The PI never was a cohesive grouping, and 50 years of oppression of various sections of it fragmented the grouping all the more. Until the Second World War, there had been major German and Jewish intellectual groups, but by the end of the 1940s these had been utterly dispersed. The diversity of the remaining PI needs to be emphasised. At its core there is an inner circle of old and established Prague-based intellectual dynasties, leading scholars from a wide range of disciplines, and famous artists, writers and musicians. The outer circle extends to intellectuals who failed to spend their childhood in Prague, as well as to less distinguished people from various backgrounds who, nevertheless, contribute in their way to the intellectual life of the city.
Any intelligentsia has an unstable membership.
Distinction is often achieved quite late in a scholar or artist's career, and talent tends to pass down the generations only in a very diluted form. Indeed, a great man may have only daughters, and in Prague few women are welcomed into the upper echelons of the intelligentsia, though they may be tolerated, even adored, as a great man's consort. An intelligentsia constantly needs new blood. Prague, like all great cities, constantly draws its lifeblood from its hinterland. Young artists and scientists, writers, painters, musicians, engineers and architects from small towns and villages in Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia and from ordinary Prague families come to the capital and work on their professions and, perhaps, finally achieve distinction, though never total acceptance as insiders from the old PI elite.