Prospect/Foreign Policy Ballot

I was astonished when I was listed on the 2008 Prospect/Foreign Policy Ballot for the world’s top public intellectuals. After all, as I said to Robert Boynton in an interview some years ago, “I somewhat resist being identified as a public intellectual.” In the event, I ended up two down from Lee Kuan Yew! As for the “winner,” it turns out that Turks love internet campaigns, so Fethullah Gülen was number 1. Rather more surprisingly, I’ve met more than 40 of these men and women, and more than a dozen of them are my friends. (Advice from a philosopher friend of mine: Don’t say it’s a small world … it’s just a small class.)