Rich Fairhead/Prospect
There is nothing like an emergency to make you realise the value of practical ideas. When the chips are down, and death rates are up, the world wants answersespecially from its sharpest thinkers.
As Prospect revisits the task of identifying the leading minds of the moment, in the intellectual hit parade which we have produced in varying formats since 2004, that test of immediate and real-world relevance looms large. As we compiled our longlistdrawing on the advice of distinguished experts in various fields who have written for us over the yearsand then whittled it down towards 50, we were struck by how different the list looked from 2019s. It was at the point where we had around 35 confirmed names that we noticed not one of them was a holdover.
A measure of churn was expectedwe put a premium on new books and recent interventions, after allbut not a wholesale changing of the guard. Having previously been sceptical of those claims that Covid-19 would change everythingwhy would it?I suddenly felt there was something in them. We decided to make a virtue of the disruption, and produce an entirely new list for a shaken world that is beginning to reset.
The immediate relevance of some of our thinkers to the Covid-19 era speaks for itself: vaccinologist Sarah Gilbert and science writer Ed Yong being prime examples. Just as interesting, however, are those who work in fields a mile away from medicine, but who have nonetheless acquired a new salience in the dark and peculiar circumstances of 2020.
In economics, after the sudden stop followed by all the stimulus and bailouts, we are plainly going to need to talk about debt. Having something to say on that helps two of our big brainsStephanie Kelton and Thomas Pikettyearn a place on the list. In public policy, with a staggering proportion of the workforce furloughed, there is a sense that the hour of the godfather of the Universal Basic Income movement, Philippe Van Parijs, might at last have come. Likewise, the polymathic thoughts of Ari Ezra Waldman on the problems of privacy in a digital age rocket up the agenda when governments everywhere are grappling with intrusive track-and-trace schemes. And in politics, while New Zealands prime minister Jacinda Ardern had already shown creativity in developing a governing ethos of kindness, it always sounded rather airyuntil she showed how it could be put to practical effect in the coronavirus context, and achieved some of the worlds best results.
So all-encompassing has been the disruption that many varied and otherwise unrelated minds have found new ways to shine: Sally Rooney moved from the page to the TV screen, and kept us culturally (and tearfully) engaged in lockdown; Eric Yuan Zoomed in from relative obscurity as his video platform became the virtual meeting room, as well as the substitute pub.
Othermore enduringimplications will eventually flow from the chance the lockdown gave us to reset. In the arts, different sorts of names come to the fore: names like Jenny Odell, for example, who uses discarded everyday objects to invite mindful meditation on the transience of our day-to-day lives and how they this fit (or dont fit) with nature.
This year we have produced an entirely new list for a shaken world that is beginning to reset
Spending time away from the usual bustle, and perhaps in the garden, has raised environmental consciousness. So, too, has the jolt to reflect afresh on how all the life, health and happiness that civilisation affords hangs by a thread. We duly hail all manner of minds that engage with ecology, whether that be through the critical thinking of Timothy Morton, the rigorous popularisation of David Attenborough or Carlota Perezs thoughts on how the economy can be steered in a greener direction as it splutters back into life.
A spell of enforced solitude will also turn the mind to the question of who we really areand prompt it to interrogate all the old stories about where we come from. Although it was catalysed by police brutality in the US, it may be no coincidence that the history wars over statue-toppling took hold this year. Thaddeus Metz, Angela Saini, Cornell West, Olivette Otele and William Dalrymple are all top thinkers with things to say about the many warped consequences that can result from one culture subjugating another; Ross Douthat, meanwhile, is a thoughtful conservative voice who cautions us against allowing frenzied arguments about identity to silence discussion.
There are some names here whose special interest it would be contrived to put down to Covid-19. But even herecoming back to my starting pointamid a mood of anxious uncertainty, they have to earn their place by way of practical relevance, even if that is relevance to the big contemporary challenges that existed before the virus. Challenges like, say, the rise of China (Julia Lovell), the decline of the west (Anne Applebaum), the politics of personality (Hilary Mantel) or the twin threats to the rule of law and sound constitutional governance (Bruce Ackerman, Dahlia Lithwick, Philippe Sands).
The diversity of the list is rich. It contains a preponderance of women for the first time ever, and pleasingly mixes brilliant young minds (Lisa Piccirillo) with a couple of nonagenarians.
While it also includes a good mix of liberal, socialist and conservative voices, I can anticipate one objection in the absence of any thinker who can truly be said to have emerged from within the global populist insurgency associated with Donald Trump. We have thought long and hard about this. We have run and will continue to run pieces by nostalgic writers who reject globalisation. We make space for serious minds who rage about all the communities it has left behind (see Paul Collier). But as the Trumpian project becomes ever-more nakedly anti-intellectual and anti-reason, we struggle to regard even intelligent individuals who choose to defend it as serious thinkers. Some readers may take a different view, and see more substance in nativism. But for me, Steve Bannon and his like are cynics; the value of ideas for them is purely instrumental, for use in power play.
With that one caveat, the mix is something to marvel at. The range of intellectual endeavours is a reminder of the breadth of human genius. I hope youll enjoy finding out more about the thinkers who strike us as most pertinent to our age as much as we on the inside of Prospect did. Salute them and take the chance to cast a vote (details at the end of the package) to help crown a top thinker for 2020. Well publish the full results in our next issue. Oh, and please dont miss the chance to tell us who we missedtheres a space on the voting form. Because with the liveliest minds and the biggest questions, there is never a final answer. Long may human beings continue to discuss, disagreeand think!
Tom Clark is editor of Prospect
Bruce Ackerman
The turbulence of the last few years will eventually settlebut into what? The shape of tomorrows politics depends on how this moment constitutionalises. If Boris Johnsons prorogation wheeze sets a precedent, or Donald Trumps judicial bench-packing continues much longer, liberal democracy is in trouble. Its defenders need to swot up on how constitutions can go wrongand right. Bruce Ackerman, a Yale professor whos just as informed on De Gaulle, Mandela and Waesa as he is on Americas founders, is a sure guide. His popular sovereignty initiative to rationalise the process for amending the US constitution could put principled reformers back on the front foot.
Elizabeth Anderson
She started out in economics before abandoning a field she had come to view as ethically barren, and has since combined philosophy with the social sciences to analyse the power structures around usand, as an excited New Yorker puts it, redefine equality. Her interest in race and gender is urgently relevant in 2020, and her refreshing take on the Protestant work ethic (which she insists has a progressive pro-labour side as well as a conservative materialism) underpins a powerful account of modern workplace relations. Always confronting the world as it truly is rather than how we would like it to be, she won a MacArthur genius grant in 2019.
Anne Applebaum
The American international order is crumbling. Its opponents always suspected it was mere cover for US imperialism, and the sudden swerve of many former enthusiasts to support the narrow chauvinism of Trumps America First slogan encourages that dark view. Applebaum, long an authority on the abuses of Communist and post-Communist Eastern Europe, in her new book Twilight of Democracy is unsparing in exposing the moral bankruptcy of Trumpian Republicanism. Her sharp pen is as persuasive as any in presenting the idea of the west as a morally serious projectand one whose loss we may come to mourn.
Jacinda Ardern
By bringing her baby to the UN General Assembly she grabbed the worlds attention, but over three years in office Ardern has proved to be more than a media favourite. Her ethos of kindness sounded a vague way to transcend neoliberalism, but shes steadily shown what it means in fields from child welfare to the environment. Her instinctive, bridge-building leadership after the Christchurch mosque massacre was an inspiration. And her Covid-19 strategydevised in lockstep with chief scientist Juliet Gerrardbuilt with intelligence and empathy on a foundation of unflinching honesty to achieve some of the worlds best results.
David Attenborough
Not all climate-change activists are Swedish teenagers. At 94, David Attenborough is one of the countrysif not the worldsmost influential thinkers on the environment. Just as the Extinction Rebellion protests were taking off last year, Attenborough presented the hour-long documentary Climate Change: The Facts, which relied on his authority to convey the truth about what were doing to the planet. For decades his documentaries have alerted millions to the precious wonders of the animal and plant kingdoms, and the threat that humans pose to them. No longer confined to the BBC, his eight-part Netflix series Our Planet brought him even closer to truly global domination.
William Dalrymple
The Scottish historian, long resident in India, has made it his lifes work to reckon with the legacy of the British Empire in the subcontinent. His recent book The Anarchy is a barnstorming account of the East India Company, the corporation that launched the hostile takeover. Dalrymple describes Robert Clivewhose newly-controversial statue remains next to the Foreign Officeas a man of extreme aggression and devil-may-care-audacity. But Dalrymple also points to Indian complicity with the British, as well as to the many atrocities of local princes. In polarised times, in which one side acquits the Empire of its crimes, and the other blames imperialism for every last human wickedness, his work is an important corrective.
Jared Diamond
Twenty-three years ago in Guns, Germs and Steel, the polyglot professor (whose scholarship has ranged from human physiology to ornithology and anthropology) drew our attention to how far disease had shaped world civilisations. In Upheaval last year, he looked at how societies can recover from catastrophes such as invasion, political collapse or mass death. Just as individuals need to develop strategies of resilience, he argues, so too should countries. The challenge, for nations as for individuals in crisis, is to figure out which parts of their identities are already functioning well and dont need changing, and which parts are no longer working and do need changing. Within months, Covid-19 made his argument urgent.
Ross Douthat
The opinion pages of the New York Times have become a battleground in the culture wars. In June, a Republican senators provocative call to Send in the troops on Black Lives Matter protesters caused a newsroom revolt. The most eloquent conservative voice in the NYT is Ross Douthat, whose cogent analysis of the farrago was a qualified defence of the papers liberal valuesstrident, even unpalatable views need to be aired, he argued. Douthat, a traditional Catholic, is also a critic of modern secularism, as he argues in his new book The Decadent Society. But he is no fan of the US president. In a recent op-ed, he argued that Trump will be an accelerant of the rights erasure, an agent of its marginalisation and defeat.
Esther Duflo
Economics is often caricatured as being more interested in pounds than people and derided for getting lost in theoretical dead-ends. This Frenchwoman rescues the discipline from both charges. Duflo applies randomised trials to urgent policy questions with huge human significance in the developing worldquestions such as how to encourage decent basic education, keep malaria at bay and, pertinently for our Covid-19 world, boost vaccine take-up. (She suggests incentives as modest as a bag of lentils.) At just 46 when she claimed the Nobel Prize in economics last yeartogether with husband and co-author Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremershe is an exceptionally young but richly deserving winner.
David Frum
Although still registered as a big-R Republican, David Frum is much less interested in party politics than little-R republicanismhis concern is the spirit of American democracy and the health of its republic. In his journalism the former George W Bush speechwriter has, from early on, been one of the clearest-sighted conservative critics of Trumphis personal lack of principle and venality, certainly, but also his potential to trash the standing of his office and the possibility of compromise. Frums biggest worry, outlined in his book Trumpocalypse, is less the disastrous 45th president winning in November than his political poison lingering for many years after his defeat.
Greta Gerwig
Originally known as a Hollywood actress and muse to Marriage Story director and partner Noah Baumbach, Gerwig has since proven herself to be a masterly screenwriter and director. Her 2017 coming-of-age drama Lady Bird won universal critical acclaim. That led to her most recent project adapting Louisa May Alcotts classic novel Little Women for the big screen. At a time when everyone has been locked down with family, her work invites searching questions about our closest relationships. Her snubbing in Hollywoods recent awards season attests to stubborn sexism in the industry, but the success of her films shows that things are changing.
Sarah Gilbert
Decades of work on malaria, flu and then Mers readied this Oxford vaccinologist to do battle with the new coronavirus pandemic. Just as important was the preparatory thinking she had done about how to handle an unknown potential disease X, and the way she has galvanised her team. Moving beyond the old reliance on antibody responses, she pursues a proactive approach to vaccine designtapping recombinant DNA techniques and homing in on T-cell responses. With safe-to-handle viral vectors speeding research, Gilbert energetically seeks a smart way through the slow protocols of academic medicine to speed up the application. Her work couldwith lucklead to a successful inoculation programme within months.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore
Could we live in a world without prisons? For lifelong abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore the answer is an emphatic yes. A seasoned campaigner against the prison-industrial complex, who now works in academia, Gilmore has spent the best part of 30 years developing the field of carceral geography: the study of the interrelationships across space, institutions and political economy that shape and define modern incarceration. Shes helped shift the conversation about responses to crime from one of punishment to rehabilitation. As the failings of the US justice system come once again to the fore, Gilmores radical ideas have never felt more relevant.
Jrgen Habermas
Having come of age listening to the Nuremberg trials, Habermas, now 91, has always been seized by the urgency of defending fundamental notions like an open public sphere and the idea of truth, through post-modern decades during which the academy grew complacent and self-indulgent. The last of the generation of Rawls and Foucault, both of whom he sparred with, his breathtaking range is on show in a new history of philosophy. Despite warning that a post-truth democracy would no longer be a democracy, in dark times he still retains faith in the ability of human discussion to advance the common good.
Martin Hgglund
Can you lead a spiritual life without being religious? The Swedish atheist thinker takes up the challenge in his book This Life. For Hgglund, the meaning of existence does not lie in an imaginary afterlife but in the fact of death: the apprehension that we will die makes meaningful the question of what we do with our time on earth. Erudite and provocative, Hgglunds philosophy aims to plug the God-shaped hole gap in the lives of atheists, and has become more relevant as death once more stalks the developed western world. The Prospect review of his book wondered, though, whether the questions he asks have really been as foreign to religious thinking as he imagines.
NK Jemisin
Science-fiction writer NK Jemisin broke records when all three novels in her Broken Earth trilogy won a prestigious Hugo Award for best novel between 2016 and 2018. Her work creates a fully-imagined universe to explore some of the great themes of our timesclimate change, racial oppression and split identities. Jemisin, remarkably the first African American to win the Hugo, has criticised the publishing industry for not being diverse enough in genre fiction. Her new novel, The City We Became, is a love letter to a New York under threat from alien invasion.
Bong Joon-Ho
The South Korean filmmaker captured headlinesand hearts and mindswhen he swept this years Oscars. He won four trophies, including best director and best picture for Parasite, an upstairs-downstairs tale about a poor family meeting a rich one. Bongs cinemawhich also includes dystopian train drama Snowpiercer and Netflixs Okjahas long dealt with class conflict and the problems of contemporary capitalism, mixing the political with a playful mastery of tone and genre. In an industry dominated by superhero blockbusters, Bongs global success proves there is widespread appetite for something new.
Stephanie Kelton
Respectable monetary policy died when central banks turned to the printing presses to battle the Great Recession, pursuing so-called Quantitative Easing (QE). Will the Covid-19 crisis see fiscal policy go the same way? Stephanie Kelton hopes so and is finding an audiencenot only because theres little appetite for more austerity. With interest rates and inflation on the floor, its harder to argue that governments directly creating money for social programmes would necessarily spell ruin. But a free lunch today will mean inflation tomorrow warn respectable economistsincluding some Keynesians. Like Keynes himself, though, Kelton resets the frame and goads conventional wisdom.
Igor Levit
At just 33 years old, Russian-German pianist Igor Levit is a superstar interpreter of the classical canonhis complete Beethoven Sonatas came out earlier this year. Hes also unafraid of political gestures: at the 2017 Proms he played Ode to Joy, the European national anthem, in what was seen as a riposte to Brexit. In lockdown, he has pioneered live-streaming concerts on Twitter, dressed down in jeans and T-shirt, with explanations in German and English beforehand. (Check out his performance of Schuberts late B-Flat Sonata.) Few others have done as much to democratise classical music while still maintaining the highest of standards.
Dahlia Lithwick
Lithwick is the outstanding scrutineer of the US Supreme Court, but qualifies as a true world thinker because of her subtle and penetrating analysis of the rule of law. Should Novembers election descend into foul play and end up thrown over to the courts (like Bush vs Gore in 2000) Lithwick will be a must-read. But she qualifies as a true world thinker because of her subtle and penetrating take on the rule of law. She has written, including in Prospect, on how that ideal consists as much in a web of mores and codes as it does in any procedure or chain of command. Trump violates these, but soincreasinglydo other rulers on a planet where political corruption could become a second pandemic.
Julia Lovell
Rejecting earlier revisionism, Chinas Xi Jinping has ruled that the Mao years and the reorientation towards state capitalism that followed are all one glorious chapter in the nations history. With China risen, does that make the brutal revolutionary newly-relevant not just at home, but also across the world? As Cambridge historian Lovell describes in her fine book Maoism: A Global History, the after-effects of his ideology spread across the planet, from Vietnam to Zanzibar. Also the author of a superb account of the Opium Wars, Lovell is an acute observer of the way history is used and abused by current regimes. Xi is no sincere believer in the dictums of Maos Little Red Book, but he does admireand emulatehis authoritarian power play.
Hilary Mantel
One of the most acute analysts of the 21st centurys often alarmingly personal politics is a novelist writing about Tudor England. In the concluding part of her Wolf Hall trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, Mantel continues her investigation into Thomas Cromwell, a canny practitioner of Machiavellian statecraft who attempted to align England with the Protestant princely states in Europe. That, as much as Henry VIIIs unpredictable sexual tastes, was the reason Cromwells career eventually unravelled. Mantel is also an eagle-eyed observer of the current royal family: her famous lecture on the Duchess of Cambridge is one of the works collected in a forthcoming collection, entitled Mantel Pieces.
Helen McCarthy
The deepest assumptions shape day-to-day life without us noticing. Take a longer view, and you can spot themand grasp how they can change. McCarthys work exposes the oppressive power of the housewife ideal. Many mothers have long been in paid employment, but in the years between commonplace domestic servants and ubiquitous domestic appliances, they were vilified for falling short as angels in the house. Only in the last 40 years, with the help of nurseries and other childcare, have working mothers ceased to be deemed aberrant. In the lockdown, all responsibility for children was thrown back to parents, and reports suggest the burden was unequally sharedunderlining the enduring power of the tropes McCarthy identifies.
Thaddeus Metz
This professor of philosophy at the University of Johannesburg is reimagining what it might mean to teach his subject in an African context. As well as the traditional syllabus (Plato etc), Metz has championed native African philosophy as an object of equal worth to study. He has defended the idea of a distinctive African moral theory based on ubuntu, one which values harmonious relationships and human solidarity. It should, he argues, be taken just as seriously as the work of Kant or utilitarianism. That Metz is a white American makes the project, often described as decolonising the curriculum, all the more intriguing.
Branko Milanovi
Bean-counting can narrow horizons, but not for this Serbian-American number cruncher. Inequality used to be measured country-by-country, but he has pioneered analysis of the global income distribution, which he likens to an elephant, with a high back (fast wage-rises in mid-table China), low head (squeezed working-class wages in the west) and a rising trunk (the runaway pay of the pre-financial crisis global elite). Unlike many leftists, he diagnoses no general crisis of capitalism, instead focusing on its varieties, and the surprising way the restless insecurity of Chinas political economy works to bolster growth. As Covid-19 accelerates Chinas eclipse of the US, he is an indispensable guide.
Timothy Morton
Living in the Anthropocene turns out to require a new, less anthropocentric, vocabulary. Mortonan English professor at Rice University, Houstonprovides one. A proponent of object-oriented ontology (OOO), Morton argues that nature or the environment does not, in fact, exist as we think of it, as something separate from or encompassing of civilisation. He suggests instead that all objects, from rocks to trees, live in equal and interdependent co-existence with humans. Counting singer Bjrk, artist Olafur Eliasson and curator and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist among his fans and collaborators, he is exerting a rare and a far-reaching impact on our intellectual and cultural imagination.
Jenny Odell
ACalifornian whose exhibitions have spotlighted objects discarded at landfills and the manufacturing roots of our everyday items, Odell calls us to observe the commonplacewith undivided attention. Her interests culminated in How to Do Nothing, a bestseller about the pleasures of resisting Big Techs commodification of our attention spans. Its a philosophical meditation on what it means to live mindfully with nature at a time when powerful corporations want us to do anything but. When billions were suddenly confined to their homes this year (with nothing but social media to connect them with others), the need to rediscover how to be content doing nothing became self-evident.
Olivette Otele
Born in Cameroon and raised in France, Olivette Otele was appointed professor of the history of slavery at Bristol University last autumnhaving become, at Bath Spa, the UKs first black female history professor just the year before. She has been a keen analyst of Bristols impassioned debate over its long associations with slavery. In reaction to the pulling down of Edward Colstons statue, she wrote, many other slave traders are still celebrated in Bristol, while poverty, racism and all forms of inequalities are, more than ever, in urgent need of being tackled. Her book African Europeans: An Untold Story will be published this October.
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The world's top 50 thinkers 2020 - Prospect
