Education

Are These The World’s Top Thinkers For 2020?


Prospect has annnounced its 50 top thinkers in the world for 2020. This list, which has been published in some form or other since 2004, is a much-anticipated exercise by the influential British magazine, which covers a range of social issues, political developments, intellectual currents and cultural topics.

This year’s list was formed, according to the the Prospect team, with the advice of “distinguished experts in various fields who have written for us over the years.” A premium was placed on real-world relevance, which had the predictable result of elevating a large number of figures who’ve become more prominent because of their work regarding the Covid-19 pandemic and its resulting economic and social consequences.

The editors admitted they’d been skeptical of claims that Covid-19 would “change everything,” but they ultimately came to accept that, in fact, the pandemic had resulted in the rise of a new guard of scientists, writers, scholars and artists. “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 List

For the first time in the history of the Prospect lists, women (26) comprise the majority of the 50. Americans are well represented, particularly those working at a number of the nation’s leading universities.

The fields in which the selected leaders work cover a broad array of intellectual and creative specializations, with a particular emphasis on scholars in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and journalism. Here are just a few examples.

Literature: English writer and multiple Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel, the Irish novelist Sally Rooney, Nobel-winning author Olga Tokarczuk, American science fiction writer N.K. Jimisin, and Abby Stein, the American transgender author, activist and rabbi.

The Arts: German pianist Igor Levit, and American artist and educator Jenny Odell.

Journalism and Commentary: Ross Douthat with the New York Times, “Never Trumper” commentator and The Atlantic writer (and long-ago Forbes legal columnist) David Frum, Pulitzer-winner Anne Applebaum, and Ed Yong, science writer at The Atlantic.

Filmmaking: South Korean Bong Joon-Ho and American actress and director Greta Gerwig.

History: UCLA geographer and historian Jared Diamond, Columbia University historian Stephen Wertheim, and Bristol University historian Olivette Otele.

Social Science: French economist Thomas Piketty, Harvard psychologist Elizabeth Speke, and prison scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore at the City University of New York. 

Philosophy: American scholar Cornel West, Yale philosopher and literary theorist Martin Hagglund, and Timothy Morton at Rice University.

The list also includes several figures who have burst into the spotlight because of their timely scholarship, frequently related to the pandemic in some form. Examples are Ari Ezra Waldman, a leading authority on privacy and technology, and Professor of Law and Computer Science at Northeastern University, Eric Yuan, billionaire founder and CEO of Zoom, Oxford University vaccinologist Sarah Gilbert, and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.

Of course, one of the great pleasures with lists like this is for the reader to take exception to the individuals who were left off or to raise objections to those who were included. The Prospect list will not disappoint. Go to its website and vote for your choices or complain about the omissions.

Tom Clark, Editor of Prospect, already anticipated one objection to the list: “the absence of any thinker who can truly be said to have emerged from within the global populist insurgency associated with Donald Trump.” And one can almost hear the lilt of pleasure in his answer: “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… 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.”



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