Chomsky, the leading American intellectual and academic, has a curious first name. What is it? a) Noam b) Noah c) Haven’t a clue If you answered a), good for you. You are exactly the type of sophisticated, educated reader that Prospect, a leading magazine of intellectual ideas, wants to cultivate. If, however, you answered c), you may want to turn straight away to The Funday Times.

In a poll conducted last month by Prospect in conjunction with an American magazine, Foreign Policy, Noam Chomsky was declared No 1 Global Public Intellectual. Drawn from a list of 100 noted thinkers, politicians and philosophers, he beat such luminaries as Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian novelist, the conservative American political thinker Francis Fukuyama and our own Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm. The results will be announced in the November issue, published this week.

Chomsky, professor emeritus of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), won a decisive victory over his nearest rival, the novelist Umberto Eco. Almost 20,000 people cast their votes; he garnered nearly 5,000 compared with 2,500 for Eco. The biologist Richard Dawkins came in third place, followed by Vaclav Havel, the playwright and former president of the Czech Republic. Christopher Hitchens, the pugilistic journalist described by the magazine as an “essayist and contrarian”, came fifth.

David Goodhart, the editor of Prospect, describes the exercise as a “bit of intellectual fun, a parlour game. It’s not meant to be entirely serious. At worst, it’s harmless. At best it gets people arguing about trends in intellectual life”.

The poll was timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the magazine. It also followed the success of last year’s survey by Prospect of the top 100 public intellectuals in Britain. Richard Dawkins won, followed by Germaine Greer.

“This year’s exercise wasn’t about all-time great thinkers,” he said. “The criteria said that you had to be active, you had to be practising.” That ruled out Dead White Males such as David Hume, for example, or Karl Marx, who won BBC Radio 4’s poll earlier this year for “greatest philosopher”. It also eliminated great minds of the last century such as Karl Popper and Bertrand Russell.

Even if you are not conversant with Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies, or Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy, these names have resonance. But for many perplexed members of the public, the reaction will be, Noam who? And, what’s all the fuss about?

Born in 1928 in Philadelphia, Chomsky came to prominence as a young linguistics professor at MIT in the 1950s. His theory of grammar, forged at this time, holds that grammar, the capability to form structured language, is innate to the human mind. At 29 he published Syntactic Structures, which revolutionised the study of language. The New Yorker has called him “one of the finest minds of the 20th century” and The New York Times has said he is “arguably the most important intellectual alive”.

But syntax and semiotics apart, most people came to know Chomsky for his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam war. He published his first collection of political writings in 1969. For more than 40 years he has been the loudest and most consistent critic in America of its policies at home and abroad. He has written more than 40 books and continues to lecture frequently.

Described as the Elvis of Academia because of his popularity, he says: “I never was aware of any other option but to question everything.”

After the US bombing of Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan in 1998 he wrote: “Wanton killing of innocent civilians is terrorism, not a war against terrorism.” At 76, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is as prolific a left wing provocateur as ever. He lambasts all forms of American colonisation. His latest book, Imperial Ambitions, published later this month, is a discussion of the post-9/11 world. In it he maintains that “the pretences for the invasion (of Iraq) are no more convincing than Hitler’s”. In turn, Chomsky attracts equal measures of bile. One of his loudest critics is Christopher Hitchens. “In some awful way, Chomsky’s regard for the underdog has mutated into support for mad dogs,” Hitchens has said.

Goodhart thinks the debate about Chomsky’s worth is bound to continue. On the one hand he is the author of a profound contribution to linguistics. On the other his pronouncements outside his area, in politics, are often simple-minded and maddening.

Whatever Chomsky’s merits, Goodhart ascribes his popularity to something deep-rooted in our psyche. “He represents the old-fashioned romantic image of a voice in the wilderness,” he says. “He cannot be bought, and we find that noble. We tend to think it is an intellectual’s job to be against power. And I think Chomsky has an authority granted by brilliance in one area.”

Which is where we shall leave our friends, chewing the intellectual fat. And in intelligent households like yours, surely Prof Idol beats Pop Idol any day.

Full results available at www.prospectmagazine.co.uk