The world’s top intellectual, according to a British magazine poll, is America-hating crypto-socialist MIT professor Noam Chomsky.

Noam Chomsky, the American linguistics expert and US foreign policy critic, was named the world’s top public intellectual, according to a new British magazine poll released.

Best known for his loud and consistent criticism of the Vietnam War and US foreign policy over the last 40 years, Chomsky, 76, decisively beat Italian novelist and academic Umberto Eco and third-placed Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins to top the poll.

Now an emeritus professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chomsky first became known for his theory of grammar developed at MIT in the 1950s, which held that the ability to form structured language is innate in the human mind.

He later became known for his political activism.

The Noamster is on a roll; he was also recently elected as one of the people BBC readers would most like to see rule the world.