Political Concepts Committee on Concepts and Methods Working Paper Series

40 December 2009

What Is an Intellectual?

Rebecka Lettevall
Sdertrn University, Stockholm (rebecka.lettevall@sh.se)

C&M The Committee on Concepts and Methods www.concepts-methods.org IPSA International Political Science Association www.ipsa.org CIDE Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences www.cide.edu

Editor Andreas Schedler (CIDE, Mexico City) Editorial Board Jos Antonio Cheibub, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign David Collier, University of California, Berkeley Michael Coppedge, University of Notre Dame John Gerring, Boston University Russell Hardin, New York University Evelyne Huber, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill James Johnson, University of Rochester Gary King, Harvard University Bernhard Kittel, University of Oldenburg James Mahoney, Brown University Cas Mudde, University of Antwerp Gerardo L. Munck, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Guillermo ODonnell, University of Notre Dame Amy Poteete, Concordia University, Montreal Frederic C. Schaffer, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Ian Shapiro, Yale University Kathleen Thelen, Northwestern University

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It is striking in how many ways the intellectual has been viewed depending on the specific context. In many of the former communist countries, intellectuals played a crucial role in preparing for the social changes taking place around 1989. This was the case in for example Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, where several of what was considered the intellectual elite received top political positions within the new democracies. The importance of intellectuals in these cases occurred in a political and historical situation of corruption and restricted freedom of speech, and over history it has been shown several times that situations of oppression containing hopes for change serve as a fertile ground for a culture of intellectuals. In this context, the intellectual thus becomes a very positive concept. The intellectual has often been a strong force in situations of oppression, and is also in some ways prepared to act in a new political situation as soon as it occurs. But what about the role of the intellectual in politics under other circumstances? This and other questions proved to be very interesting as I started discussing them with scholars and other persons with different social and national backgrounds. As an historian of ideas I already knew that the view of intellectuals in politics had varied quite a bit, depending on the time period as well as the geographical location. My purpose here is to try to clarify some preliminary thoughts on the different values this concept involves in order to see if regarding the concept from different spatial and chronological perspectives might illuminate the view of the intellectuals position today.

The values embedded in the concept of the intellectual cover a broad spectrum, and have not always been as positive as they were in former Eastern Europe. The concept of the intellectual also varies between different languages as well. My intention, however, is not to map this, but rather to give some examples. One way to examine some of the common assumptions regarding a concept is to look up the definition in dictionaries and encyclopaedias. I have done that using some contemporary works. In 1

The American Heritage Dictionary (1992) the term intellectual is given several explanations, of which two are most appropriate here: Intellectual is rational rather than emotional, or an intellectual person. But the intellectual person is not given any further definition in this text.

According to Websters (1998) an intellectual is a person who does intellectual work or a member of the intelligentsia. The intelligentsia are the people regarded as, or regarding themselves as, the intellectual or learned class. Leaving the English dictionaries, another definition is to be found in the German Duden (1992). In this work, Intellektuell is einseitig, betont verstandesmssig, auf den intellekt ausgereichtet.. The plural form Intellektuelle seems to be more neutral; it refers to a person who works with geistig Arbeit und ist gebildet. In the Swedish Nationalencyklopedin (1994), the intellectual is defined as a person who tries to change societal development through his or her ideas. Using a narrow definition, the intellectual has to be a person who is free from his or her own interests, while an intellectual in a broader sense is involved in social groups such as researchers, writers, teachers priests, etc, i.e. groups that more or less create or distribute knowledge, values and attitudes.

In several of these definitions there tends to be a slightly negative attitude towards the intellectual. The rationality of the intellectual seems to bring some complications. Rationality seems to be the absolute opposite of such qualities as emotions, feelings and practical experience. It seems to be cold steel versus flourishing gardens. Is the intellectual one-sided and cold?

The idea of the intellectual has a long history. For Plato as well as for Aristotle, it was totally non-controversial that society should receive its good ideas and analyses from 2

a well-educated elite group of men. But the intellectual in politics as it is considered today has its root in the Enlightenment, rather than in ancient Greece, and in the emergence of a public sphere. Several of the Enlightenment thinkers intellectually criticized the political order and their ideas became influential, not least because of the public sphere. This was the case especially in France, with philosophers such as Voltaire criticizing most societal institutions, manners and habits, including severe criticism against religion and its representatives. His struggle for freedom of speech, justice and toleration are still of extreme importance today. One of his important engagements was the defence of Jean Calas, who had been innocently condemned by the Catholic Church. It was this condition that made Voltaire emit his famous words crasez linfme! (Crush the infamy!). He constantly wrote and argued through his plays, philosophical poems, and essays as well as through his intense and voluminous correspondence. According to Voltaire, reason could provide the solution as to how to make the world a better place. This type of thinking has been very influential and has paved the road for modernity, modern civilization and scientific thinking, including its promotion of such activities as social engineering.

Another example of an intellectual involved in politics in the Enlightenment comes from an intellectual giant who did not see politics as his primal concern. Even if Immanuel Kants (1724-1804) primal interest, or at least influence, might have been in metaphysics and theory of knowledge, he was very engaged in questions of society and peoples way of living together, their unsocial sociability (ungesellige geselligheit). As a consequence of this interest, he wanted to organize society in such a way as to make it more suitable for a development of human reason, or rather to create the most propitious circumstances for mankinds use of reason. As this involved a sketch of an organizational model of society in republics and a federation in order to make it possible to reach a perpetual peace, he became quite involved in 3

political discussions in his later years. His theory has been criticized as well as praised. It has been claimed that his model helped to form the organization of states and international collaboration, as well as influencing the development of political science.1 It has also been claimed that he has neglected the experienced life of persons in other situations than himself. The non-educated, the non-male and the nonEuropean do not seem to have an important role in his society.

Conceptually, the word intellectual was used for the first time, in a positive sense, in connection with the Dreyfus affair, when the French writer mile Zola wrote a letter of protest first published in the journal LAurore in 1898. He was protesting against a corrupt legal system in a case where a Jewish officer had been found guilty by the president of France for high treason.2 Intellectuals are still viewed as mainly positive in contemporary France. They prove to be intelligent and to be reflective. Besides, their history starts with the Renaissance humanism.3

It is very possible that the influential criticism of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno as presented in the Dialectics of Enlightenment (1947), has also had an impact of the criticism of the role of the intellectual. Now, the criticism of Horkheimer and Adorno is very multilayered, but one of their main arguments is that the idea of progress has created the consequence of human beings cutting their links

Many books which stated the influence of Kants Perpetual Peace (1795) on international relations theory appeared on its bicentennial in 1995, by Jrgen Habermas, Volker Gerhardt and Georg Cavallar, to only mention a few. The influence or dialogue of political science has been claimed by Eric S. Easley.

2 3

Pascal Ory, Les Intellectuels en France, de laffaire Dreyfus nos jours (Paris, 1986). Intellectuel, Larousse, (Paris, 1992).

to nature and their relations to nature. Several thinkers have contributed in one way or another to construct or defend the boundaries between the human being and nature, including that which is outer and foreign. Thinkers such as Kant have been criticized along these lines.

During the Hiroshima Memorial day in Stockholm a few years ago, one of the most prominent Swedish intellectuals stated that he was not an intellectual. His comment was part of his response to an open question from the audience on why intellectuals were so absent in the contemporary discussion on the disarmament of nuclear weapons. The reaction he gave was quite astonishing. First of all, he openly questioned that he really was an intellectual in a way that made the audience assume that he did not want to be considered an intellectual. It seemed obvious that for him the concept of intellectual was loaded with negative connotations. The value of it was nothing he wished to be associated with. Why was it so? The person I am talking about is in his 60s. He is a well educated professor and carries clear leftist intellectual values. He has several times attacked Swedish politics from an intellectual standpoint within debate articles and public announcements. Obviously he does not want to be associated with the somewhat elitist concept of the intellectual. In Sweden, it is often heard that intellectuals intellectualize, that is, that their reasoning is too abstract to be of any use to peoples ordinary lives. Politics has no interest in such non-utilitarian reasoning.

In other circumstances than the contemporary Swedish debate, the question of intellectuals might not be as provocative as it was in the situation I have just described. The intellectual has certainly been important in the development of society and culture since the Enlightenment. But why is it so threatening to some now? What is an intellectual? 5

The value-laden nature of the concept of the intellectual is an offspring of the dialogue of its context, i.e. the concept does not have a value an sich. In general, one could say that in Sweden, the intellectual is not considered to be as important and positively understood as she or he is understood in France, for example. The German tradition is different, as being called an intellectual there could be considered an insult. The intellectual was considered to be isolated from the real world as well as being seen as a non-patriot.4

Of course it is not as simple as saying that it is only negative or positive. There are several theories about intellectuals in society. The Hungarian professor of the philosophy of religion Thomas Molnar (b. 1921) has been very critical of the intellectual elite in his work from 1961, where he holds that the intellectuals no longer are as free in their thoughts as they used to be, but instead engage themselves in social engineering and intellectual production in a factory-like manner. He calls them technological humanists.5

What is an intellectual? Molnar has a clear idea of what is needed for an intellectual. In the second edition of his book, he writes that: experience is only the raw material, it cries out for a comprehensive grasp by philosophical principles that one distils framing and reflection, and mainly from the courage of commitment to the true as understood. (p. xi). According to him, most intellectuals are not as eager to search for what is true as they should be. At the universities, they are too mired down

Dietz Bering, Die Intellektuellen: Geschichte eines Schimpfwortes (Stuttgart, 1978). Also Anthony Phelan, The Weimar Dilemma: Intellectuals in the Weimar republic (Manchester, 1985).

Thomas Molnar, The decline of the Intellectual, (London, 1994, [1961]

in old patterns and ideologies, although slightly less in Europe than in the USA, and truly deserve the labels such as Weberian functionaries, Ortegan mass-men or Mannheimian ideologues. According to Molnar, it is important that the intellectual has both a depth and an abstract dimension. But according to his view, one of the tasks of the intellectual is to search for eternal values, a position that seems to make it more important to stick to a fixed model than to criticize from an open perspective. Thus Molnars view of the intellectual is conservative.

In the German-British sociologist Karl Mannheims (1893-1947) view, it is only the free intellectual who is able to scrutinize society. But the intellectual also has to be a part of society. You have to be in society and thus a part of it, because if you are not, you will not be able to understand what you see. As a free intellectual, unbound by any interest, you might be able to represent an objective view of society. If on the other hand you represent a social group or class, you cannot be an intellectual, according to Mannheim.

This is quite the opposite of the Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramscis (1891-1937) view, where the intellectual is always the part of a social class carrying class interests. The closeness between the intellectuals and the elite in society makes it even harder to change society. There is a need for organic intellectuals, that is, intellectuals as a part of and agitating for the interests of the lower classes. According to him, these intellectuals are necessary for a change in society. Organic here refers to

the constantly changing groups and movements in society that need new representatives.6

The intellectual is thus sometimes understood as being an onlooker or a spectator. Taking into account its Enlightenment legacy and the severe criticism against it, this becomes even clearer. It seems impossible to have a totally objective perspective. Every person carries his or her own history and experience which influences values and ways of thinking and acting. Not realizing this fact could easily be considered as ignorance by others sharing other values.

The theories of the intellectual that have been mentioned so far are all approximately fifty years old or more. The role of the intellectual in society seems to have changed in some respects since then. The task has been professionalized during the last decades in the sense that the intellectuals tend to be experts within a certain area of society. Going back to the Swedish example, I would say that this is the case within nuclear weapon disarmament discussions. It has been proved that there are a lot more weapons today than ever before, and that the number of nuclear states has increased. The question is not so much discussed in public, perhaps because the questions are dealt with by experts, in physics, security policy and risk analyses. The question thereby seem too difficult to grasp for ordinary people. It is not a concern on the daily agenda, even if the risk that a nuclear weapon will detonate has increased. But there is

Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks, (London 1977) (La formazione degli Intelletuali, 1929-35.)

also greater hope than ever that the question might be solved.7 The issue of nuclear weapons was a major concern among intellectuals and politicians in the 1950s and on. But it does not seem to be so anymore. The question has been marginalized within the public sphere. It has been handed over to the experts, and it does not seem clear as for how citizens will be able to approach it again.

Another aspect in which the role of the intellectual has changed might make us understand the behaviour of my example of the intellectual a bit better. It has to do with the ideal of equality. Maybe it is not so surprising after all, given the lower status of the intellectual in Sweden. The intellectuals position is a difficult one. The development in Sweden has gone its own way. Swedish politics was shaped by social democracy for decades. In the beginning, the leftist intellectuals took an important part in the development of politics. Persons such as former prime minister Olof Palme, Alva Myrdal and Gunnar Myrdal are internationally known. But from the mid-sixties the leftist intellectuals left the Social Democratic party and never found their way back again. In the meantime, the market-oriented ideologies helped to shape a different group of thinkers.8 The intellectuals not only disappeared from social democracy but also from politics in general. And many other changes took place in Sweden at the same time.

Weapons of Terror: Freeing the World of Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Arms, The Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission (The Blix Commission Report, Stockholm, 2006).

Kjell stberg, Vad har hnt med den fordistiska vlfrdsstatens ingenjrer, eller: Var har socialdemokratin gjort av sina intellektuella? Manuscript to be published. Stockholm, 2009.

There is a fear of elitism that is connected to the intellectual. The views of intellectuals have often been marginalized by journalists or antagonists, or by the people. Experts are not much believed. There is a negative attitude to rationality as it is associated with such things as racial hygiene and absence of emotions, feelings and practical experience.

Where does all this lead? It seems necessary that human activity should be critically scrutinized by intellectuals, not only by auditors and lawyers. Human activity is so multifaceted that it constantly must be viewed from broader spatial and chronological perspectives. Without criticism it becomes impossible to know who we are, where we came from and what we could be. Nor will we be able to see who others are. It is an important civic question for there to be intellectuals in society and that they are to be in dialogue with the rest of society. Some persons are better suited than others to be that, but this does not exclude others from being educated in such ways. But is it possible to be intellectual without having an identity in society? The conservative view of Molnar and Gramscis historical intellectual where the intellectual is working for the conservation of eternal values in society is very much out of date. What is eternal and who decides that?

The intellectual pushes criticism to a new level with his or her views. But it is very important not to push the view too hard so that contact with reality vanishes. Intellectual analyses are probably necessary for the development of society. The problem is not to get stuck in the Enlightenment trap and shape ideas with no substance, no body. It is of the greatest importance to realize that others are not like you in all respects. An important role of the intellectual is to be an alarm clock for approaching undesirable situations. One such example is the Dreyfus affair. Another

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one is the global nuclear weapon situation. A third one is the climate issue. All these questions are larger than the expertises productions of facts and reason.

In a time characterized by communication but also by a habit to write briefly, without much complexity, we run the risk that some of the sophisticated reasoning which scrutinizes society just disappears. Has society changed in such a way that the intellectual no longer has his or her proper place there?

Let me sum up. First of all, it seems to be difficult to define the intellectual, as it is a value-laden concept whose values depend on the spatial and chronological circumstances. Secondly, the intellectuals have several times in history helped to spur for revolutions and social changes. 18th century France and late 20th century Eastern Europe are two such examples. Thirdly, there seems to be a certain kind of problem connected with the intellectual in at least some democracies. In a democracy where the idea of equality is a cornerstone, the elite have a weaker position as a consequence of the fact that nobody should be better than anyone else. This is the other side of the coin of the idea of equality. The intellectual either represents an elite that is not supposed to exist in a society of equals or is an expert talking in his or her own interest. But, considering the experience after the revolutions, it seems to be very important for a society to contain intellectuals in order to make society develop. But they have to be in constant dialogue with the other citizens of the society of which they are a part.

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