From Chris Bertram (Bristol, Philosophy), I learn of a listing of 100 “public intellectuals” in Britain compiled by Prospect Magazine, from which they hope to learn, by the scientific method of e-mail voting, who are the top five. There are several philosophers and social/political theorists on the list–A.C. Grayling, John Gray, Mary Warnock, Onora O’Neill, W.G. Runciman, Quentin Skinner, Anthony Giddens, Mary Midgley, Roger Scruton–though Professor Bertram expresses the unusually forthright view that, with the exception of O’Neill, “the other philosophical options are terrible.” Being a fan of A.C. Grayling’s commentaries, I’m not sure this is entirely fair; the U.S. would benefit from having someone like Grayling writing in major newspapers.

Of local interest is the fact that my colleague Philip Bobbitt makes the list, as a “theorist of law and conflict”; his work on war, history, and strategy is even better-known and more widely discussed in the U.K., than here (where, at least among legal academics, he still remains best-known for two earlier works, Tragic Choices [with Calabresi] and Constitutional Fate). Philip is the only American law professor who makes the list of major public intellectuals in Britain. Indeed, the only other US-based scholars I spot on the list are the historian Simon Schama, now at Columbia; Michael Ignatieff, now at Harvard’s Kennedy School I believe; and Niall Ferguson, now at Harvard. But there may be some others who are unknown to me.

From a U.S. perspective, the most striking thing here is how many of those on this list are actually serious scholars and intellects. I can recall, once, in high school in the 1970s, a classroom discussion in which the teacher suggested that the “only” public intellectual in the U.S. was William Buckley! And could you imagine a Marxist historian like Eric Hobsbawm making the list in America?

But, seriously, who among philosophers commands any attention in the public culture in the U.S.? Peter Singer, happily, yet only because of the political controversy that engulfed his appointment at Princeton; Ronald Dworkin, to a very limited extent (his main public forum is The New York Review of Books, whose readership is primarily academic); Thomas Nagel, again to a very limited extent (though at least he makes it periodically to The New Republic, but mostly for academic-style reviews). Probably the two most visible philosophers in popular culture are Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty, a fact that is itself revealing both about the nature of philosophy and the nature of the United States.