This species is hard to find in Canada. Margaret Atwood and John Ralston Saul come closest. In the United States, Noam Chomsky.
The philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy (BHL, in short) plays that role in France. As a result of his pro-American sympathies, he also has a sizeable audience in the U.S.
Ian Buruma wrote about him in last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review: “popping up here, there and everywhere in his fine white shirts, opened halfway down his chest, holding forth on everything from Jean-Paul Sartre to Jihad in Pakistan, and generally acting out the role, in a somewhat theatrical fashion, of the great Parisian intellectual.”
Occasionally it is not clear why he says outrageous things.
One wonders, for example, on what grounds BHL applauded Brazil’s decision not to extradite the Italian ex-terrorist Cesare Battisti, who was sentenced in absentia to life in prison in his home country for murdering four people.
If the Italians were going to impose capital punishment on the man, one certainly could understand BHL’s position. But life in prison for a terrorist who murdered four people?
On January 5, the Italian daily La Repubblica extended its exasperation with BHL to French intellectuals in general:
“They suffer from a special kind of visual impairment: the inability to take a self-critical view of themselves…. To have brought a king to the guillotine remains something they are proud of and which in their own eyes lifts them above all other Europeans. The universalism they boast of is making them blind to their own limits…. Their contribution to the European Community is a mixture of decorative universalism and de facto nationalism…. Intellectual confrontations do take place, but they are never directed at Europe or the world, about which they are profoundly ignorant.”
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
John Ralston Saul? The man is unbalanced.
The French are shocked when their public intellectuals don’t hate the United States and/or bourgeois life. As a bo-bo, though not of the left, I wish we could find a public intellectual or two who agreeed with me.
What about Ezra Levan?
Many thanks for those who cause us to question what we value, to spark debate and to encourage salon. So often I find the world filled with ardent defenders of conventional wisdom.
The most rewarding public intellectual the world has produced in the last two hundred years was George Bernard Shaw. Would you agree? We need him now.
But some conventional wisdom may still be wisdom.
Yes. And not everything Dr. Goebbels wrote was lies.
Amen to Krever – and worth defending even ardently.
GBS, yes but would H.G. Wells not be on the list?
Of course.
HBL is not really well known in the US. Every once in a while I read one of his BON MOTS in the paper. Has anybody ever read one his books, or are they too abstruse ? Thinking highly of the US is a capital crime among French intellectuals.
Th important thing is that BHL and the brewery heiress Daphne Guinness have been friends for some time. (“You are no longer a person; you are a concept!” he once famously declared to her; a quote that is repeated regularly in profiles of Ms. Guinness.) But, lately, their public outings in London have become more frequent and their demeanor around each, more intimate.