This week’s Chronicle Review features an article by Daniel R. Drezner entitled “Public Intellectuals 2.0,” ($, I think) about the role of public intellectuals in the age of blogs and non-stop media commentary. (If you’re unfamiliar with the idea of public intellectuals, here’s a quick description and two magazines’ list of the “top 100” – think Paul Krugman, Nobel Laureate but also NY Times columnist, someone with high-caliber intellect and credentials but who can converse in the general cultural sphere.)
Drezner pulls together a quick, non-exhaustive list of current public intellectuals associated with academia (as opposed to journalists, essayists, non-university-affiliated authors, etc.):
Eric Alterman, Michael Bérubé, Joshua Cohen, Tyler Cowen, Jared Diamond, Stanley Fish, Francis Fukuyama, Jacob Hacker, George Lakoff, Mark Lilla, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Louis Menand, Martha Nussbaum, Steven Pinker, Robert Putnam, Eric Rauchway, Robert Reich, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Lawrence H. Summers, and Cass R. Sunstein
Who else would you include – Christian or nonChristian? N. T. Wright immediately comes to my mind. (Though he’s no longer affiliated with a university, he was previously on faculty at McGill, Worcester, and Oxford.) He exemplifies someone who can write and speak with authority for both academic and “popular” audiences.
So, who else would you add to the list above?
Micheal Hickerson
The former Associate Director for the Emerging Scholars Network, Micheal lives in Cincinnati with his wife and three children and works as a web manager for a national storage and organization company. He writes about work, vocation, and finding meaning in what you do at No Small Actors.
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