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certain recent disturbances in the German technical schools, the student
movement has until now been led by students of the humanities and
social sciences. Pure and applied scientists and medical itudents and
teachers were involved in May in France; their concern was the social
uses of their knowledge as well as with the organization of instruction
and inquiry. This may well indicate a change in the basis of the student
movement in the future, but for the moment it could be said that the
most consistently radical students in the movement have been those not
facing imminent induction into the administrative and productive
process.
Again, the recent one-day moratorium on research among scien–
tists and technologists may indicate a change. Precisely why students
of sociology, in particular, should be prominent in the movement
is not easy to answer. Once intended as a discipline encompassing
the understanding of society as a whole, sociology has often been
degraded to a set of research techniques useful as instruments of
administrative technology. The students, more interested in critical
traditions than in techniques, have found intellectual incentives
for questioning this world in portrayals of it which insist on its
im–
mutability. (It is true also that in France and Germany, especially,
sociology has been taught by a few radical university professors.) At any
rate, were we obliged to find a brief formulation, we should have to say
that the radical student movement has been led by "the intellectuals"
among the students. This remains true even where, as in the United
States, certain of the radical leaders manifest a considerable disdain for
intellectual tradition.
IV. The Intellectuals
While the technical intelligentsia can be described as a determinate
group within the labor force, they are distinct from "the intellectuals"
of a society. Each term refers to groups with a higher education and to
traditions of higher culture. But intellectuals have spoken out on matters
of public concern. Their activities have been communally regulated, by
the interplay of public response with the intellectuals' own idea of
relevance. United in informal but effective groups, the intellectuals
through these groups have exhibited a limited but definite autonomy.
The regulation of the technical intelligentsia, by contrast, takes place
by the rules governing professional or technical activity, and their
autonomy is considerably more restricted than that of the intellectuals:
both their skills, and the functions to which they are put are determined
not by themselves but by their employers.
