To mark its 100th issue in July 2004, Prospect produced a list of Britain’s top 100 public intellectuals, ranging from Tariq Ali and Martin Amis to Lewis Wolpert and James Wood.

Inspired by the list’s success, the Top 100 Public Intellectuals Poll was then jointly conducted in November 2005 and June 2008 by Prospect and the US magazine Foreign Policy, this time based on readers’ votes and ranked from one to 100. The objective was to determine the 100 most important public intellectuals still alive and active in public life. The polls have continued to provoke debate ever since.

As well as the results themselves, you can read for free on our website David Herman’s analysis of the 2005 results and Tom Nuttall’s analysis of the 2008 results, plus Christopher Hitchens’s helpful guide on “how to be a public intellectual.”

You can also read our January 2009 feature on the top public intellectuals of 2008, as selected by Prospect’s own panel of experts—and contribute here to our ongoing discussion about who the most important voices in the shifting intellectual arena are today.

The 2005 List

1. Noam Chomsky
2. Umberto Eco
3. Richard Dawkins
4. Václav Havel
5. Christopher Hitchens
6. Paul Krugman
7. Jürgen Habermas
8. Amartya Sen
9. Jared Diamond
10. Salman Rushdie
11. Naomi Klein
12. Shirin Ebadi
13. Hernando de Soto
14. Bjørn Lomborg
15. Abdolkarim Soroush
16. Thomas Friedman
17. Pope Benedict XVI
18. Eric Hobsbawm
19. Paul Wolfowitz
20. Camille Paglia
21. Francis Fukuyama
22. Jean Baudrillard
23. Slavoj Zizek
24. Daniel Dennett
25. Freeman Dyson
26. Steven Pinker
27. Jeffrey Sachs
28. Samuel Huntington
29. Mario Vargas Llosa
30. Ali al-Sistani
31. Edward O. Wilson
32. Richard Posner
33. Peter Singer
34. Bernard Lewis
35. Fareed Zakaria
36. Gary Becker
37. Michael Ignatieff
38. Chinua Achebe
39. Anthony Giddens
40. Lawrence Lessig
41. Richard Rorty
42. Jagdish Bhagwati
43. Fernando Henrique Cardoso
44. JM Coetzee
45. Niall Ferguson
46. Ayaan Hirsi Ali
47. Steven Weinberg
48. Julia Kristeva
49. Germaine Greer
50. Antonio Negri
51. Rem Koolhaas
52. Timothy Garton Ash
53. Martha Nussbaum
54. Orhan Pamuk
55. Clifford Geertz
56. Yusuf al-Qaradawi
57. Henry Louis Gates Jr.
58. Tariq Ramadan
59. Amos Oz
60. Larry Summers
61. Hans Küng
62. Robert Kagan
63. Paul Kennedy
64. Daniel Kahneman
65. Sari Nusseibeh
66. Wole Soyinka
67. Kemal Dervi?
68. Michael Walzer
69. Gao Xingjian
70. Howard Gardner
71. James Lovelock
72. Robert Hughes
73. Ali Mazrui
74. Craig Venter
75. Martin Rees
76. James Q. Wilson
77. Robert Putnam
78. Peter Sloterdijk
79. Sergei Karaganov
80. Sunita Narain
81. Alain Finkielkraut
82. Fan Gang
83. Florence Wambugu
84. Gilles Kepel
85. Enrique Krauze
86. Ha Jin
87. Neil Gershenfeld
88. Paul Ekman
89. Jaron Lanier
90. Gordon Conway
91. Pavol Demes
92. Elaine Scarry
93. Robert Cooper
94. Harold Varmus
95. Pramoedya Ananta Toer
96. Zheng Bijian
97. Kenichi Ohmae
98. Wang Jisi
99. Kishore Mahbubani
100. Shintaro Ishihara

The 2008 List

The positions of people who appeared in the 2005 poll are given in brackets. New entries are marked with an asterisk.

1 Fethullah Gülen (*) – read Ehsan Masood’s essay on this unexpected winner here
2 Muhammad Yunus (*)
3 Yusuf Al-Qaradawi (56)
4 Orhan Pamuk (54)
5 Aitzaz Ahsan (*)
6 Amr Khaled (*)
7 Abdolkarim Soroush (15)
8 Tariq Ramadan (58)
9 Mahmood Mamdani (*)
10 Shirin Ebadi (12)
11 Noam Chomsky (1)
12 Al Gore (*)
13 Bernard Lewis (34)
14 Umberto Eco (2)
15 Ayaan Hirsi Ali (*)
16 Amartya Sen (8)
17 Fareed Zakaria (35)
18 Garry Kasparov (*)
19 Richard Dawkins (3)
20 Mario Vargas Llosa (29)
21 Lee Smolin (*)
22 Jürgen Habermas (7)
23 Salman Rushdie (10)
24 Sari Nusseibeh (65)
25 Slavoj Zizek (23)
26 Vaclav Havel (4)
27 Christopher Hitchens (5)
28 Samuel Huntington (28)
29 Peter Singer (33)
30 Paul Krugman (6)
31 Jared Diamond (9)
32 Pope Benedict XVI (17)
33 Fan Gang (82)
34 Michael Ignatieff (37)
35 Fernando Henrique Cardoso (43)
36 Lilia Shevtsova (*)
37 Charles Taylor (*)
38 Martin Wolf (*)
39 EO Wilson (31)
40 Thomas Friedman (16)
41 Bjørn Lomborg (14)
42 Daniel Dennett (24)
43 Francis Fukuyama (21)
44 Ramachandra Guha (*)
45 Tony Judt (*)
46 Steven Levitt (*)
47 Nouriel Roubini (*)
48 Jeffrey Sachs (27)
49 Wang Hui (*)
50 VS Ramachandran (*)
51 Drew Gilpin Faust (*)
52 Lawrence Lessig (40)
53 JM Coetzee (44)
54 Fernando Savater (*)
55 Wole Soyinka (66)
56 Yan Xuetong (*)
57 Steven Pinker (26)
58 Alma Guillermoprieto (*)
59 Sunita Narain (80)
60 Anies Baswedan (*)
61 Michael Walzer (68)
62 Niall Ferguson (45)
63 George Ayittey (*)
64 Ashis Nandy (*)
65 David Petraeus (*)
66 Olivier Roy (*)
67 Lawrence Summers (60)
68 Martha Nussbaum (53)
69 Robert Kagan (62)
70 James Lovelock (71)
71 J Craig Venter (74)
72 Amos Oz (59)
73 Samantha Power (*)
74 Lee Kuan Yew (*)
75 Hu Shuli (*)
76 Kwame Anthony Appiah (*)
77 Malcolm Gladwell (*)
78 Alexander De Waal (*)
79 Gianni Riotta (*)
80 Daniel Barenboim (*)
81 Thérèse Delpech (*)
82 William Easterly (*)
83 Minxin Pei (*)
84 Richard Posner (32)
85 Ivan Krastev (*)
86 Enrique Krauze (85)
87 Anne Applebaum (*)
88 Rem Koolhaas (51)
89 Jacques Attali (*)
90 Paul Collier (*)
91 Esther Duflo (*)
92 Michael Spence (*)
93 Robert Putnam (77)
94 Harold Varmus (94)
95 Howard Gardner (70)
96 Daniel Kahneman (64)
97 Yegor Gaidar (*)
98 Neil Gershenfeld (87)
99 Alain Finkielkraut (81)
100 Ian Buruma (*)

The only people to have the same placings in both 2005 and 2008 are Samuel Huntington (28th) and Harold Varmus (94th). Excluding new entries, the greatest advance between 2005 and 2008 was 53 places, by Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, from 56th to 3rd. The greatest fall was by Richard Posner, by 52 places, from 32nd to 84th. The highest-ranked intellectual from 2005 not to be included in the 2008 poll was Naomi Klein, who made 11th place in 2005.