VANGUARD
227
I am aware that my distinction between intellectuals and the
technical intelligentsia may be derived from a previous phase in the
social organization of intellectual activity. The intellectual, in this
schem~
does bear a conspicuous resemblance to the individual (if hypothetical)
participant in the free market. His autonomy may be as much a matter
of the relatively open market for intellectual work in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries as of the conception of homo faber bound
to bourgeois activity in general.
It
would follow that we require a new
conception of intellectuals, encompassing recent changes in the intellectual
market. Nevertheless, for the moment let us take as a minimal criterion
for distinguishing intellectuals from the technical intelligentsia their
relative remoteness from the administrative and productive process in
industrial societies.
The intellectuals are artists, writers, scientists in the pure rather than
the applied fields of the natural sciences, scholars in the human sciences
not directly involved in the manipulation of behavior. Some intellectuals
may from time to time accept employment in which they are used for
purposes different from their own. The boundaries are often unclear,
but the existence of two different areas of activity - technical and in–
tellectual - is hardly in doubt. Indeed, when agencies of power call
upon intellectuals it is not always for the purpose of inducting them into
the discipline of power.
It
is precisely the disinterestedness and novelty
of free intellectual activity that men of power find attractive and useful.
(It is one of the ironies of our present situation that so many intellectuals
strive to identify with the perspectives of kings, while their rulers value
them for their activity as thinkers.)
The critics of the intellectuals among the powerful and practical
(and those most embittered of critics, the self-hating segment of the in–
tellectuals) have made too much of the supposed defects inherent in
the intellectuals' position. Remoteness from a certain experience of
reality, they argue, has led the intellectuals to abstract and extreme
formulations, which in the end may be little more than the ideology of
a special interest group. But if "reality" is defined as the assumptions
intrinsic to a system of power, the intellectuals' resistance to this defi–
nition (a resistance which has at times taken on quite explicitly reac–
tionary forms) may contain within it the possibilities for alternative
definitions, critiques of reality which could in time lead to alternative
social institutions. The cultivation, for example, of the idea of wholeness,
of the notion of life as a work of art, is certainly a part of intellectual
tradition. The fact that in critical instances the intellectuals speak to
others than themselves, and precisely to the members of the technical
intelligentsia, attests not merely to their attention to public issues.
It
