Foreign Policy invited readers to vote who among
their top 100 public intellectuals deserved the top spot.
The magazine has now released the top twenty -- apparently, there was some politicking involved:
During nearly four weeks of voting, more than 500,000 people came to ForeignPolicy.com to cast ballots.
Such an outpouring reveals something unique about the power of the men and women we chose to rank. They were included on our initial list of 100 in large part because of the influence of their ideas. But part of being a “public intellectual” is also having a talent for communicating with a wide and diverse public. This skill is certainly an asset for some who find themselves in the list’s top ranks. For example, 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.
Reading this automatically triggered my "old school" nerve -- could anyone imagine Irving Howe or Friedrich von Hayek mounting such a voting drive? Admittedly, Norman Podhoretz is a different story....
The results themselves are predictable, as anyone who remembers
how Internet voting on Time's man of the (20th) century turned out:
No one spread the word as effectively as the man who tops the list. In early May, the Top 100 list was mentioned on the front page of Zaman, a Turkish daily newspaper closely aligned with Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen. Within hours, votes in his favor began to pour in. His supporters—typically educated, upwardly mobile Muslims—were eager to cast ballots not only for their champion but for other Muslims in the Top 100. Thanks to this groundswell, the top 10 public intellectuals in this year’s reader poll are all Muslim. The ideas for which they are known, particularly concerning Islam, differ significantly. It’s clear that, in this case, identity politics carried the day.
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