a historian and Islam specialist - is at 13. Ayaan Hirsi Ali - an Islam critic - is at 15. Fareed Zakaria - a journalist and Islam commentator - is at 17. And Richard Dawkins comes in at 19. Who woulda thunk it?
Yan Xuetong (#56) is awesome. I heard him lecture in China and asked him if there were any scenarios where a globalized utopia could arise. He said the only way that could happen is the Independence Day scenario (an alien invasion) but it would give us unity like nothing else.
The article claims that "...a number of intellectuals—including Aitzaz Ahsan, Noam Chomsky, Michael Ignatieff, and Amr Khaled—mounted voting drives by promoting the list on their Web sites."
This is false about Noam Chomsky: there were no "voting drives" on chomsky.info or zcommunications.org, where Chomsky has a blog. Chomsky has never paid any attention to the Foreign Policy vote. I wonder what possible motive Foreign Policy has for making this false claim.
I really doubt Aitzaz Ahsan's contribution. I've been following that judiciary debacle in Pakistan and I don't think he's that vocal even in Lawyer's community, especially after that Long March decision that he took on his own at the eleventh hour.
It's tough to rate someone in the present time or even in the near future. I think the only way really to determine their relative ranking is to look at history/have the benefit of hindsight - e.g. DaVinci, Newtown, Shakespeare..
I fail to understand how Kasparov made it to the list. He has no following in Russia whatsoever, and not many in the West like his neo-conservative connections.
His inclusion makes the rest of the list somewhat suspect.
Yeah, it's scandalous. Steven Pinker is in at 57, Craig Venter at 71, even Malcolm Gladwell made it to 77. But Steven Hawking is not intellectual enough, it would seem.
