Intellectual Figurehead of Our Time?
 

The 50s had Sartre and Camus
The 60s had Marcuse
The 70s - 80s had Foucault and Jameson
The 90s had Zizek and (posthumously) Deleuze
The 00s? Please God not Michael Moore, surely.

naomi klein
noam chomsky
norman mailer
arundahti roy

how's that for start

i'd agree with chomsky.

the thread title was intellectual figurehead so michael moore is immediately discounted

actually i suppose chomsky was most active in linguistics during the 60s and 70s - can he be considered "our time"?

jamie foxx

Jon Stewart or Lewis Black. Haha.

I don't see the obsession with the present. There is so much past to get up to date with, and by the time you're done with that, the present is in the past.

Camus, Sartre, Nietszche, Kierkegaard, Descartes, and Socrates are all just as relevant now as they were in their own times, possibly moreso.

That's probably true, and all the people mentioned so far have borrowed from those before them anyway. Even so, a generation usually either throws up or adopts an intellectual figurehead of its own. The 50s had the existentialists, the 60-70s had the new left, the 80s-90s the postmodern lot. I suppose today the dominant issue is globalization, so whoever it is it's going to come out of debates around that. Chomsky is the obvious candidate then, I suppose.

Oprah

i'd agree with chomsky

add richard dawkins

habermas

michael gazzaniga! (neuroscientist)

if you want political-- francis (yuck) fukuyama <- vomit-worthy, yet influential among the neocons that rule our time

I can't think of one. But the Chomsky love fest is sort of curious to me.

Gary Kasparov

wiki:
Kasparov announced his retirement from professional chess on March 10, 2005, to devote his time to politics and writing. He formed the United Civil Front movement, and joined as a member of The Other Russia, a coalition opposing the administration of Vladimir Putin.
On September 30, 2007, Kasparov entered the Russian Presidential race, receiving 379 of 498 votes at a congress held in Moscow by The Other Russia. [1]
Kasparov was arrested on November 24, 2007 by riot police in Moscow while trying to march on the federal election offices to present a letter of protest against Putin and the upcoming election[2], and was subsequently given a jail sentence of five days. [3][4] He was released from jail on November 29, 2007. [5]

Nice choice! Interesting person, I didn't know of until last year. The only real voice of dissent in Russia.

Stephen Colbert!

odb!

Why not Michael Moore? I guess you're too afraid of what some turds might think. Or perhaps he just didn't fit your cookie-cutter notion of an ivory tower intellectual like the rest on your list. At any rate, he's scapegoated just like Socrates was in his day and it's better to be a gadfly than a fly.

I've read a lot of Sartre and Camus. Sure, there's some valid stuff to ponder, but they each perverted existentialism quite a bit with atheism and humanism. At least Camus rejected nihilism and Marxism and like Kierkegaard, despises Hegel.

Marcuse is an intellectual rabble-rouser Marxist that perverts Wittgenstein.

No thanks.

i'd add susan sontag, john berger, gore vidal...

Velly Velly Intellesting.

he's definately intellectually influential even if he is basically abhorrent.