THIS AGE OF CONFORMITY
13
labeled the intellectuals as "powerless people." He meant, of course,
that they felt incapable of translating their ideas into action and that
their consequent frustration had
becom~
a major motif in their be–
havior. His description was accurate enough; yet we might remember
that the truly powerless people are those intellectuals-the new
realists-who attach themselves to the seats of power, where they
surrender their freedom of expression without gaining any significance
as political figures. For it is crucial to the history of the American
intellectuals in the past few decades-as well as to the relationship
between "wealth" and "intellect"-that whenever they become ab–
sorbed into the accre'dited institutions of society they not only lose
their traditional rebelliousness but to one extent or another
they cease
to function as intellectuals.
The institutional world needs intellectuals
because
they are intellectuals but it does not want them
as
intellec–
tuals. It beckons to them because of what they are but it will not
allow them, at least within its sphere of articulation, either to remain
or entirely cease being what they are.
It
needs them for their knowl–
edge, their talent, their inclinations and passions; it insists that they
retain a measure of these endowments, which it means to employ for
its own ends, and without which the intellectuals would be of no
use to it whatever. A simplified but useful equation suggests itself:
the relation of the institutional world to the intellectuals is as the
relation of middlebrow culture to serious culture, the one battens on
the other, absorbs and raids it with increasing frequency and skill,
subsidizes and encourages it enough to make further raids possible–
at times the parasite will support its victim. Surely this relationship
must be one reason for the high incidence of neurosis that is supposed
to prevail among intellectuals. A total estrangement from the sources
of power and prestige, even a blind unreasoning rejection of every
aspect of our culture, would be far healthier if only because it would
permit a free discharge of aggression.
I do not mean to suggest that for intellectuals all institutions are
equally dangerous or disadvantageous. Even during the New Deal,
the life of those intellectuals who journeyed to Washington was far
from happy. The independence possible to a professor of sociology
is usually greater than that possible to a writer of television scripts,
and a professor of English, since the world will not take his subject
seriously, can generally enjoy more intellectual leeway than a profes–
sor of sociology. Philip Rieff, a sociologist, has caustically described a
