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Russell Brand
Russell Brand … thinking. Photograph: Dean Chalkley/BBC/Matchlight/Dean Chalkley
Russell Brand … thinking. Photograph: Dean Chalkley/BBC/Matchlight/Dean Chalkley

What’s going on with Prospect magazine’s list of top 50 world thinkers?

This article is more than 9 years old
Russell Brand and Cody Wilson are in, the pope and Mary Beard are out – the criteria for making it on to the annual list of cerebral superstars is hard to fathom

Russell Brand has come from nowhere to join the world’s top public intellectuals, while the pope (voted the fifth best in 2014) has been banished from the elite group. Ruthlessly purged too are Amartya Sen, the reigning world champion of thought, and five other members of last year’s top 10: like Sen and Pope Francis, Raghuram Rajan, Kaushik Basu, Mary Beard, Peter Higgs and Ha-Joon Chang all fail even to make the top 50, transformed in 12 months from titans to has-beens.

Such is the topsy-turvy world of Prospect magazine’s world thinkers rankings, a now-annual poll in which voters pick their favourites from 50 “leaders in their fields, engaging in original and profound ways with the central questions of the world today”, selected by a shadowy “staff team”. In compiling their list they give credit for their influence” (“whether or not we agree with them”) over the previous year; a criterion that explains new entries in 2015 such as Brand, novelist Michel Houellebecq, surgeon and author Atul Gawande and Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.

Arundhati Roy. Photograph: Suki Dhanda

Those discarded, conversely, were evidently penalised for playing less prominent roles on punditry’s global stage – failing to bring out a controversial book, win a major prize, make headlines, shine on the festival/debate circuit or on YouTube, etc. Among the 2014 shortlistees also axed in 2015 (by a panel seemingly bent on ditching philosophy like a so-last-year fashion trend) are Daniel Dennett, Rae Langton, Martha Nussbaum, Derek Parfit, Thomas Nagel and Slavoj Žižek.The pope’s spectacular downfall, however – like those of Sen and Richard Dawkins, world No 1 in 2013 but not shortlisted since – points to other factors, since he could hardly be described as low profile in 2014. Just as Francis owed his No 5 ranking to the Catholic vote, the four Indians in last year’s top six (of whom only the writer-activist Arundhati Roy survives) clearly benefited from sizeable patriotic support – “reminds me of the Eurovision song contest rather than the Nobel Academy” was one unimpressed commenter’s reaction to the poll results, noting the influence of “national pride”.

Economists, including Varoufakis and Thomas Piketty, are again strongly represented in a 2015 pantheon in which 17 of the cerebral superstars are women (34%) and 41 are North American or European (even this understates the west’s dominance, as some figures identified as from other continents have academic posts in the US or UK). Novelists, in contrast, remain as rare as scientists, with those chosen – Houellebecq, Roy, Hilary Mantel, Marilynne Robinson, Mario Vargas Llosa – usually doubling up as essayists or polemicists to qualify as premier penseurs.

Cody Wilson.

Brand, included at the expense of two of the gurus who inform his book Revolution, as Noam Chomsky is still missing and David Graeber has been dropped after making the 2014 list – is far from the only thinker whose presence looks designed to be provocative, as among the other new entries are Christopher Hitchens’s bete noire Henry Kissinger, 91, and “libertarian theorist” Cody Wilson, best known as a “gun rights” campaigner whose recent projects include pioneering 3D printing of rifle parts. If enough of the US gun lobby read Prospect, or can be persuaded to visit its website, Wilson could even emerge as No 1.

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