Public Intellectuals-Now and Then

I: Definitions and Thumbnail History First off, it must be said that intellectuals, that is people whose chief concern is with ideas and thinking about, and usually writing about, ideas--that includes certain philosophers, certain literary people and historians, some social scientists, some political scientists, occasional scientists--have existed forever. But "public intellectuals," i.e., those who attempt to influence social and political events and reality directly with their ideas are a relatively recent phenomenon. Certainly Voltaire was one, and Diderot and the Encyclopedists" who aimed with reason to combat superstition and religious obscurantism were others. But they frequently acted as individual intellectuals, not as part of a self-conscious group or class of people. That concept and role are rather more recent. In Eastern Europe the concept of an intelligentsia arose, an educated class who would use ideas, expressed in essays and journalism, literature, and drama, to combat the autocratic and reactionary ideology of Czarism. In the West, the intellectuals as an oppositional class, in battle with retrograde and repressive ideologies, came clearly into focus during the anti-semitic Dreyfus Affair in France. In an indispensable article, Susan Rubin Suleiman defines, flatly, French intellectuals "as a category of people whose very existence as such became recognized at the time of the Affair" (117). One of the intellectuals whose participation as a Dreyfusard influenced his entire life was the Jewish intellectual Julian Benda, best known for his La Trahison des clercs, in which he argued famously that "the duty of the intellectual was to defend universal values, over and above the politics of the moment" (qtd. in Suleiman 118). What he saw at stake in the Dreyfus Affair, as in his later anti-fascism of the 1930s was "precisely the defense of universal values--truth, justice, intellectual and social freedom-against the particularist doctrines of racism, nationalism, and reasons of State" (Suleiman 118). We cite Benda, not because he was the sole or most outstanding participant in L'Affaire (Zola probably deserves that honor), but because those words ring out so boldly, and in so timely a fashion in Europe then and in America now. More to the point, the Dreyfus Affair both inaugurated the current use of the term "intellectual," according to Suleiman, and "also the collective intervention of intellectuals as a self-conscious group in public affairs" (121). Thus, the day after Zola's J'Accuse appeared in Laurie (13 Jan. 1898) and sold 300,000 copies, a list of people appeared in that same newspaper calling for a new trial for Dreyfus (Kleeblatt 268). The heading of the list was called "protestation des intellectuels" and it included the professional associations of the signers: "professor, writer, architect, member of the Academy (Anatole France was the only one), agrege, licencie in law, science, literature, and so on" (Suleiman 121). That custom or method of protest against perceived injustices and outrages continues, of course, to this day and constitutes an avenue of expression for most intellectual workers who want to affect public discourse and action. It is an estimable tradition, and it is important to note where it came from and what its aims were historically. The influence, or fallout, from that beginning was profound upon American (as well as European) intellectuals. In his fine book New York Intellect, Thomas Bender points to two of America's most important intellectuals in the twentieth century, William James and Edmund Wilson, as directly responding to the influence of the Dreyfus Affair. "The term 'intellectual,'" Bender writes, "entered political and cultural discourse in 1898, when the Dreyfusards used it to name themselves and to claim by it a new sort of oppositional moral authority. Within three months, the word appeared in America, in an editorial in The Nation, and by 1900 it was being used in New York's Lower East Side, referring to those immigrants who, under settlement-house auspices or in cafe society, had formed study groups to incorporate into their lives American literature and culture. …