Top Public Intellectuals of 1905

1.

I think the person who might have topped the poll would have been Henri Bergson. Almost forgotten today, people forget just how popular Bergson was at the time. Society ladies queued to sit in his lectures, numerous intellectuals made the pilgrimage etc. etc. Seriously.

Roosevelt would rightly feature on both lists, but William Jennings Bryan would probably be there on a 1905 poll as well, and deservedly absent from the retrospective.

Trotsky might be on both, too, but Kautsky would certainly be higher up a 1905 poll.

Ernst Haeckel for list a. only, and, if the poll was tiresomely Anglocentric, a whole bunch of deservedly forgotten Fabians.

Many good picks above- Wm James, Bergson, Bryan, etc. I’d vote for Kropotkin as someone who could/should have been on a 1905 list. He’s read rarely now, I think, though I happend to read a fair amount of him a while ago, mostly for fun, and found it both more enjoyable and interesting than I would have thought. Some of it seems worth considering still, though I’m not at all sympathetic to anarchism. His life story is also extraordinary.
-Chris: do you think people will read Rushdie’s or Eco’s novels 100 years from now? I’ve not read either, but I’d guess that at least some of them might be read, at least by those who are in to reading old novels.

Charles Sanders Peirce !!!
Sigmund Freud
John Dewey
Max Weber !!!
very quickly, but this lis-makingt is completely Anglo-centric!!!

And Camille Paglia on the F/P Prospect Poll? Give me a break.

Some things should not be decided by referendum

How about the Fabian of your choice?

Bernard Shaw
H.G. Wells
Havelock Ellis

Or a Scientist?

Kelvin
Poincare

Or a novelist?

Tolstoy
H. James
Frank Baum

Or a social darwinist

William Graham Sumner

H.G. Wells would also clearly fit the “public intellectual” who is still relevant, although not so much as Pierce, Freud, or Dewey. Would Weber have made the list in 1905? Probably not. His reputation derived from works that started to appear in 1904, and many scholars argue his enduring status was a consequence of being appropriated by Americans after his death.

I suspect people will read Habermas in 100 years. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing I leave to others to decide.

I’d bet on Habermas being read in 100 years, too– and would give even money on Sen.

Hm. It seems to me that there was a major generation just passed by 1905. An 1895 list might have included Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Herbert Spencer, Emile Zola, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Woodrow Wilson. By 1905, I think all but Holmes and Wilson were dead, and Wilson was no longer “making contributions to his discipline,” as the poll puts it. Only Holmes would probably still warrant inclusion ten years later.

For 1905, I’d add Thorstein Veblen. I agree that Weber belongs based on dates of publication but not based on time of actual influence; Protestant Ethic was newly out in 05, I think, and it took more than a year just to read the damn thing…

In an American context Twain/ Clemens would certainly have been a contender, and maybe moreso in 05 than in 95 because of his writings on the Spanish-American war.

George Bernard Shaw, definitely, though it was a few years before the peak of his renown. H. G. Wells without a doubt.

Nobody’s mentioned Conan Doyle. Or Roger Casement. Kipling, surely.

But I’d agree with jacob that 1905 is somewhat between generations. Freud and Einstein, for instance, were certainly not yet “public” intellectuals. Modernism had yet to arrive, but the era of the “eminent Victorians” was definitely gone.

Oh, but one should include Virginia’s father, Leslie Stephen. And Q: Sir Arther Quiller Couch.

Yes, Kropotkin definitely.

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.

Allow me to disagree. Hard to say of course, but Saussure is still widely read (among linguists) so I think it plausible that Chomsky’s linguistics works will be read in 2105. But maybe you meant read as in widely read. In that case, I wonder if any intellectual is still widely read 150 year after his birth.

Z

Alas, my attempts to build a write-in campaign for Scott McLemee apparently fell short. There’s always 2025!!!!

To take the silliness one higher.

To heck with being read, whose work will be made into movies 50 or 100 years later. The 1905 Nobel went to Sienkiewicz. Quo Vadis and With Fire and Sword both pass the movie test in my mind.

So do Shaw, Wells, Tolstoy, Hardy, and Baum.

Which of today’s writers will get the screen revival 100 years from now? I think quite a few actually, so I guess if you want longevity of influence literature is the way to go.

Norman Angell, surely.

I’m going to disagree about what was said about Chomsky as well. His 1950’s work will remain relevent for as long as there are programming languages which need to be parsed.

Thomas Mann for b; probably too early for a.

Chomsky has about twice the votes of the second place finisher.

Do we not consider painters, composers, architects public intellectuals? I see none listed. Is the language they work in not universal or enduring?

Otto Wagner is an architect.

Debussy was also mentioned above.

Franz Boas (founder of American Anthropology and evelopr of cultural relativism)
Frank Lloyd Wright (architect of some kind…)
Albert Einstein (seconiding the nomination)
Mother Jones (who, at 75, was just getting started…)
Abraham Cahan (author and editor of the Yiddish daily “The Forward”, top-selling Socialist paper in the US)
Chaim Zhitlovsky (Yiddishist and developer of the concept of cultural nationalism, main rival to Zionism before WWII)
Theodore Herzl (Zionist advocate)
Thomas Edison
Marie Curie
Gustav Mahler

Some good ones in here… my guess for “Top 20” of 1905 would be (in no particular order:

Leon Trotsky
William James
G.B. Shaw
H.G. Wells
Sidney & Beatrice Webb
Sigmund Freud
Bertrand Russell
Theodore Roosevelt
Maurice Maeterlinck
Leo Tolstoy
Theodor Herzl (died ’04, however)
Havelock Ellis
Henri Bergson
Mark Twain
Rudyard Kipling
Andre Gide
Karl Kraus
Hilaire Belloc/G.K. Chesterton (count as one)
Henri Poincare
Thorstein Veblen

Some trouble with lists like these.. some heavyweights had just died (Zola, ’02); others were slightly known (Valery early fame, but didn’t break silence until ’17); others more obscure but very influential (Alfred Mahon); and still others just coming on (Max Weber-first pub in ’04; Einstein in ’05).

Still, lot’s of fun — a good way to waste half hour on a Monday afternoon.

“I don’t know how much the three papers of the miracle year contributed to Einstein’s standing as a public intellectual save in that it made him famous for being a genius.”

It gave him standing in the intellectual field called “physics”.

I’m not sure that treating music as an “intellectual” activity results in very good music.

If he had not died eight years earlier, Henry George would certainly make the the a) list. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who passed away in 1902, would also just fail to live long enough to make the list.

George Santayana might make the a) list.

In Germany, at least, Hermann Cohen would be on the a) list. Perhaps Edmund Husserl would be, too (though I think he cut significantly less of a public figure, at least in 1905, than Cohen did).

In the US, the a) list might include Walter Rauschenbusch.

Maybe not Husserl, but probably Meinong for a.

aretino… but was Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903) the darling of the Bloomsbury set as early as 1905? I suppose, with his role in Cambridge Apostles, I’d say he was more a private intellectual at that point, no?

Also, if Moore–then surely G.H. Hardy (or even David Hilbert, whose 23 Problems was given in 1900)?

This is one year off, but The Jungle, which aimed for the public’s heart and hit its stomach, was published in 1906. Upton Sinclair might not quite achieve public intellectual status, more public polemicist.

Emile Durkheim, classmate of Bergson, should make both lists. By 1905 he had written “The division of labor,” “The rules of sociological method,” “Suicide,” and founded l’annee sociologique. And his work certainly stands up today.

How about Ferdinand Tonnies as a longshot? He wrote an outrageous large number of things, although most never made it to the Anglo world until much later…

I’ll also throw out Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough and disseminator of quasi-anthropological studies of folklore and myth. He’s definitely an a) and not a b).

Others not mentioned:

Jack London
George Herbert Mead
Alfred North Whitehead
Joseph Conrad
Anatole France

max planck

Benjamin Kidd and Leonard Hobhouse.

A meta-comment. Chris wrote:

nobody will read them in 100 years

But having this as an implicit requirement biases the sample, both with regard to 1905 and to 2005. Einstein is read today (if he is) for sociological reasons, not scientific ones. It is the fate of workers in the sciences, and in other areas of enquiry that follow the scientific model (including much of philosophy) to be absorbed into the body of knowledge. There is no necessary relationship between the brilliance and importance of the work and its survival in its own right .

I think I’m drunk. But 1905, given what we know now? It looks like this:
1. Albert Einstein
2. Albert Einstein
3. Albert Einstein
4. Albert Einstein
5. Albert Einstein
6. Albert Einstein
7. Albert Einstein
8. Albert Einstein
9. Albert Einstein
10. Albert Einstein
BTW, it was four papers. The Fourth, chronologically (assuming there is such a thing as time, of course), was titled “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?” and contained a memorable equation: E=mc^2

Who are these other people? Thanks to Richard Feynman (who patented the nuclear submarine, the nuclear airplane, the nuclear rocket, and the nuclear reactor, and sold the lot to the US Government for a dollar — he was an employee at the time) we have had deterrence, and a supply of not-very-clean energy. Feynman channelled (I was going to say “only channelled” but he had his own supply of genius) Einstein. One man made the modern world. And he made it from a Patent Office in Bern. He wouldn’t have won any awards at the time. Albert Abraham Michelson was a famous doubter, and won the Nobel in 1907. And, IIRC, continued doubting until his death.

Though reading some of the other choices, both Twain and Shaw seem fine to me.

Since I’m doing the “who ought to have been” poll: Only Jon mentioned Conan Doyle. Ibsen, obviously. And William James. And Conrad. And Ford Madox Ford. And Henry James. Hold on, this is supposed to be a blog for smart people. I thought you all had enhanced cerabellums (-a, whatever). And you forgot “The Master”? You say you read books, and you don’t read the finest prose (says he, nipping past that playwright with the beard) writer ever? What, exactly, do you mean by this read in 100 years stuff?

Saad Zaghloul for the non-anglocentric list.

D. H. Lawrence was close to being published in 1905. If you are going to exclude the recently dead, you should at least get to include the ready to blossom.

As for current intellectuals, I nominate Jane Jacobs, author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” and “Dark Age Ahead.”

And John Muir.

26 I guess we could start with Plato and work our way forward on that one!

But that’s typically what I meant, I don’t know about where you live Chris, but around me, Plato is “widely read” only among students in philosophy. Apart from them, I doubt you can find more than 1% of people who have read more than one work of him. Likewise, I am convinced that student in linguistics (and computer science) will read Chomsky in 2105.

I would say the only intellectual widely read in France long after his death is Voltaire, and even him is kept alive mostly by highschool literature classes.

Oh, and if I had to vote for 1905, I would vote for Poincarre on the basis of his influence in several different fields : he was a major reference in mathematics, physics and philosophy at the time.

Z

With hindsight, Russia turned out too important for the 20th century to be represented just by Tolstoy, Kropotkin and Trotzky. How about Gregory Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, and his pupil Lenin. Also, from the same stable, komissars’ own Germaine Greer – the proto-feminist Alexandra Kollontai

Philosophers and (especially) novelists have a much longer shelf life than journalists and scientists — particularly natural scientists. (Perhaps physicists have only a half-life.)

I could see Salman Rushdie still being read in 100 years. I could see that for Habermas and Eco (as a philosopher), too. Probably Chomsky as a linguist will have fallen into the situation of Smith as an economist — a hallowed but seldom-read intellectual ancestor.

I might have missed it, but Wilber & Orville Wright certainly were original thinkers of the time. Please remember, their accomplishment came only after they rejected the accepted science of the time in regard to lifting foils. From their minds imagination, the world they left behind differed significantly from the world they inherited and thusly, they earned their right to be on the list of great thinkers of their time.

I think the braineater had gotten to Alfred Russell Wallace by 1905. A decade later, Conan Doyle would be writing serious books about faeries.