Posted on 10/19/2005 12:56:32 AM PDT by F14 Pilot
He is in his 70s and first became known for his theory of transformational grammar - and now he is top of the thinkers' hit parade. Noam Chomsky, the linguistics professor who has become one of the most outspoken critics of US foreign policy, has won a poll that names him as the world's top public intellectual.
Chomsky, who was underwhelmed by the honour, beat off challenges from Umberto Eco, Richard Dawkins, Vaclav Havel and Christopher Hitchens to win the Prospect/Foreign Policy poll.
More than 20,000 voters from around the world took part in selecting the winners from a list of 100. The most striking aspect of the list is the shortage of the young, the female and the French. Only two of the top 10, Hitchens and Salman Rushdie, were born after the war, and Naomi Klein is the highest placed woman, at 11. France provides one name in the top 40, fewer than Peru and Iran. Since the poll was for the world's leading intellectuals, it should come as no surprise that websites manned by supporters of Chomsky, Hitchens and Abdolkarim Soroush were used to draw attention to the poll. Chomsky's supporters are clearly the most energetic: he took 4,800 votes to Eco's 2,500. Voters came mainly from Britain and the US. "I don't pay a lot of attention to them," said Chomsky of the poll last night. "It was probably padded by some friends of mine."
Pondering the absence of younger intellectuals from the list, David Herman asks in the new issue of Prospect: "Who are the younger equivalents to [Jürgen] Habermas, Chomsky and Havel? Great names are formed by great events. But there has been no shortage of terrible events in the last 10 years." Only two of the top 20 have yet to reach the age of 50.
The choice of Chomsky will be welcomed and contested by many of the same names who responded delightedly or furiously to the award of the Nobel prize for literature to Harold Pinter last week.
In recognition of this, Prospect offers alternative perspectives, with Robin Blackburn arguing for Chomsky's right to head the list as both a brilliant expositor of linguistics and a vital critic of the US abroad, while Oliver Kamm dismisses him as a kneejerk anti-American who is cavalier about his sources.
Top five
1 Noam Chomsky linguistics expert and critic of US foreign policy
2 Umberto Eco writer and academic
3 Richard Dawkins Oxford professor of public understanding of science
4 Vaclav Havel playwright and leader of Czech velvet revolution
5 Christopher Hitchens journalist, author, pro-Iraq war polemicist
Well, at least he isn't an idiot...he knows a bogus poll when he sees one as well.
I had to study Chomsky to get a teaching degree. Half of it was complete crap.His designer teaching theories ruined a generation of students.
Ward Churchill missed the cut? Hard to imagine how that happened....
There are many, many great "thinkers" who fall to the right. Joseph Campbell, for instance, had politics that leaned right.
I've flipped through Chomsky in the bookstore and found it to be the most dense mish-mash. I really believe that the only reason why people think he's such a genius is that they cannot read (or understand) what he writes.
Umberto Eco the prolific borrower, almost bordering on plagerism? He lifted Barbara Tuchman's work, A Distant Mirror, for his Name of the Rose. And Focault's Pendulum was borrowed from a number of sources -- Born in Blood, perhaps one. What he did was okay -- just NOT the top fruit on the tree of intellect.
Like most of the wanking lunatic left Komrade Chomsky is a glutton for attention and an exhibitionist, with "beat off" being the operative description.
In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.
At least he retains a shred of normal perspective.
UK's crack squirrels are dissed for their less cogent chum, Chomsky chipmunk.
Chomsky and his connections to neo-Nazis and anti-Semitic Holocaust deniers -
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=17899
This clown's been rewarded very handsomely by this country and for the visceral contempt he's shown for it.
And to listen to the man lecture, he sounds like a more ignorant version of Ward Churchill.
"Who are the younger equivalents to [Jürgen] Habermas, Chomsky and Havel?
Ward Churchill, Helen Thomas, and Maureen Dowd?
"1 Noam Chomsky linguistics expert and critic of US foreign policy
2 Umberto Eco writer and academic
3 Richard Dawkins Oxford professor of public understanding of science
4 Vaclav Havel playwright and leader of Czech velvet revolution
5 Christopher Hitchens journalist, author, pro-Iraq war polemicist"
Interesting how they describe Chomsky as a war "critic", but Hitchens is a pro war "polemicist"
He should have stuck to linguistics. Some of his work there is brilliant and some of the most widely accepted in the field. Just goes to show that because you are good at one thing and know it really well, you don't necessarily know crap about something else. His political ideology is simplistic, idiotic, and wrong.
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