Ezra Klein links to Kevin Drum, who thinks that “40 years ago there were a small number of what you might call mega-intellectuals — people like Buckley and Chomsky and Galbraith and Friedman — who had a bigger influence on public discourse than any single public intellectual does today. Nobody on Dan’s list really seems to compete on quite the same plane as some of those 50s and 60s superstars.”
Ezra agrees with him. I don’t. Or, at least I don’t think this is obviously true. Here’s the thing: we consider Milton Friedman a giant because everyone in the libertarian political quandrant grew up reading him, while everyone in other quandrants grew up seeing him refuted. Contrariwise, Chomsky is considered a giant because everyone on the left idolized him in college and lots of non-lefties criticized him.
But of course, people in the 1950s didn’t have those attitudes because back then Friedman and Chomsky were brilliant young professors just beginning to make names for themselves. If you’d made a short list of important public intellectuals in 1970, Friedman and Chomsky would have been on it, but the list probably would have included a lot of other people that few remember today. Likewise, if we tried to make a list of the 100 most important public intellectuals today, that list would no doubt include some people that will one day be regarded as “giants,” but we don’t have any particular way to predict who they’ll be. What will determine that is whose ideas continue to be discussed as the next generation of intellectuals is growing up, and we won’t know who those are until we’ve actually had the discussions.
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