All we are is dust in the wind

Foreign Policy and the UK’s Prospect magazine have announced the results of their contest to determine the world’s top public intellectuals. I had my own problems with this exercise when it was first announced, but I’m a booster compared with the message contained in Chris Bertram’s posting: Not much there that is worthy of comment. ...

By , a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

Foreign Policy and the UK’s Prospect magazine have announced the results of their contest to determine the world’s top public intellectuals. I had my own problems with this exercise when it was first announced, but I’m a booster compared with the message contained in Chris Bertram’s posting:

Not much there that is worthy of comment. Nearly everyone on the list has made a contribution which is either totally ephemeral, or which will simply be absorbed into the body of human knowledge without leaving much trace of its originator. Ideas from Sen, Habermas or Chomsky will survive in some form, but nobody will read them in 100 years. And the rest will be utterly forgotten?or so I predict.

Bertram is likely correct that many of the contributions are ephemeral, but is it really so bad to come up with an idea that is “absorbed into the body of human knowledge”? Isn’t that kind of the point? [But according to Bertram, there won’t be much trace of the idea’s progenitor–ed. On the one hand, duh. Current writers always interpret older writers in the context of their current epoch. On the other hand, it is precisely this habit in our thinking that then leaves the door open to graduate students eager to engage in their own kind of revisionism — which can’t happen without reading the originator.]

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner

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