“The concept of the intellectual, like that of the intelligentsia, appeared in the late nineteenth century in Catholic societies that were late to modernization: France and Poland. In two worlds, each different from the other: one Latin, the other Slavic; one the capital of the nineteenth century, the other on the periphery; one post-revolutionary, the other pre-.”
An intellectual is a writer, artist, or scientist who opines on matters of public interest with moral authority among the elite.
The following are not intellectuals:
- Those who do not intervene in public life.
- Those who intervene as specialists.
- Those who adopt the perspective of a particular interest.
- Those who opine on behalf of others.
- Those whose opinions are subject to an official truth (political, administrative, academic, religious).
- Those who are listened to thanks to their religious authoritiy or ability to impose themselves (by violent, political, administrative, or economic means).
- Cab drivers, hairdressers, and others who do the same thing intellectuals do, but without the respect of the elite.
- The members of the elite who would like to be seen as intellectuals, but never get their hands on the microphone, or (when they do) are of no interest to the public.
- Those who garner the attention of a public so broad that it becomes offensive to the elite.
The word was first used as an adjective: in French since the thirteenth century, in English since the fourteenth, in Spanish since the fifteenth. It became a noun toward the end of the nineteenth, to refer to a certain kind of personality.
The paradigm was embodied by Émile Zola when he intervened in the Dreyfus affair. In particular, through his open letter to the president of France, reprinted in the newspaper L’Aurore (January 13, 1898) with a title that went down in history: “J’accuse.” It ended with a litany: I accuse Lt. Col. du Paty de Clam of being the diabolical creator of this miscarriage of justice—unknowingly, I am willing to believe—and of defending this sorry deed by all manner of bizarre and evil machinations; I accuse General Mercier of complicity in one of the greatest inequities of the century; I accuse General Billot of having held in his hands absolute proof of Dreyfus’s innocence and concealing it as a political expedient; I accuse… (adapted from the translation by Shelley Temchin and Jean-Max Guieu).
What gave the famous novelist the right to speak out against the military authorities who had declared Captain Alfred Dreyfus (a Frenchman of Jewish ancestry) a traitor for supposedly selling military secrets to Germany? Zola was neither a Jew nor a soldier nor a lawyer. He had no expertise in the field, nor any particular interest to defend. He challenged the sentence on neither legal nor military grounds. He was legally hounded for his accusations, and he had to flee the country, although he ended up winning the case: Dreyfus was absolved.
His intervention evinced the fact that public truth is not subject to official truth; that there are courts of public conscience in which civil society exerts its autonomy in the face of military, political, ecclesiastical, and academic authority. He displayed the appearance of a fourth power, that of the press, in the face of powers legislative, executive, and judicial. He revealed that matters of public interest (in this case, antisemitism) cannot be reduced to one or another interest, jurisdiction, or field of expertise: that war is too important to be left up to soldiers, and justice too important to be left up to lawyers.
The intellectual is foreshadowed in Jeremiah as well as Socrates. He is plainly present in Voltaire and the encyclopedists, who enlivened the public life of civil society through books and theatre. But the recognition and inauguration of this social role took place in Paris in the late nineteenth century, with Zola’s “J’Accuse” and the subsequent “Manifesto of the Intellectuals.” When liberal conscience and mass media thrive, when being a citizen and being a reader converge around printed matter, and when the page takes the place of the pulpit and the agora, the intellectual becomes the focal point of public life.
Dictionaries tend to apply the noun “intellectual” to certain abilities, tastes, or specialities, omitting the definitive application: the social role. An intellectual is not an especially intelligent person, one especially disposed to the intellectual life, or one specialized in an intellectual line of work.
Although intellectuals are something like the public intelligence of civil society, and although they are seen as very intelligent people, they are not defined by their intelligence. It is easy to find intellectuals less intelligent, less educated, less erudite than some person or another not deemed an intellectual. The true difference is not in ability but in social function.
A function uncharacterized by field, profession, trade, speciality. The distinction between manual and intellectual workers (which is insufficient in and of itself: manual workers use intelligence, intellectual workers use their hands) is, in practice, useless. An ever broader sector of society neither sows the fields nor manufactures products, but rather produces words, numbers, images, ideas, procedures. But very few so-called intellectual (adjective) workers are intellectuals (noun).
All intellectuals write, though not all are good writers. Their statements may recall parliamentary oratory, the theatricality of the speech, the sermon, the lecture, of round tables and radio and television interviews, but their characteristic intervention is not oral but written. Some are great poets or prosists in the obvious genres (poetry, theatre, the novel, the essay) or the not-so-obvious (the letter to the editor, the pamphlet, the polemic, the manifesto).
Others are writers out of necessity: they are products of the arts or the sciences, and they write to opine. In the case of the literature-adjacent arts (visual art, film), we might say they “write” with their art; but only rarely do they not intervene, as well, with writings and statements per se. When it comes to science, it could be no other way: scientists who act as intellectuals do so through unscientific writings.
This gives rise to confusion: some believe the literary cannot be as serious as the scientific, or public interventions are not serious unless made by specialists in the field at hand; Sakharov must opine on atomic physics and nothing else. But scientific works can be as unserious as any other, and public life surpasses the little worlds of specialization. Deciding on the use of the atomic bomb is not something one studies with a cyclotron; it is something that surpasses the methods of physics.
It is not a tautology to say (as Borges said) that the classics are those books that are read as classics. Nor is it a tautology to say that intellectuals are those writers who are followed as intellectuals. An intellectual without an audience is not an intellectual. So, saying “we intellectuals” sounds like saying “we classics”: it takes a stance before the public that only the public itself can concede. What makes the intellectual is the reception of his speech, more than his speech itself. When his vision of the realities or the dreams of the tribe calls the tribe’s attention, he begins to be read as an intellectual.
Intellectuals assemble mirrors of interest for society: to take distance from itself, to unfurl, to take itself in, to understand itself, to critique itself, to fantasize. On the mirror of the page, they create speculative experiences, theoretical practices, spiritual exercises in which society sees itself as thinking, critical, imaginative, creative, in motion.
This is why they have been seen as the conscience of society. But the metaphor is deceitful. No one can be the conscience of a “person” that is collective in nature. The fact is that a physical person assembles verbal mirrors, maps, compasses, sextants, or eyeglasses with which to find his way through reality, and it may be that others find them helpful for the same purpose, and then they begin to spread. In these artifacts (and not in their creator) lies what could be called a common conscience: different eyes see through the same lens. This analogous conscience, this fact of having seen not necessarily the same thing, but through the same lens, allows us to speak of a common conscience, of a public conscience, and even of a national conscience that seems to be the “conscience” of a higher person (the Community, the Public, the Nation) speaking through the intellectual’s mouth.
“The collective noun intelectualidad, which, according to dictionaries, refers to the overall grouping of intellectuals or educated persons of a country or region, is little-used in Mexico. It came to prominence in 1948 as a sort of Madridism, taken up by Agustín Lara in an immortal turn of phrase.”
By hypostatizing this shared conscience into the intellectual’s person, the tribe can project upon him its fantasies (and he can submit to others’ projections, taking a liking to incarnating something greater). Or the tribe deifies him into a narcissistic We: like the mirror of the supreme intelligence, rigor, expertise, and honesty of the good tribal conscience; or persecutes him as its bad conscience: the embodiment of arrogance, madness, stupidity, frivolity, and bad faith, of accepting thirty denarii from the purses of unspeakable interests.
In traditional societies, society’s conscience is in the hands of the priestly caste. But, since the Reformation, the split between the individual conscience and religious authorities has weakened the conscience traditionally objectified in the clergy. In Protestant societies, each member of the faith is his own moral authority, completes his own reading of the revelation, is his own shepherd even as he listens to others. In Catholic societies, the split from religious authorities was late and intercepted: not from the individual conscience, but rather from the state, starting with the French Revolution.
Paradoxically, this difference means that in Protestant societies, which came first to modernity, the head-of-state can call upon God (as in the United States) and even serve as the head of the church (as in England), with no great risk of fundamentalism. On the other hand, in Catholic societies, precisely because they were reformed from the top down, and not starting from the individual conscience, the specter of fundamentalism always looms, as fear or temptation; there is always a certain tension between popular beliefs and official ideology.
In particular, the elites that spearhead civil society and aspire to a free, modern conscience identify neither with the traditional clergy nor with the enlightened bureaucracy. This plays into the intellectuals’ role as a sort of civil priesthood, as opposed to the state’s priesthood and the clergy itself.
For this reason, intellectuals have greater heft in Catholic societies than in Protestant ones: they are like the free conscience of the Protestant layman, but with the pastoral function of the Catholic clergy. They are seen as officiants of a lay prelacy that holds the keys to the civil realm: the keys to the national conscience. They are, at once, reformation (the critical, protestant side of the national conscience) and Catholic tradition (the elite in charge of the conscience of all others).
Intellectuals are and are not the intelligentsia. The intelligentsia is not the grouping of intellectuals, as some dictionaries say: it is the entire lettered estate of the nation. There is a close historical, social, and linguistic affinity between the phenomena that give rise to these terms, but there are also differences.
Intellectuals are a grouping of personalities; the intelligentsia are a social stratum. Intellectuals are civil prophets, even civil cardinals; the intelligentsia also includes parishioners. Intellectuals appear after the revolution, the intelligentsia in its preamble. Intellectuals are the ego that fancies itself the superego: critical, moralistic, the overhanging judge of all partial struggles (au-dessus de la mêlée). The intelligentsia is the ego that fancies itself the id: the educated population that sees itself as interpreting the better unconscious aspirations of the people, and that ends up supplanting said people as its conscious vanguard (where there’s an id, there’s an ego). Intellectuals are criticism, intelligentsia is revolution. Intellectuals criticize the new revolutionary state; the intelligentsia puts it together. Intellectuals are au fait with the publishing and journalistic worlds, with working without a title, with freelancing. The intelligentsia is more au fait with the academic and bureaucratic worlds, with ranks, with appointments, with charging based on the time elapsed on the job. Intellectuals dream of Socratic holiness while they build up capital on the newsstands of public opinion. The intelligentsia dreams of Platonic holiness while they build up capital in the backrooms of promotion. Intellectuals go from books to renown; the intelligentsia goes from books to power.
The concept of the intellectual, like that of the intelligentsia, appeared in the late nineteenth century in Catholic societies that were late to modernization: France and Poland. In two worlds, each different from the other: one Latin, the other Slavic; one the capital of the nineteenth century, the other on the periphery; one post-revolutionary, the other pre-. Paris coined the new meaning of the word intellectuel. Poland coined the new meaning of the word inteligencja.
From the Polish, the term passed into Russian as intelligentsiya and was adopted in English and French as intelligentsia in the early twentieth century. This adoption was timely, since the English word “intelligence,” besides its conventional meaning, had come to refer to espionage or information-gathering, and because the French word intelligence, besides its conventional meaning, had come to refer to understanding or complicity. Furthermore, leaving the word intelligentsia in Russian recalled its subdeveloped, revolutionary origins: the educated, discontented caste that aspired to power, to spearhead the modernisation of a backward country. Neither France nor England, at the start of the twentieth century, could relate.
Mexico could, although it did not adopt the word. In those same years (1908), Justo Sierra spoke of a “national brain” with a right to power. He may as well have said a “national intelligentsia,” but he did not. In the end, the Mexican intelligentsia baptized itself with a different name: los universitarios, with a usage (like that of intelligentsia) that is not so easy to translate. How might we say los universitarios mexicanos in English or French? In French, for example, universitaire applies to those who are at university, but not to all those who have ever been there. The community in question is understood in a stricter sense. In Mexico, the University is like the Revolution: an endless process of overcoming; a dominant family, open to all those who aspire to great heights; a legitimizing banner of ascent to power.
The collective noun intelectualidad, which, according to dictionaries, refers to the overall grouping of intellectuals or educated persons of a country or region, is little-used in Mexico. It came to prominence in 1948 as a sort of Madridism, taken up by Agustín Lara in an immortal turn of phrase:
En Chicote, un agasajo postinero
con la crema de la intelectualidad…
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
Gabriel Zaid, “Intelectuales,” in De los libros al poder, in Obras de Gabriel Zaid Vol. 3, 3rd ed.
(Mexico: El Colegio Nacional, 2020), 359-365.
Published with the author’s permission.
