At Crooked Timber, where he's guest-blogging, and The Edge of the American West, Eric Rauchway calls attention to Foreign Policy's"The Top 100 Public Intellectuals," May/June. You're invited to vote for your top five. Last year's voting yielded this list of the top five: Noam Chomsky, Umberto Eco, Richard Dawkins, Václav Havel, and Christopher Hitchens.

There are some obvious biases in this year's list of nominees. Two-thirds of"the top 100" are from North America or Europe; and the list is dominated by political scientists and economists. Discretely, Eric isn't critical of the latter fact at Crooked Timber. At The Edge, however, he names the historians who made the list: Anne Applebaum, Jared Diamond, Drew Gilpin Faust, Niall Ferguson, Ramachandra Guha, Tony Judt, Enrique Krauze, and Bernard Lewis. What does that say about our field, Rauchway asks. The suggestion is that the list says more about Foreign Policy than about historians.

What historians should be on the list? Suggestions at The Edge seem to me to be a mixed lot. Howard Zinn? You're kidding! Eugene Genovese? Probably not. Garry Wills? Yes, indeed. Wills has a range of historical expertise that Genovese's never attempted and both of them have depth of analysis that Howard Zinn's never had.

Jeff Vanke - 4/24/2008

Notwithstanding his hardline Clintonista bent, Sean Wilentz is another possibility, strong as both "intellectual" and "public."

Jeremy Young - 4/24/2008

What qualifies as a "public intellectual." I'd argue that it's not depth of analysis, but the simple fact of getting one's name out there as a go-to person for commenting on public events.

Given that -- and with the caveat that I don't actually have to like someone's historical public intellectualism to name them -- here are some names that come to mind:

Eric Alterman
Karen Armstrong
Michael Beschloss
David Brinkley
Juan Cole
Robert Dallek
Niall Ferguson (I do agree with them on that one)
Doris Kearns Goodwin
David Greenberg (clearly a historian, though his appointment is in another field)
Melissa Harris-Lacewell
Haynes Johnson
Andre Kaspi (in France, not in the US)
Michael Kazin
Edward J. Larson (see Greenberg above)
Ralph Luker (running America's most prominent history blog definitely qualifies)
Joshua Micah Marshall
Simon Schama
Richard Norton Smith
Sean Wilentz
Howard Zinn (unquestionably one by my standards stated above)

Again, this list is delimited by the caveats that 1) it's just whom I can think of off the top of my head, and 2) it's only people I've heard of (hence the heavy Americanist bias). So it shouldn't be taken as complete by any means.

Ralph E. Luker - 4/24/2008

Good recommendation! It raises another issue about whether any of FP's nominees are bloggers. So far as I could tell, the only blogger who makes FP's list is Richard Posner.

Jonathan Dresner - 4/24/2008

Timothy Burke.