Karoline:

A great, great question! Fortunately, I think that the answer is "yes." Including the recently deceased, I think we have had Jurgen Habermas, Stanley Fish, the late lamented Susan Sontag, perhaps Jared Diamond, Christopher Hitchens, the late Jean Baudrillard, Hans Kung, the late Jacques Derrida, perhaps Jimmy Carter, William Bennett, Paul Nitze, W.V.O. Quine, Steven Pinker, Camille Paglia, Naomi Wolf, Naomi Klein, Joan Didion, Noam Chomsky, Reinhold Niebuhr, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Lawrence Lessig, Stephen Hawking - and many others. If your favorites aren't on the list, it's probably because I couldn't necessarily think of them in time. I also know that people who read this will be tempted to do two things:
1. Assume that the list is people with whom I generally agree, and
2. Assume that the list is, for me, generally complete.

Neither of these assumptions is close to the truth, and some of these thinkers I rarely agree with. Nevertheless, these are people that have had a cultural, political, religious or philosophical impact on our society that is considerable. Some may be viewed as mere scribblers (e.g. Hitchens) others as wild-eyed crank philosophers (Derrida) but all have written books that have caused quite a stir. 
There is a problem, and perhaps this is what you've hinted at: today's intellectuals seem "smaller" in what they deal with. They come at very big problems from the relative comfort of their intellectual redoubts, leaving the reader to extrapolate to the world at large. As a university professor, I think we live in a time when those in my profession seem little inclined to seek a soapbox for their views - they seem to want to be proved right about very little things, rather than risk being pilloried for being wrong about big things. There are many distinguished professors at big name institutions that no one outside their field has ever heard of. And these are people in philosophy, history, culture, literature and politics - all the things you'd think would lead them to want to hold forth publicly. Alas, they write (as I do) articles that few read, and seem content at the occasional accolades from their peers at conferences. Perhaps YOU need to become a public intellectual!