As Europe’s asylum crisis intensified last month, prominent liberal opinion pages — the London Review of Books, Le Monde, Canada’s Globe and Mail — featured contributions from some of today’s leading thinkers. Slavoj Žižek, Jürgen Habermas, and Peter Singer all offered their analysis of what must be done, and by whom, to relieve the refugee emergency.

These interventions are rich in lessons about how the “responsibility of intellectuals,” to use Chomsky’s formulation, is currently being discharged — or not. Indeed, for all the philosophers’ fame, their contributions impress only by the banality of their prescriptions.

Žižek said that “Europe must reassert its commitment to provide for the dignified treatment of the refugees.” “National sovereignty,” he believes, “will have to be radically redefined and new methods of global co-operation and decision-making devised.” Habermas called on France and Germany “to show Europe has a hard core able to act and to take the initiative.” Singer noted that “affluent countries should be giving much more support to less affluent countries that are supporting large numbers of refugees.”