Pankaj Mishra and Niall Ferguson are having a feud

[patrick1]

Most excellent. Ferguson is clearly the most irritating of all US public intellectuals (that isn´t an evolutionary psychologist or Camille Paglia).

The fact that he is going to work with A.C. Grayling at that ridiculous "humanities school" further underlines this point.

Does teaching/working in America for a few years make him not British anymore?

[patrick1]

Most excellent. Ferguson is clearly the most irritating of all US public intellectuals (that isn´t an evolutionary psychologist or Camille Paglia).

The fact that he is going to work with A.C. Grayling at that ridiculous "humanities school" further underlines this point.

Does teaching/working in America for a few years make him not British anymore?

Considering that he's pretty explicitly disowned the UK, I'd say US intellectual is pretty fair.  Though what he really is is the last gasp of that early-mid 20th century creature, homo atlanticus.

Didn't or doesn't he currently teach at LSE or is it an honorary chair deal? He must have some friends in British academia.   I find someone like Ferguson to be a product of his academic lineage and that is distinctly not American. Then again I don't really find Hitchens, Sullivan or Simon Schawa (sp?) US intellectuals either.

[patrick1]

I know he is British but he is a public intellectual in the United States. That is what I meant.

Don't know how public he really is here.  The regular blowhards of Chomsky, Krugan, Friedman, Hitchens and Zakaria are typically the ones trotted out.  Granted, I don't really travel in the intellectual milieu much but I really only know him from the Ascent of Money book and documentary.

[patrick1]

Nothing like making your opponents points for them there, Niall. Ha.
[quote]
Not content with libelling me, Mishra also systematically misrepresents my new book, falsely alleging a whole series of omissions. He claims that in Civilisation I disregard ‘Muslim contributions to Western science’; in fact, I discuss them in some detail. He asserts that I ‘offer no evidence’ for my claim that China was very far from being economically neck to neck with the West in 1800. In fact, the point is footnoted and the work of two Chinese scholars, Guan Hanhui and Li Daokui, clearly referenced; I also provide Angus Maddison’s figures for per capita income. Mishra alleges that ‘Asian leaders and intellectuals’ are ‘mute here as in all Ferguson’s books’ and that I do not discuss their growing awareness of Western predominance. In fact, I devote three pages each to the Ottoman and Japanese responses to Western ascendancy. Gandhi is quoted at length. He is no more ‘mute’ here than in Empire or War of the World. Mishra says I don’t mention the genocidal policies pursued by the Belgian rulers of the Congo: in fact, they are referred to twice. He claims that I do not discuss how Western innovations, when ‘imposed on societies historically unprepared for them, could turn literally into killers’. Yet my discussions of the use of modern artillery in Chapter 2, and railways and ‘eugenics’ in Chapter 4, do precisely that.