Last year, the American magazine Foreign Policy and the British magazine Prospect co- published a list of the world’s top 100 public intellectuals — men and women whose ideas have changed the world. It included Noam Chomsky, Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Niall Ferguson, Thomas L. Friedman, Al Gore, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Christopher Hitchens, Paul Krugman, Bernard Lewis, Pope Benedict XVI, Jeffrey Sachs, Fareed Zakaria — and four Canadians: New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell; human rights theorist and Liberal party leader Michael Ignatieff; Harvard linguist and experimental psychologist Steven Pinker; and political philosopher and Kyoto Prize winner Charles Taylor. In its year-end review, Prospect also nominated Booker Prize winner Margaret Atwood, whose book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, was a 2008 bestseller; and social critic Naomi Klein, whose most recent book is The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
No reasonable person calls himself a public intellectual, of course; it’s a badge awarded by others. But on what grounds? What exactly is a public intellectual? They come from all walks of life — academics, writers, journalists, politicians — and share a deep commitment to the life of the mind and the impact of ideas on society. But what sets them apart from other such people is their engagement in the issues of the day. United States appeals court judge Richard Posner, himself a member of the club, has observed that a public intellectual is someone who acts as “a social critic rather than merely a social observer.” And by that definition Canada can claim, if not a hundred, then certainly more than six. Among others, and in addition to those already mentioned, the list would include Michael Adams, Maude Barlow, Conrad Black, Michael Bliss, Michael Byers, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Robert Fulford, David Frum, Jack Granatstein, Allan Gregg, Rudyard Griffiths, George Jonas, Tom Kent, James Laxer, Stephen Lewis, Irshad Manji, Roger Martin, John Polanyi, John Ralston Saul, Janice Gross Stein, David Suzuki, and Ronald Wright.
Not to mention Mark Kingwell, who writes a dazzling essay in this issue on the leadership of Barack Obama (“All in the Game,” page 22), and whose place in the firmament is indisputable. A professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, he is also a Senior Fellow of Massey College, a contributing editor at Harper’s, and a member of the board of the Walrus Foundation, which publishes this magazine. He’s the author of twelve books of philosophy and political and cultural theory, including the national bestsellers Better Living (1998), The World We Want (2000), and Concrete Reveries (2008). And, in addition to Harper’s and The Walrus, he writes for the New York Times, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, Toronto Life, and an array of scholarly journals, including Queen’s Quarterly, the Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Forum, Philosophy and Social Criticism, the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, and American Scholar.
Kingwell developed a taste for public engagement as an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, where in 1983–84 he edited the student newspaper, the Varsity. This led to summer internships at the Globe and Mail. “I always say the only really hard career choice I’ve had to make was when I had offers of a full-time job at the Globe and a funded place in the Ph.D. program at Yale — security versus speculation. But the choice I made was the right one, I think, because it has allowed me to do the journalism I want, whereas it wouldn’t have worked the other way around.” Not that he’s ever felt conflicted about his two roles: “For me, philosophy and public engagement go together naturally. Academic philosophy can seem narrow and baffling to the uninitiated, it’s true, but it’s also very good at providing tools for thinking critically about the world. And in a country like Canada, where universities are funded by citizens, people like me have an obligation to do so.”
Unlike the aforementioned Richard Posner, who wrote a book at the beginning of the millennium entitled Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, Kingwell is optimistic about public discourse in North America. “My first book was a defence of civility as a political virtue, and if you read the comment threads on blogs and online articles today you can see how convincing I was. But it was ever thus. The thing to remember is that public discourse is a renewable resource, and in the marketplace of ideas good offerings drive out bad ones. So I’m confident we will continue to find ways of making sense to each other, and maybe even get smarter along the way.” An appropriate summing-up from someone whose hero is the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher — and public intellectual — David Hume, a man who placed his trust in the powers of human reason.
