Intellectuals

The intellectual stratum

The institutions of intellectual life

Intellectual traditions and social authority

The functions of intellectuals

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Intellectuals are the aggregate of persons in any society who employ in their communication and expression, with relatively higher frequency than most other members of their society, symbols of general scope and abstract reference, concerning man, society, nature, and the cosmos. The high frequency of their use of such symbols may be a function of their own subjective propensity or of the obligations of an occupational role, the performance of which entails such use. These two major motivations of intellectual actions can exist in the same person, and they can be present in the same action. They can also exist relatively independently of each other. Intellectual propensities or interests vary in intensity among persons performing intellectual roles and are sometimes also found among those who practice nonintellectual occupations.

Intellectual interests arise from the need to perceive, experience, and express—in words, colors, shapes, or sounds—a general significance in particular, concrete events. They arise from the need to be in cognitive, moral, and appreciative contact with the most general or “essential” features of man, society, nature, and the cosmos. This need is deeply, indeed constitutively, rooted in human beings, albeit unequally distributed among individuals. It underlies the production (creation) and consumption (reception) of works of science, scholarship, philosophy, theology, literature, and art. However, the objectified products of scientific, scholarly, philosophical, theological, literary, and artistic actions are not solely the result of the spontaneous expression of these propensities. The expressive, cognitive, and moral propensities which seek coherent, objective form are aroused, nurtured, heightened, and focused by traditions (which are manifested in the models exemplified by great works and creative personalities) and by the explicit teaching and the culture of the social circles and institutions in which the various intellectual activities are practiced. These propensities are sustained, too, by the institutionalization of expectations of intellectual production, reproduction, and consumption.

Intellectual activities are institutionalized because many individuals who do not have strong or intense intellectual interests of their own need the results of such interests, either to satisfy the necessities of their own mental and physical constitution or because they believe intellectual products to be necessary for the effective functioning of institutions and of society as a whole. Even the most rudimentary and relatively undifferentiated societies have a place for the intellectual functions which are expressed in art and interpretative speculation, even if they do not provide many specialized roles in which these activities are carried on. More differentiated societies require and provide for more specialized intellectual roles which help to locate the individual, his group, and the society in the universe; to interpret, explain, and attempt to control the occurrence of evil; to legitimate authority and define its responsibilities; to interpret the society’s past experiences; to instruct the youth in the traditions and skills of the society; to facilitate and guide the aesthetic and religious experiences of various sectors of the society; and to offer assistance in the control of nature.

The propensities or needs which give rise to functional intellectual roles also impel intellectual creativity. They do so because they are operative in the consumption (reception) of intellectual products. Those who do not themselves have the powers or capacities to reach out directly and productively toward the general and abstract level of existence still need, if only intermittently, to be in contact with, and to participate in, the symbolic objectifications which are created or disclosed by the more creative; they also need the skills which are developed in conjunction with the development of the powers involved in productive or reproductive intellectual action. In other words, they are the consumers of intellectual products (e.g., laity, readers, audiences, patients, clients).

Intellectual objectifications are received or consumed not only because of a pressing need for contact with the “essential” but also because many of the tasks undertaken in certain societies call for the performance of certain functional roles which require intellectual skill and reward such performances. The more complex the structure and the larger the scale of the undertaking, the more likely it is to involve a component of intellectual action.

Large-scale engineering projects, irrigation schemes, military operations, and administrative and judicial organizations tend to utilize generalized knowledge. Even where the empirical element (i.e., the experience of the practitioner) dominates, the large scale of such operations evokes in those responsible for their execution a sense of need for some more general principles to govern their actions. These general principles are not merely theoretical legitimations of the undertaking but are integral to the executive actions through which the projects are realized. The techniques and skills in these executive actions rest on or involve the performance of intellectual actions.

Persons are recruited to intellectual or intellectual-executive roles not solely, or even primarily, because of their deep personal propensity to perform the intellectual actions entailed in such roles. Some of those who enter these roles do so above all because they offer the opportunity of experiencing the gratification of intellectual action as such; others do so more because they are encouraged by parents, teachers, and the prevailing opinion of their class and culture, as well as by the prospective rewards of money and prestige. Once it is perceived that there are intellectual actions capable of incorporation into them, the roles are created, and recruitment into them is economically, politically, and culturally facilitated and rewarded. In the present century the closer associations between scientific research and industrial and military technology, between scientific research and health, and between scientific research and agricultural technology have come about because research workers, politicians, military men, farmers, and civil servants came to believe that the tasks set by “interests” (anticipations of advantage) and aspirations confronted by existing and prospective situations could be dealt with by persons trained in science and technology. The same is true of the utilization of statistics and economic and sociological analysis, in private and public economic life. The custodians of the established order and the authoritative institutions through which their needs are satisfied provide the resources which permit technological-intellectual roles to be established, set tasks for the incumbents of the roles, present opportunities, and offer incentives for the performance of intellectual work. These intellectual-executive roles are not, however, wholly the creation of the “powers”—that is, those who have executive authority and financial resources. The very notion that such roles are possible arises from the perception of the existence of intellectual actions by those who hope to benefit by them and from the desires of the performers of these actions to bring their intellectual production to fruition in the actions of those who have no intellectual interests.

The intellectual stratum

Every society has its intellectuals. Primitive societies—despite their undifferentiatedness, which is a function of poverty, of the thinness of their intellectual traditions, and of the feebleness of their technology—also have their intellectuals or at least their protointellectuals. Frontier societies too, despite the special criteria by which their members are recruited, also produce intellectuals. In the great European and Oriental empires of antiquity and the Middle Ages the magnitude of the tasks undertaken by their political elites, the precipitation of “revelations” in their written literature, and the surplus wealth resulting from their large size and relatively advanced technologies required, and provided for, substantial numbers of intellectuals.

Still, prior to modern societies, poverty, the empirical character of technology, the restricted role and aspirations of government, and the rudimentariness of educational institutions kept the intellectual stratum relatively small and internally relatively undifferentiated. The intellectual class acquired a pervasive importance first in modern Western societies and then in societies outside the West when they began to assimilate Western beliefs and to establish institutions resembling those of the West.

The tasks set by the aspirations and demands of those sections of modern society which care to influence the exercise of authority generate an elaborate system of differentiated and professionalized intellectual roles. The numerous conflicts of activated demands, the vastly increased “legal initiative” of the population, and the wider and deeper ramifications of the concerns of the state require trained lawyers and judges. The modern idea of the responsibilities of the state generates a civil service which requires persons who have studied law, economics, statistics, and administration or whose intellectual powers have been cultivated by exercise in intellectual activities not directly connected with administration, such as mathematics, classics, or literature. Religious institutions now, as in the past, require clergymen and theologians; even though they now make up a significantly smaller proportion of the intellectual stratum than they did before the development of modern societies, they still form a large bloc among the intellectuals. The extension of political interest and activity—from a small group of wealthy and traditionally ascendant families, first to the wider reaches of the property-owning classes and then to the citizenry at large—as well as the greater efficacy of the state in modern society have magnified the amount and organization of political contention. Party politics, whether in democratic or in one-party states, require journalists, political analysts, and leader-writers.

The great increase in the scale of organization of the units of economic life and the emergence of an intimacy between technology and scientific research such as never existed before the last part of the nineteenth century have between them increased the demand for research workers, scientifically qualified technologists, statisticians, economists, and, increasingly, managers with technological and other intellectual disciplines. The industrialization of warfare has also increased the demand for scientific research workers and technologists; new conceptions and resources for military administration and policy have created a demand for intellectual practices such as strategic studies, intelligence analysis, and manpower studies, each of which has become a subprofession in its own right.

Humanitarianism and democracy have led to a new emphasis on the protection and improvement of health, which requires physicians, physiologists, biochemists, surgeons, public health specialists, and the like. The need to feed a larger and more urbanized population, with greater purchasing power and more differentiated tastes, has caused governments and individual agriculturalists to summon the assistance of geneticists, soil chemists, botanists, economists, agricultural-extension officials, statisticians, and other experts. The increasingly widespread demand for enlightenment throughout society—for a share of the cultural inheritance as well as for the improved status and economic rewards afforded by education—has created a corresponding demand for teachers, librarians, editors, and journalists.

None or few of these numerous intellectual–practical roles (engendered by practical needs and not by intellectual propensities) would have been possible, nor could they continue, without the simultaneous or prior exercise of purely intellectual propensities. Intellectual-practical needs could not have been met, nor for that matter could some of the needs have been conceived of as needs, without the accomplishments of men impelled primarily by their intellectual propensities. Furthermore, the provision of personnel for these intellectual-practical roles would be impossible without a system of institutions in which intellectual propensities are relatively free and dominant (that is, universities and institutions of advanced technological training and research) and without the recruitment of persons with predominantly intellectual propensities.

Some of these intellectual–practical roles have a high intellectual component. The superior judiciary, higher technological roles, the higher civil service, the editorial, and the analytical-journalistic roles, even when they are directly engaged in executive performance, require the mastery and practice of complex patterns of symbols of wide generality. Those at lower levels of authority and with narrower ranges of responsibility also require some measure of intellectual expertise. Thus, many of these roles can be entered, according to custom or formal requirement, only after passage through a course of disciplined or organized intellectual study. (In the case of the lower levels of these fields—for example, the ordinary lawyer, the general medical practitioner, the middle and lower ranks of civil servants, the ordinary engineer, the routine local-newspaper reporter—the intellectual training through which they must pass often contains considerable intellectual elements which do not enter into their practice.) Thus, the training of large numbers of persons for the wide variety of intellectual-practical roles generates a system of predominantly intellectual roles in teaching and research.

Alongside these intellectual roles, which are an integral part of the political, administrative, legal, and economic spheres of a complex modern society, there are other intellectual roles which constitute the cultural system and which are largely the product of intellectual propensities as such, shaped by intellectual traditions and the resources made available out of respect for their intrinsically intellectual character.

The institutions of intellectual life

Except in small societies and in societies which, although large, have a small stratum of intellectuals, the intellectuals seldom, if ever, possess an inclusive sense of identity. In contemporary large-scale societies the specialization of education and practice, the consequent tendencies toward segregation along professional lines, and the wide extension of secondary and higher education have made for vague external boundaries of the intellectual stratum. Even in small intellectual strata, differences in religious and political beliefs and in ethnic and class connections have caused rifts in the solidarity which might otherwise have prevailed in situations where a common participation in high culture offered a criterion for an inclusive self-identification.

Nonetheless, the intellectual stratum of any society possesses a structure; it is more than the statistical aggregate of all those who perform intellectual actions. Even though the intellectual stratum ordinarily does not have, in the present century, an entirely common culture, it increasingly tends to pass through a common institutional system: the academic or university system. The highly specialized and particularized intellectual-practical cultures nurtured outside the universities would not be what they are without the link between them and the more general and abstract culture of the university system. Within this source of the more specialized and segregated intellectual-practical professions, there is more of a common culture and more of a coherent and integral corporate structure than in the intellectual stratum as a whole. Thus, from the university system comes a certain measure of institutional interconnectedness of the whole intellectual stratum.

The structure of the intellectual system of any society is defined by four main factors: (1) the sources of financial support of the performers of intellectual actions; (2) the modes of administration of intellectual actions; (3) the patterns of demand for intellectual objects and intellectual-practical performances; and (4) the relationships between past and present intellectual accomplishments (i.e., the relationship of tradition and creativity in the various fields of intellectual action).

Sources of financial support

The forms of financial support of productive and reproductive intellectual actions are: (a) income gained from inherited wealth; (b) income gained from the practice of nonintellectual occupations; (c) patronage; (d) income from the sale of the products of the individual’s own intellectual actions; (e) income received as salary (or from other types of payment) for services performed, usually within corporate intellectual bodies; and (f) income for services performed in intellectual-practical (executive) occupations.

In most literate societies intellectual life is sustanined by combinations of several or all of these modes of support. In Europe prior to the eighteenth century, intellectual life was characteristically sustained by income from inherited wealth and from patronage and to a lesser extent by income derived from payment for intellectual services (e.g., teaching) and intellectual-practical services (e.g., administration). Support from the sale of intellectual products (books, plays, poems, paintings, sculpture, and music) appeared for the first time during the Italian Renaissance—and then only in connection with the sale of paintings and sculpture produced on commission. Prior to the development of inexpensive printing and the expansion of literacy, the free-lance intellectual who lived from the sale of his intellectual products was extremely rare and was confined to painting and sculpture. Prior to the growth of universities and organized research institutions, support from salary for intellectual work (research, writing, and teaching) was likewise rare; it was confined mainly to court intellectuals (historians, astronomers, and astrologers).

In advanced modern societies and in the modern sector of underdeveloped societies intellectuals are supported predominantly through employment in corporate intellectual bodies (universities and research institutions) and to a lesser extent through employment in intellectual-practical occupations in, for example, the civil service, military organizations, churches, newspapers, and research departments of industrial enterprises. Free-lance intellectuals living from the sale of their products, although much larger in number than in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, still constitute a relatively small proportion of the total intellectual stratum. (The proportion of free-lance intellectuals was probably greatest in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before the great expansion of universities and corporately organized research.) In underdeveloped countries, where most of the population is still illiterate, the free-lance intellectual who lives from the sale of his intellectual products is a rarity.

The proportion of productive intellectuals who live or have lived on income derived from nonintellectual occupations (e.g., professional soldiers, merchants, bankers, clerks, laborers) has always been small, although certain very distinguished figures are to be included in this category (e.g., Thucydides, Ibn Khaldun, George Grote, Edward Hyde, H. C. Lea, Chateaubriand, and T. S. Eliot for part of his career).

Administration of intellectual actions

The trend toward the increasing envelopment of intellectual life within corporate intellectual institutions is in part a function of a change in the interests of an increasingly large proportion of the intellectual stratum—that is, a change from predominantly literary, philosophical, and theological concerns to scientific and scholarly interests. This trend is also a function of changes in techniques of scientific and scholarly research. As long as scholarship was confined to a relatively small number of books and manuscripts and as long as scientific research could be done with relatively simple and inexpensive instruments, these interests could be pursued independently and with the financial resources made available through inherited wealth or from income earned in other occupations. However, once scholarship began to require the use of very large libraries, well-ordered museums, widely dispersed manuscripts, and the “finds” of large archeological inquiries, and as the number of scholars who could not provide these from their earned and unearned income increased, the conduct of scholarly research required that much larger sums of money be found if research was to proceed on the scale that came to be thought desirable in the nineteenth century. Research in the biological, medical, and physical sciences underwent similar experiences. The demand for greater precision and reliability of observations imposed the need for more expensive equipment which could not be provided by a rentier or an amateur scientist from his private income. The greater numbers of persons seeking scientific education, as well as the newly created association of research and education, required larger laboratories with larger masses of equipment. There was no alternative to a denser, more encompassing organization of scientific activity.

These changes in the techniques of scholarship and science coincided with the growth of national wealth and a new development in the attitudes of governments toward university education and toward the scholarly and scientific studies pursued within them. Governments responded munificently to these changes, as did wealthy private persons and the foundations established by them (particularly in the United States). The combination of the increased number of students to be looked after, of buildings, books, and equipment to be procured and cared for, and of scientists and scholars (who were also teachers) to be paid made more organization and control inevitable.

Patterns of demand

As long as rulers were concerned only with their own glory and that of the state, intellectual performance could be left to those with intellectual propensities and the culture necessary to express them. The works of genius could only be the product of those with strong and intensive intellectual propensities. Patronage, court employment, official sinecures, and ecclesiastical livings could suffice for those whose inherited wealth was too meager to maintain them and who could not gain a livelihood through their activities as university teachers, painters and sculptors on commission, theatrical managers, soldiers, and diplomats. Genius and the glory which it brought were what counted—alongside of flattery—and numbers were not especially significant.

When, however, intellectual performance came to be associated with the strength of the state and its internal order and, later, with the physical and mental well-being of the large mass of the people, random and irregular patronage was not able to meet the new demand. The numbers of intellectuals demanded were too great, and the results of the predominant modes of recruitment, which depended on strong and intense intellectual propensity and the accidents of inheritance and patronage, were too uncertain. This vastly increased demand entailed an organized pattern of training and a certification of accomplishment. Intellectual accomplishment in reception and reproduction had to be standardized so that the users in the “practical” sphere—in commerce and industry, education, the civil service, and the judiciary—would be assured that their recruits were reliable.

However, in those spheres of intellectual life which did not obviously contribute to the strength and order of the state and the physical well-being of society and in which the product of intellectual activity was an artifact which could be judged by its consumer, intellectual propensity could still be relied upon. There was no need for certification; the product—a novel, a poem, a painting, or a statue—carried its own certification, in the response of its consumer or recipient, who was assisted increasingly by critics without official status. Self-recruitment could therefore dominate. The arts thus remained the sector of intellectual life in which a free-lance structure could persist. This is at least the way in which things have happened in countries which, in principle or in fact, permitted freedom of intellectual production.

Where the glory of the state required organized and costly parks and buildings, architectural education and practice and schools of painting and sculpture underwent the process of organization and control which the provision of personnel for the intellectual-practical skills (for the civil service, education, law, and so forth) had established. Painting and sculpture have not, however, been subject to the same degree of organization as architecture, partly because of the continuing private demand for paintings and sculptures. This has freed painters and sculptors from the degree of subjection to authority to which engineers and architects, as performers of intellectual-practical activities, have had to submit.

In some states, however, the arts have not been regarded primarily as sources of glory for rulers and of private satisfaction for individual citizens; rather, intellectual activity in the arts has been, and is, regarded as a factor in public order and in the strength and fame of the state. As a result, artistic activities have been subjected to processes of organization and control so that output can be guaranteed or certified. However, since in this sphere quantity is recognized to be less important than quality, more attention is paid to distribution than to production of works of art. Censorship through the control of access to a public audience is the mode of organization found appropriate when intellectual actions, including artistic action, are seen as factors in the maintenance of public order and the security of rulers. But even in countries which take this view, the free-lance principle of support is allowed to predominate within the limits set by censorship, since the belief still prevails that works of art are to a much greater extent the products of intellectual propensity than are the works accomplished in the intellectual-practical professions (the same is true of pure science).

Tradition and creativity

All intellectual actions, however great the genius of their performers, are shaped within a context of tradition. The relationships between intellectual actions and tradition vary in the degree of compellingness and immediacy. In the pattern of scientific work, it is the latest manifestation of the tradition which serves as the point of departure for any particular work of research. The remoter points in the stream of tradition are respected for having set the path for subsequent work, and particular figures are respected not only for their specific accomplishments but for the general tone or ethos which infused their work and which inspires subsequent research workers even at a distance of several centuries. But it is the latest point reached by the tradition which is decisive for the research scientist; it is the latest work which offers both authority and challenge. There is little choice of the tradition to which a research worker must submit; once his problem is chosen, the tradition which he confronts can no longer be chosen. It is there!

This is why scientific research must rest on such a disciplined mastery of what has been accomplished in “the literature.” This is the reason, too, why training and certification can be standardized. This relationship to tradition lends itself readily to class instruction, textbooks, and examinations.

In contrast, certain fields of intellectual activity, such as philosophy, literature, and painting, have no such inevitable subjection to the immediate past. They are freer to turn wholly against it—although very few do—and to choose more usefully or more selectively from the wide variety of traditions and models which have been effective in the course of the development of their respective subjects. Whereas a scientist who rejects much of a current tradition must confront it and respond to it, a writer or painter need not do so. Although most writers and painters do in fact use the currently received tradition as their platform, they need not do so, and they may do so as selectively as they wish. Their divergence from the current pattern is noted, but they will not be censured for it. At least there is no binding consensus that they should do justice to the tradition of the last moment. There is no necessary orthodoxy in literature and art such as there is in science. Thus, whereas it is not a defect in a scientist or scholar to be “academic”—indeed, it is the precondition of his originality—there is no comparable obligation on the part of a literary man or a painter to be academic.

The traditions which govern the life of the intellectual stratum may be divided into the substantive traditions of the special fields of intellectual activity, such as the traditions of psychology, physics, or literature, and their subordinate or technical traditions, such as those concerned with the study of vision, low-temperature physics, or the short story. These traditions contain the results of past accomplishments. The merit of any intellectual performance is assessed by the degree to which it has mastered the inherited tradition and gone beyond it. (The transcendence of tradition as an element in accomplishment is a modern conception; prior to the formation of the romantic conception of genius the merit of an intellectual work was considered to lie in the degree to which it approximated the model offered by tradition. This assessment was in fact an assessment of originality as well as of conformity. It was a creative conformity.)

Intellectual traditions and social authority

Training in intellectual work has two goals: the mastery of both the articulated and promulgated substance and the techniques offered by tradition, and the development of tacit expertise which is the assimilation of the unarticulated spirit of what the tradition offers so that one can transcend and transform traditions while still adhering to them.

Assessment of degree of success in the attainment of these two goals, which stand in such a paradoxical relationship within the larger paradox of tradition and creativity, is one major task of the institutional system of intellectual life, along with the tasks of recruiting, training, facilitating production, and communicating results. The assessment of persons and works is necessary for maintaining traditions of the highest achievement in a given field of intellectual work and for fostering innovation which is not arbitrary and which respects the substance of the tradition even when rejecting it. Among the chief institutions of assessment are examining bodies, appointments committees, the editorial staffs of periodicals, publishing houses, patronage (grants) and prize-awarding bodies, the reviewing sections of periodicals and newspapers, and the selection committees of museums.

In fields of intellectual action in which the insistence on the observance of the latest tradition as a precondition for its transcendence and transformation is great, the institutions of assessment are highly integrated, functioning as a single system, both nationally and internationally. The institutions of assessment themselves, especially at the peaks of the hierarchy, maintain a universally acknowledged standard. The decisions at the peak are acknowledged as valid by a practically world-wide consensus of those who have themselves passed successfully through the machinery of recruitment, training, and assessment. The mediocrities are relegated to the lesser institutions, and failures drop to the bottom or are forced to leave the field. Within each field in which everyone is nominally equal, there is in fact an aristocracy, which is largely an aristocracy of contemporaneous accomplishment but which is also, in small part at least, an aristocracy of particularistic institutional affiliation. (Persons at institutions which are acknowledged to be the richest in accomplishment are, simply by virtue of that fact, carried along and accorded some measure of precedence.) As a result of the operation of the institutions of assessment, certain works and the persons who have produced these works are promoted to the center of attention of those who work on the same or related subjects. Their accomplishments constitute and present the highest and most immediate form of the tradition which must be universally acknowledged and confronted.

The situation is somewhat different in those fields of intellectual action in which there is more self-recruitment, in which training is more a matter of self-discipline than of ordered institutional pressure, and in which the relevant traditions may be more freely chosen. In such fields there is a less far-reaching and less compelling consensus. Although each field has a dominant tradition, each also comprises divergent traditions which have their adherents within and across national boundaries. These diverse traditions have their own institutions of assessment (publishing houses, bookshops, magazines, museums, and galleries) and their own informal circles (friendships and acquaintanceships centered on salons, cafes, etc.), which nurture the particular tradition and make their assessments in its light. The traditions which are asserted in these acts of assessment are the vital substance of the life of the intellectual stratum. They comprise the standards and rules which guide the striving for accomplishment, and the substantive beliefs and symbols which constitute the heritage of valid accomplishment.

It should be emphasized that these traditions are not maintained simply by the authoritativeness of the institutions of assessment and of the body of accomplishment on behalf of which they act. The vitality of these traditions is sustained by the passionate propensity of the “natural” intellectual to be in contact with symbols of general scope. They are traditions which are, so to speak, given by the nature of intellectual work. They are the immanent traditions of intellectual performance, the accepted body of rules of procedure, standards of judgment, criteria for the selection of subject matters and problems, modes of presentation, canons for the assessment of excellence, and models of previous accomplishment and prospective emulation. Every field of intellectual performance, more than any other craft or profession possessing a long and acknowledged accumulation of accomplishments, has such a cultural tradition, which is always being added to and modified, although at varying rates. Without the tradition which is called scientific method in each particular field of science and scholarship and which is called technique in the fields of literary creation and the plastic and other arts, even the greatest and most creative geniuses could not be effective. Colleges and universities, scientific, scholarly, and artistic journals, museums, galleries—in short the whole system of intellectual institutions—function to select those who are qualified to work within these traditions and to train those who are selected in their appreciation, application, and development. Even the most creative and rapidly developing domains of intellectual performance could disregard these traditions only with very great loss.

Secondary traditions have prevailed for a very long time in the intellectual strata of most societies with a written corpus of intellectual works and with specialized intellectuals. These secondary traditions are in a sense marginal to actual intellectual work, but their relation to intense intellectual action is not wholly accidental. The vital substantive and technical traditions of intellectual work seem to entail a measure of tension between themselves and the laity. Although this tension is not constitutive of intellectual work, it seems to be a necessary by-product. The values inherent in these vital traditions are remote from the practical routines of daily life, from the pleasures of the ordinary man, and from the obligations, compromises, and corruptions of those who exercise commanding authority in church, state, economy, and army. Thus, the very intensity and concentration of commitment required by the vital traditions of intellectual life dispose intellectuals to feel some sense of a distance separating the intellectual from the routine and practical.

Intellectual action arose out of religious preoccupations. In the early history of the human race it tended in its concern with the ultimate, or at least with what lies beyond the immediate concrete experience, to operate with religious symbols. Intellectual action of the most intense kind continues to share with genuine religious experience the fascination with the sacred, or the ultimate ground of thought and experience, and the aspiration to enter into intimate contact with it. In secular intellectual work this concern involves the search for the truth, for the principles embedded in events and actions and for the establishment of a relationship between the empirical self and the “essential,” whether the relationship be cognitive, appreciative, or expressive. It is therefore no stretching of the term “religion” to say that science and philosophy, even though they are not religious in a conventional sense, are as concerned with the sacred as religion itself.

Thus, it may be said that a tradition of awesome respect and of serious striving for contact with the sacred underlies the vital intellectual traditions and the actions which carry them forward. This is perhaps the first, the most comprehensive, and the most important of all the traditions of the intellectuals. In the great religious cultures of Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism, prior to the emergence of a differentiated modern intellectual stratum, the care of the sacred through the mastery, interpretation, and exposition of sacred writings, as well as the cultivation of the appropriate mental states or qualities, were the prime interests of intellectuals. (In China a class of Confucian intellectuals in the civil service produced its own tradition, more civil and aesthetic than religious in the conventional sense.) In the West, too, in antiquity, a substantial number of the philosophical intellectuals bore this tradition of concern with the sacred, and on the higher reaches even those who cut themselves off from the tribal and territorial religions continued to be impelled by such considerations (e.g., Pythagoras, Euclid, Ptolemy, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Lucretius, Seneca). Although religious orientations attract a diminishing share of the creative capacities of the elite of the intellectual stratum in modern times, they still remain a major preoccupation of a substantial fraction of the educated classes and of the most creative minds.

With this striving for contact with the ultimately important comes the self-esteem which always accompanies the performance of important activities. Anyone who tries to understand the traditions of the central part of the intellectual stratum and their relations with the authorities who rule the other spheres of society at any given time must bear in mind the crucial significance of the self-regard which comes from preoccupation and contact with the most vital facts of human and cosmic existence, as well as the implied attitude of derogation toward those who act in more mundane or more routine capacities. Naturally this sentiment is not shared equally by all intellectuals. Not all are equally involved in these “vital facts” and therefore not all have the same sense of the dignity of their activities.

When intellectuals ceased to be primarily religious intellectuals or when they ceased to share the prevailing religious orthodoxy, the very act of separation, even where gradual and undeliberate, set up a tension between the intellectuals and the religious authority of their society. Moreover, where the religious authority had close ties with the civil authority, as was often the case, tension between the deviant intellectuals and the civil authorities was aggravated. Ecclesiastical authority became an object of the distrust of some of the most intense and creative intellectuals, and insofar as the civil authorities associated themselves with the religious powers, they too shared in that skepticism. This attitude has not by any means been universal, nor has the distrust always been aggressive. Confucian civil servants, disdainful of Taoism or Buddhism, did not become rebels against their sovereigns as long as they themselves were treated respectfully. In the West, where the separation of religious and other intellectual activities has become most pronounced, a more general feeling of distance from authority has been engendered and has become one of the strongest of the secondary traditions of the intellectuals. It happened first in the West and then, in the present century, in Africa and Asia among intellectuals who have come under the influence of Western traditions.

This attitude is not an integral part of intellectual work, except in political philosophy and the fields related to it, but it has nonetheless found very wide acceptance among those who do intellectual work. It is, moreover, the matrix from which a number of other important secondary traditions have grown. The tension between the intellectuals and the authorities stems from the intellectuals’ urge to locate and acknowledge an authority which is the bearer of the highest good, whether it be science, order, progress, or some other value, and to resist or condemn actual authority as a betrayer of the highest values. In other words, this tension comes from the vital tradition of the intellectual stratum which propels it toward the discovery and expression of what is “ultimately” true and thus “sacred.” Practically all of the more concrete traditions in the light and shadows of which intellectuals have lived embody this tension. These secondary traditions which, however diverse in their age and origin, have played a great part in forming the relations of the modern intellectuals to authority are: the tradition of scientism; the romantic tradition; the apocalyptic tradition; the populistic tradition; and the anti-intellectual tradition of order.

All of these traditions are in conflict with other traditions of deference toward ecclesiastical and temporal authorities and the expectation of a career in their service. Even in those modern cultures in which a tradition of acceptance of legitimate civil and ecclesiastic authorities by the intellectual stratum is strongest, as in modern Britain and modern Germany, it has by no means had the field to itself. More recently, antiauthoritarian secondary traditions have found a widespread and enthusiastic reception in Asia, where devotion to the prevailing religious values and service to temporal authority have always had a powerful hold.

Scientism. The tradition of scientism denies the validity of tradition as such. It insists on the testing of everything which is received and on its rejection if it does not correspond with the “facts of experience.” It is the tradition which demands the avoidance of every extraneous impediment to the precise perception of reality, regardless of whether that impediment comes from tradition, institutional authority, or internal passion or impulse. It is critical of the arbitrary and the irrational. In its emphasis on the indispensability of first-hand and direct experience, it sets itself in opposition to everything which comes between the mind of the knowing individual and “reality.” It is easy to see how social convention and the traditional authority associated with institutions would fall prey to the ravages of this powerfully persuasive tradition, which tends to corrode competing traditions.

Romanticism

The romantic tradition appears at first sight to be in irreconcilable opposition to the tradition of scientism. At certain points, such as the estimation of the value of impulse and passion, there is a real and unbridgeable antagonism. In many important respects, however, they share fundamental features. Romanticism starts with the appreciation of the spontaneous manifestations of the essence of concrete individuality. Hence, it values originality, that is, the novel, that which is produced by the genius of the individual (or the folk) in contrast with the stereotyped and tradition-bound actions of the philistine. Since ratiocination and detachment obstruct spontaneous expression, they are thought to be life-destroying. Institutions, which have rules and which prescribe the conduct of the indivdual members by conventions and commands, are likewise viewed as life-destroying. The bourgeois family, mercantile activity, the market—indeed, civil society in general, with its curb on enthusiasm and its sober acceptance of obligation —are repugnant to the romantic tradition; all are regarded as the enemies of spontaneity and genuineness, since they impose a role on the individual and do not permit him to be himself. They also kill what is really “living” in the folk, that is, the spontaneous and undeliberate. Civil society is thought to have no place for the intellectual, who thus becomes afflicted with a sense of his moral solitude within it: moral solitude is viewed as the “natural condition” of the spontaneous individuality in a society of philistines living a routine existence. The affinities of the romantic tradition to the revolutionary criticism of the established order and to the bohemian refusal to have more part in that order than is absolutely necessary are obvious. The romantic tradition is one of the most explosively antiauthoritarian, and even anticivil, powers of modern intellectual life.

Revolution

The revolutionary tradition, which has found so many of its leading recipients and exponents in the intellectual stratum, has drawn much from scientism and romanticism, but essentially it rests on one, much older tradition, namely the apocalyptic, or millenarian, tradition. The belief that the evil world as we know it, so full of temptation and corruption, will come to an end one day and will be replaced by a purer and better world originates in the apocalyptic outlook of the prophets of the Old Testament. It is promulgated in the Christian idea of the kingdom of God, which the earlier Christians expected in their own time, and it persists into the present; the revolutionary tradition itself is hidden by the efforts of the church but recurrently appears on the surface of history in the teaching and action of heretical sects. The apocalyptic tradition received a powerful impetus from Manicheanism. In the Donatists, the Bogomils, the Albigensians and Waldensians, the Hussites and Lollards, the Anabaptists, and the Fifth Monarchy Men, this tradition has lived on. It has come down to our own times in a transmuted form. Although the apocalyptic outlook still exists in its religious form among numerous Christian, quasi-Christian, and non-Christian sects in Europe, America, Asia, and Africa, its intellectually most important recipients are the modern revolutionary movements, especially the Marxian movements. (Marxian writers of the early part of this century acknowledged the Anabaptists, the Fifth Monarchy Men, the Levellers, and the Diggers as their forerunners, and although the Bolsheviks have been less willing to admit Russian sectarianism as an antecedent, it is probable that the Russian sectarian image of the world and its cataclysmic future made it easier for the Marxian conception of society and its historical destiny to find acceptance in Russia.) The disposition to distinguish sharply between good and evil and to refuse to permit any admixture, the insistence that justice be done though the heavens fall, the obstinate refusal to compromise or to tolerate compromise—all the features of doctrinaire politics, or the politics of the ideal—which are common to many modern intellectuals, must be attributed in some measure at least to the revolutionary tradition.

Populism

Another tradition which has moved nearly all intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is the populistic tradition. Populism, which is partly an offspring of the romantic tradition, is a belief in the creativity and the superior moral worth of the ordinary people, of the uneducated and unintellectual; it perceives virtue in their actual qualities or in their potentialities. In the simplicity and wisdom of the ways of the ordinary people, the populist tradition alleges that it has discerned virtues which are morally superior to those found in the educated and in the higher social classes. Even where, as in Marxism, the actual state of the lower classes is not esteemed, they are alleged to be fitted by destiny to become the salvationary nucleus of their whole society. Elements of the populistic disposition are manifested in romanticism, with its distrust of the rational and calculating elements in bourgeois society; in revolutionism, with its hatred of the upper classes as the agents of wicked authority; and in the apocalyptic attitude, which sees the last coming first and which alleges that official learning (religious and secular) has falsified the truths which the Last Judgment and the leap into freedom will validate. German historical and philological scholarship in the nineteenth century, imbued with the romantic hatred of the rational, the economic, and the analytic spirit, which it castigated as the source and product of the whole rationalistic trend of western European culture, discovered in the nameless masses, the folk, the fountain of linguistic and cultural creativity. French socialism went a step further, and Marxism elevated this essentially romantic outlook into a systematic, “scientific” theory.

In all countries peripheral to the most creative centers of Western culture at the height of its hegemony over the modern mind, intellectuals were both fascinated and rendered uneasy by the culture of western Europe. Not only in early nineteenth-century Germany, but in Russia of the 1850s, in the middlewestern United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in Brazil (in the doctrine of “Indianismo”), in the resentful and embittered aesthetic “left” and romantic “right” of the Weimar Republic, in India since the ascendancy of Gandhi, and in the emerging intellectual strata of the new countries of Africa, populistic tendencies have been massively at work.

In the newly sovereign countries of Asia and Africa the intellectuals have been educated either in foreign countries or in institutions within their own countries modeled after those at the center of the culture they have sought to emulate. In all these countries the intellectuals have developed anxiety about whether they have not allowed themselves to be corrupted by excessive permeation with the admired foreign culture. To identify themselves with “the people”—that is, to praise the culture of the ordinary man as richer, truer, wiser, and more relevant than the foreign culture in which they had themselves been educated—has been a way out of this distress. In most cases this development is a protest against the “official” culture, the culture of the higher civil servants and of the universities. As such, it has fused easily with the other traditions hostile to civil institutions and civil authority.

Order

Closely connected with the traditions discussed above and yet apparently a negation of them is the anti-intellectual tradition of order. Here, order is understood as a perfect integration of society under a powerful authority, in accordance with which each individual has a prefixed status and role. Best known in the West in the form of French positivism (as in the work of Saint-Simon and Comte), the anti-intellectual tradition has its roots in antiquity and in the belief that excessive intellectual analysis and discussion can disrupt the foundations of social order. Evidence of an ambivalence in the traditional antiauthoritarianism of intellectuals is afforded by Plato’s attitude toward poets, the burning of the books by the repentant Confucian Li Ssu at the origin of the Ch’in dynasty, Hobbes’s analysis of the role of intellectuals in bringing about the English civil war, Taine’s interpretation of the significance of the philosophes in bringing on the French Revolution of 1789, and the ideas of Joseph de Maistre and of the French “right” since his time. It should be noted that this anti-intellectual tradition of order is also usually hostile to civil authority, which it regards as ineffectual wherever such authority permits some measure of intellectual freedom. It is not antagonistic toward all intellectuals but only toward those who are “critical” and whose criticism is an instigation to the disruption of “order.”

Since these secondary traditions are all hostile to civil authority, they are not supported by the type of institutional system which is directed to the meeting of those “needs” (for intellectual-practical services) which authority regards as legitimate. The continuance of these secondary traditions rests in part, therefore, on their attractiveness to persons of strongly intellectual propensities. They also depend on dissensual institutions; for example, political and religious sects often develop their own sets of intellectual institutions—schools, publishing houses, bookshops, periodicals, and circles. These secondary traditions depend, too, on a continuing self-renewal at the peripheries of such central cultural institutions as universities, research institutions, and the more civil political parties. They are maintained there by dissidents from the prevailing outlook among the elders, as well as by the more sensitive, less routinizable sectors of the oncoming generation. Student “movements” are important sources of recruits.

However, the life of these secondary traditions depends, above all, on the literature which the great figures of these traditions have created. Much of this literature forms part of the intellectual tradition which the more highly organized intellectual institutions cultivate as part of their task of training recruits for intellectual and intellectual-practical actions. However, since the secondary traditions themselves are not cultivated by the organized intellectual institutions, the transmission of these traditions and their institutions of assessment tends to be fragmentary and discontinuous. The intellectual institutional system of the secondary traditions resembles the institutional system which provides those intellectual products for which there is no institutionalized “demand.” This structural affinity is supported by the greater responsiveness to these secondary traditions among those who produce literary and artistic works. Bohemia is thus the common hearth of literary and artistic production and consumption and of the reception and cultivation of the secondary traditions.

Nonetheless, the intellectual stratum lives in society, even though professional necessities and tastes tend to segregate intellectuals in terms of places of work and centers of conviviality. Although the intellectual stratum in modern societies is mainly of middle-class origin and in earlier societies was largely of upper-class origin, it is not self-reproducing. Intellectuals grow up in families and in schools in which they come to share the wider and less intellectual culture of their society. Moreover, given the strong attraction which authority has for intellectuals, their awareness of an authority which rules their society gives them some sense of affinity with the rest of that society. Intellectuals are usually patriots, and the frequent “antipatriotism” of some sectors of the intellectual stratum is, in fact, merely an inverted manifestation of their patriotism. More than most of their fellow countrymen, they feel the falling away of their country from perfection.

The functions of intellectuals

The most obvious function of intellectual action is the production of intellectual works which are added to the tradition or stock of intellectual works —the “high culture”—available to their society. Intellectuals also carry on, elaborate, and modify the tradition of beliefs about various sectors of the universe; they transmit to the next generations of intellectuals those fundamental dispositions, tastes, and modes of apprehending reality which cannot be readily articulated and codified and which cannot be transmitted except by prolonged and intimate interaction.

Creating and diffusing high culture

The creation and development of this high culture is the primary function of the intellectuals whose productiveness stems from an inner intellectual propensity. Their propensities are directed toward intellectual tasks set largely by intellectual traditions but also by the conditions of their society. Primary intellectual production has its own autonomy: it works on what is offered by its traditions, seeking to improve, refine, correct, and transform these traditions in the form of new works. Where creativity and originality are emphatically acknowledged and prized and where innovation is admitted and accepted, this function is perceived as a primary obligation of intellectuals. Even in traditional societies, in which individual creativity has not been seen as having positive value, the labor of powerful minds and irrepressible individualities on what has been received from the past has modified that heritage and has adapted it to meet new tasks and to overcome hitherto unmastered, or perhaps even unnoticed, obstacles. In this process of elaboration, divergent potentialities of the system of cultural values have been made explicit, and conflicting positions have been established. Each generation of intellectuals performs this elaborating function for its own and the next succeeding generations.

Only a very small proportion of the works produced in a society within a given generation represents significantly novel and valuable additions to the cultural stock. Many are reproductive of earlier innovations, and many are done at a low level of proficiency. (The hierarchies of individual intellectuals and of intellectual institutions correspond to hierarchies of originality and individuality of intellectual works.) Most of the productive intellectuals of any generation are also reproductive, although in unequal degrees. The most original of them therefore perform a twofold function in the creation and extension of high culture. First and most important, they create new and valuable works as such; second, they guide, by providing models for emulation, the large substratum of reproductive intellectuals, who in turn diffuse, in modified form, the patterns of procedure and belief of the most creative workers in their respective fields.

The relationship between the productive and the reproductive is not, however, simply a matter of diffusion. In some fields the reproductive stratum often tends to be more attached to past models of creative intellectual works than to the newly created ones. This is particularly true where there is a highly institutionalized system of transmission of intellectual traditions, as a result of which many persons with relatively feeble intellectual propensities of their own acquire a quite considerable obsolescent intellectual culture. Even where there is not an active attack on creative innovations, the sheer persistence of this attachment to past patterns restricts the speed of diffusion of the new beliefs. In other fields, where training is less organized and the institutions which do the training are less authoritative in their assessments and their control over promotion (as in literature), innovations are likely to find a speedier reproduction mong some intellectuals and a less enduring resistance among other intellectuals. In such fields, however, the dissensus between the devotees and the opponents of tradition is greater.

In fields of scientific research the unification of the intranational system leaves only the lower fringes of the reproductive stratum (e.g., school science) untouched by important innovations. In other fields that are less compellingly consensual in the assessment of accomplishments, more obdurate resistance and even aggressively dissensual counterattacks against creative innovations are almost endemic in the nature of the things in question.

Providing national and cross-national models

The primary intellectual function of the production of new additions to the high culture of a society is performed not only for other intellectuals of that society but for the intellectuals of other societies as well. Just as there is a roughly defined hierarchy of intellectuals for each category of intellectual action and to a lesser extent for much of the intellectual stratum as a whole, so there is a hierarchy, even more roughly delineated, among the intellectuals of different societies. When similar genres of intellectual action are performed in different societies, there is a tendency toward a universalization of standards of assessment of intellectual accomplishments. In the Middle Ages and in early modern times the Indian intellectuals performed this function for southeast Asia. The intellectuals of republican and imperial Rome looked up to, and learned from, Greek intellectuals. For a time Chinese intellectuals performed this function for Japan. In modern times the British intellectuals of Oxford, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics have provided the model for intellectuals of India and Africa. Nineteenth-century German academic intellectuals provided a world-wide model, just as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries French artistic and literary intellectuals have provided models of development for aesthetically sensitive intellectuals all over the civilized world. In the eighteenth century the intellectuals of the French Enlightenment inspired their confreres in Spain, Italy, Prussia, and Russia. Positions in the hierarchy shift. Centers lose their pre-eminence; new centers emerge either to share pre-eminence with the older centers or to displace them.

The function of providing a model for primary intellectual production within and among societies implies the attribution of universal validity to the criterion of superior quality of accomplishment. The pattern of action of a certain group of intellectuals comes to be regarded as exemplary, because it is thought to correspond more closely to certain ideal requirements of truth, beauty, or virtue. Such standards are never the objects of complete consensus, least of all in the fields of expressive intellectual action. But they are often accepted over very extensive areas of the world at any given time; this is the situation of scientific knowledge in the world today.

Developing common cultures

The hierarchies of creative intellectuals, of metropolitan and provincial intellectuals, have a parallel in the hierarchy of high and common cultures. The term “common culture” refers to the moral unity of a society. Since most societies are too large, in terms of territory and population, to be united through kinship connection and firsthand experience, the development of a common culture ordinarily depends on reproductive intellectual institutions such as schools, churches, and newspapers. Through these intellectual institutions ordinary persons become aware of each other’s existence as members of the same society. A sense of identity and of membership in a society is formed thereby, and content is given to the symbolism of the national society. Moreover, through these reproductive intellectual institutions children and adults enter into some degree of contact with the custodians and exponents of the beliefs espoused by the central institutional system. By means of preaching, teaching, and writing, reproductive intellectuals infuse into those sections of the population which are intellectual neither by propensity nor by role beliefs which they would otherwise lack. By the provision of such techniques as reading, writing, and calculation they enable the laity to enter into a wider universe. The creation of nations out of tribal, village, and regional cultures in early modern times in Europe and in contemporary Asia and Africa is the work of teachers, authors, agitators, and journalists, just as the formation of the American nation out of diverse ethnic groups is the achievement of teachers, clergymen, and journalists.

The establishment of relatively unitary societies in modern times has not been a product only of the transmission and reception of a minimal common culture; it has owed much to “practical” power-exercising actions. The legitimation of a reigning authority results, to some extent, from the effectiveness of the incumbent authority in maintaining order, in showing strength, and in dispensing a semblance of justice. But these practical activities, especially at the peaks of the hierarchies which performed them, have had intellectual components and have often been done by intellectuals, even by productive intellectuals (e.g., John Locke at the Board of Trade, Isaac Newton at the Mint). Thus, the apparently nonintellectual exercise of power has proceeded through institutions which were not infrequently manned by intellectuals. The legitimacy of authority is, moreover, a matter of beliefs; beliefs about authority, even in societies less educated than the advanced societies of the present day, are far from resting entirely on firsthand experience and observation of the efficacy of authority. Much of what is believed beyond firsthand experience is in the form of received traditions into which have entered and accumulated, alongside of other elements, the beliefs promulgated by productive intellectuals over extended periods in the past.

Influencing social change

By providing models and standards and through the presentation of symbols to be appreciated, productive and reproductive intellectuals elicit, guide, and form the expressive dispositions within a society. However, this is not to say that the expressive life of a society is under the exclusive dominion of its intellectuals. Indeed, the situation has never existed (and in fact could never exist) in which the expressive life of a society—its aesthetic tastes, its artistic creations, or the ultimately aesthetic grounds of its ethical judgments—fell entirely within the traditions espoused by the intellectuals of the society. Societies vary in the extent to which the expressive actions and orientations are consensual with what is taught and represented by the dominant “primary-productive” intellectuals. In modern societies there is certainly too much diversity in expressive intellectual practices and too much dissensus in beliefs about these practices among expressive intellectual producers for such a consensus of producers, reproducers, and recipients to exist. Nonetheless, despite these variations it is true that much of the expressive life of a society, even what is most vulgar and tasteless, echoes some of the expressive practices and beliefs of intellectuals.

Thus, the degree of intellectual consensus in a society can never be great, not only because of the dissensus among the primary producers but because of temporal stratification and other types of dissensus in the intellectual attachments of the reproductive intellectuals. The quite different social situations of the recipients of high culture, the extreme discrepancies in educational preparation and receptive capacity, class attachments and resentments, regional attachments and resistances, generational antagonisms, and the continuation of autonomous cultural traditions in the mass of the society all work against the possibility of a far-reaching intellectual consensus in society. Nevertheless, some consensus does exist, and some common cultures exist in countries which have been sovereign and have therefore had their own autonomous central institutional and cultural systems for a long time. In the creation of this common culture, an important part is played by the intellectual works of generation after generation of primary-productive intellectuals.

The process of elaborating and developing further the potentialities inherent in a system of beliefs entails some degree of rejecton of the inherited tradition. In all societies, even those in which the intellectual elite are notable for their conservatism, the diverse paths of creativity and the tradition of antitraditionality impel a partial rejection of the prevailing system of cultural values. The range of rejection of the inherited varies greatly; it can never be complete and all-embracing. Even where the rejecting intellectuals allege that they are “nihilistic” with respect to everything that is inherited, complete repudiation without physical self-annihilation is impossible. The act of rejection practically always is an act of observance and development of an alternative stream of tradition, sometimes one which has been buried for a long time. Without a genius and his works, acts of rejection among reproductive intellectuals cannot create a new tradition or revive a forgotten one. The power of recent and present creativity is too great to resist.

The inherent potentialities of any high intellectual tradition for divergent interpretations are potentialities of conflict within the intellectual stratum, both in the intellectual elite and at the lower levels of creativity and productivity. In the domains of scientific and scholarly research the modes of conflict, which in the course of time produce changes in the content and shape of consensus, are subjected to quite strict regulation. The criteria and the institutions of assessment of the contending alternatives are, on the whole, quite firmly established and clearly defined.

It is quite different in the fields of expressive intellectual action. In the middle ground, between scientific research and expressive activity, stands the mode of contention over contemporaneous, or contemporaneously relevant, social, political, and moral phenomena. Here criteria other than the intellectual enter. Attachments to particular patterns of distribution of wealth, income, or deference, to particular modes of organization of authority, and to particular incumbents or classes of incumbents of authoritative roles, play an important part in intellectual contention. These particular attachments are often generalized and subjected to intellectual discipline, but the particularistic elements remain. Through this fusion of particular attachments (and antagonisms) with intellectual traditions, some intellectuals are enabled to influence the movement of the social structure, changes in incumbents of authoritative roles, changes in allocations, etc.

Playing political roles

The affirmation or rejection of the legitimacy of authority is a major preoccupation of every form of intellectual life. It could not be otherwise, since intellectual life could not exist without the authority of tradition—an inherited corpus of works and standards for the production of works of high quality—or without creativity which challenges the authority of tradition. Authority, furthermore, engages the minds of intellectuals, especially those active in primary intellectual production. Involvement in primary intellectual production is a pursuit of the “essential,” the “ultimately right,” and the sacred, and political authority claims a similar involvement on behalf of its legitimacy. What is more, the political elite wants intellectuals. It needs their approbation and their services. However, it is less ready to share the highest authority with them and less eager to hear their criticism of how the nonintellectual ruler conducts himself in office. This is where the conflict centers. Despite the long-standing and recurrent mutual distrust between intellectuals (especially those who share the high and general intellectual culture) and politicians, numerous intellectuals, including some who have been among the greatest of primary producers, have affirmed, accepted, and served the ruling authorities.

Intellectuals attached to the high culture of their institutional systems have played a great historical role on the higher levels of state administration and the judiciary, especially in China, in British and independent India, in the Ottoman Empire, and in modern Europe. (In contrast, in private economic organizations the employment of intellectuals in administrative capacities has for a very long time been uncommon to the point of rarity; neither have intellectuals ever shown any inclination to become business enterprisers. It is only since the nineteenth century that business firms—first in Germany, then in America, and later in other industrialized countries—have taken to the large-scale employment of scientists in research departments and to a much smaller extent in executive capacities. However, the increased importance attributed to industrial research has changed the situation in industry quite markedly in the present century and especially since World War II.) Sovereigns have often considered a high standard of education, either humanistic or technical–legal, confirmed by diplomas and examinations, necessary for the satisfactory functioning of the state. Without the general acceptance of the appropriateness of appointing persons with high intellectual training and culture to administrative posts, the intellectual institutional system as we know it, in which the universities occupy a central place, would never have developed as it has.

Equal in antiquity to the role of the highly educated in state administration is the role of the intellectual as personal agent, counselor, tutor, or friend of the sovereign. Plato’s experience in Syracuse, Aristotle’s relations with Alexander in, Alcuin’s with Charlemagne, Clarendon’s with Charles I, Hobbes’s with Charles n prior to the Restoration, Milton’s with Cromwell, Lord Keynes with the Treasury during and after World War II, the “brain trust” under Franklin Roosevelt, and the circle around President Kennedy represent only a few of numerous instances throughout history in which intellectuals have been drawn into the entourage of rulers and have had their advice and aid sought and their approval valued. On the other hand, there have been many states and periods in which this has not been so. The court of Wilhelm II, for example, drew relatively little on the educated classes of the time; important events in Chinese history can be explained by the intellectuals’ reactions to the rulers’ refusals to draw them into the most intimate and influential circle of counselors. American history from the time of the Jacksonian revolution until the “New Liberalism” of Woodrow Wilson was characterized by the separation of intellectuals from the higher executive and the legislative branches of government.

Intellectuals as the heads of states and governments have been more characteristic of democratic than of monarchical regimes. Intellectuals have emerged occasionally in monarchies at the pinnacles of authority, through sheer accident or at least through no deliberate process of selection. Asoka, Marcus Aurelius, and Ikhnaton are a few such men. In the liberal-democratic party politics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there have been numerous impressive instances of productive intellectuals who have been able, by their own efforts and a widespread appreciation for their gifts of civil politics, to play a notable role in the exercise of great political authority: e.g., Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, Francois Guizot, Woodrow Wilson, Jawaharlal Nehru, Thomas Masaryk, Luigi Einaudi, Amintore Fanfani, Harold Wilson, and Ludwig Erhard. This has not been entirely accidental. For one thing, liberal and constitutional politics in great modern states and democratic and “progressive” nationalist movements in colonial territories have to a large extent been “intellectuals’ politics”—that is, politics vaguely impelled by ideals precipitated into programs.

Indeed, in modern times, first in the West and then, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the peripheries of Western civilization and in the Orient, the major political vocation of the intellectuals has lain in the enunciation and pursuit of the ideal. Modern liberal and constitutional politics have largely been the creation of intellectuals with bourgeois affinities and sympathies who live in societies dominated by military and land-owning aristocracies. This effort has been one major form of the pursuit of the ideal.

Another form of the pursuit of the ideal has been the promulgation and inspiration of ideological politics, that is, revolutionary politics working outside the boundaries of constitutional traditions. Prior to the origins of modern ideological politics, which came into the open with the Reformation, conspiracies, putsches, and the subversion of existing regimes, although they were common and often involved intellectuals, did not manifest any particular affinity between intellectuals and ideological revolutionism. In modern times, however, with the emergence of ideologically dominated political activities as a constitutive part of public life, such an affinity has emerged and is constantly being reinforced by the secondary traditions of the culture of the intellectuals. Its bearers are young persons not yet assimilated into intellectual-practical occupations, bohemian free-lance intellectuals, the educated in underdeveloped countries (the economic and administrative systems of which were not capable of absorbing them), and, occasionally, already well established persons with unusually sensitive moral consciences.

By no means have all intellectuals been equally attracted by ideological politics. Moderation and devotion to the rules of civil politics, quiet and apolitical concentration on specialized intellectual tasks, cynical antipolitical passivity, and faithful acceptance of, and service to, the existing order are all to be found in substantial proportions among modern intellectuals, just as among intellectuals in antiquity. Nonetheless, the function of modern intellectuals in supplying the doctrines and some of the leaders of revolutionary ideological movements is to be considered one of their most important accomplishments.

Edward Shils

[See alsoAcademic Freedom; Censorship; Creativity, article onSocial aspects; Fine arts; Ideology; Knowledge, sociology of; Literature; Organizations, article onOrganizational Intelligence; Professions; Religious Specialists; Science; Universities.]

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Znaniecki, Florian 1940 The Social Role of the Man of Knowledge. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.

intelligentsia Nowadays this term is loosely applied to any educated stratum of society—normally including intellectuals and managers—which has an interest in ideas. Historically, the use of the term has been more restricted, and although its origins are contested they are usually sought in early nineteenth-century Russian and Polish usage. However, as a social category it differed in the two countries, for obvious historical reasons.

Formed from the déclassé elements of major estates in nineteenth-century Russia, the intelligentsia were at first marginally located, between Tsarist autocracy and the peasant masses. Their procedures of inclusion (see CLOSURE) nevertheless borrowed from gentry manners, and later added the imprimatur of educational qualifications, which were superseding military and other credentials. Both attributes tended to cut the stratum off from the bulk of society, towards which they none the less felt they had a mission of responsibility. In the Polish case, it was the maintenance of the national spirit, its intelligens or self-consciousness, during the century of partition where Polish nationhood survived with only a rump state to bolster it, that explains the emergence of this group.

In the absence of an indigenous bourgeoisie in Eastern Europe, and given the role of the state and foreign capital, there emerged complex intelligentsia ethos: of nationalism coupled with a Western orientation, anti-industrialism and emphasis upon cultural and humanistic values, criticism of the state, adherence to the gentry style of life, and criteria of good breeding demanded of the intelligentsia proper. These represented, in the words of one commentator, the ‘universal concomitant of the confrontation of a traditional society with a modern West’. After the advent of communism it was easy to see how, as some commentators have observed, the intelligentsia in its anti-bourgeois, anti-capitalist ethos was compatible with Marxism. However, in the dominated countries of the Soviet bloc, that other feature of the intelligentsia—its sense of mission as a vehicle of national values—served to undermine the communist order.

It is a moot question whether, with the advent of market economies, capitalism will finally transform parts of the intelligentsia into its Western equivalent; namely, a loose category of intellectuals, rather than a solid social stratum. In the West, some critics have argued that the modern salariat or service class, if it tends to closure through self-recruitment and various forms of credentialism, could create a Western intelligentsia, distinguished—by its style of life, sense of status honour, and patterns of intermarriage—from the mass of post-industrial, late-capitalist society.

in·tel·li·gent·si·a / inˌteliˈjentsēə/ • n. (usu. the intelligentsia) [treated as sing. or pl.] intellectuals or highly educated people as a group, esp. when regarded as possessing culture and political influence.

intelligentsia intellectuals or highly educated people as a group, especially when regarded as possessing culture and political influence. The word comes (in the early 20th century) from Russian intelligentsiya, from Polish inteligencja, from Latin intelligentia.

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