THE SPINNING WHEEL WINS: Crowd Crowns Gandhi the 20th Century's Greatest Leader

The crowd has ruled, and its pick is a man who never commanded an army, never won an election and never held national office: Mahatma Gandhi is the greatest political leader of the 20th century. That is the verdict on Morfi's opinion markets, where people put real money behind their opinions. I'll admit it moves me. A century of tanks, treaties and summits, and the crowd's money went to the thin man with the spinning wheel.

This was never going to be settled by any single authority, and history hasn't tried. According to Wikipedia's account of the Time 100 list of the century's most important people, Time gave its 1999 Person of the Century to Albert Einstein and named Gandhi and Franklin D. Roosevelt as runners-up. Twenty years later, the BBC series Icons had Nelson Mandela winning its leaders heat over Churchill, Roosevelt and Margaret Thatcher, and Martin Luther King Jr. winning the activists heat over Gandhi himself. Churchill has his own trophies too: Time named him Man of the Half-Century in 1949, a BBC public poll voted him the greatest Briton in 2002, and Time made Mikhail Gorbachev its Man of the Decade in 1989.

Against that untidy record, the crowd went with conscience over command. Gandhi leads with 27% consensus, and King, the American heir to his nonviolent method, is second at 22%. Also on the ballot: 4 other sides. So far 24 traders have put $86,054 behind their convictions, in a market that opened less than a day ago. Notice what that ranking turns upside down. In Gallup's 1999 list of the century's most admired figures, Americans put King second and Gandhi down in thirteenth place, behind both Roosevelt and Churchill. The crowd has turned the student into the runner-up and the teacher into the champion.

Now my opinion, and I won't pretend it's anything else. I think the crowd got it right, and for a reason the wartime giants' admirers will dislike. Churchill and Roosevelt were magnificent in defending an order that already existed. Gandhi and King did something harder. They made empires and segregated states face the laws and principles those states claimed to stand for, with no weapon but the moral authority of people refusing to obey an unjust rule. Kant's Enlightenment motto was "Have courage to use your own understanding." The Salt March and the Montgomery bus boycott were that courage turned into mass action: rights claimed peacefully, in public, in the open. Yes, I'm preaching. When the subject is the century's moral hierarchy, I think a bit of preaching is allowed.

Still, a verdict reached in under a day is a first draft, not a final judgment. Mandela is the one to watch. He took the BBC's leaders crown, and his path from prison to presidency joins Gandhi's moral force with real power in office, which is exactly the kind of case that can win over late money. Churchill's backers have plenty of history on their side as well. If you think the crowd has misjudged the century, make your argument with your own money: join the market on Morfi and help write the next draft.