BOOKS
615
INCARNATIONS OF INTELLECTUALS
THE KNOWLEDGE ELITE AND THE FAILURE OF PROPHECY. By Eva
Etzioni·Halevy.
Allen
&
Unwin. $18.50.
LIBERALISM AND ITS CRITICS. Edited by Michael Sandel.
New York
University Press. $30.00.
A RADICAL PHILOSOPHY. By Agnes Heller.
Basil Blackwell. $12.95.
Each of these books provides new opportunities for reflecting
on attributes of Western intellectuals who continue to make claims
on public interest, or at any rate on the interest of publics composed
of the growing number of fellow intellectuals and quasi-intellectuals .
Each of these books conveys something important - sometimes with–
out the apparent intentions of its author- about Western intel–
lectuals (although only one of them, Etzioni-Halevy's, is explicitly
concerned with them) .
There are several reasons for the persisting preoccupation with
intellectuals in the West. One is that intellectuals, in their various
incarnations, have become a large enough group to provide an audi–
ence and market for discussions of this kind. Another reason is the
often noted functional importance of intellectuals in modern so–
cieties, said to be in great need of their services as a "knowledge elite"
dispensing specialized expertise, advice for policy makers and mean–
ingful communications. (One wonders, nonetheless, precisely what
parts of modern society would grind to a halt, if, say, hundreds of
thousands of professors in the humanities and social sciences would
abruptly vanish?) At last, and far less questionably, intellectuals
"have an inordinate share in shaping the ideas that either legitimize
or de-legitimize existing social and political structures," as Etzioni–
Halevy puts it.
I suggest that it is the chameleon-like character (using the word
in a value-free way) of intellectuals that stimulates discussions of
their attributes: it has been notoriously difficult to agree on what
exactly is an intellectual. Intellectuals have too many incarnations
and often play contradictory social roles. They fail to display indis–
putable defining characteristics . (Nobody has ever conducted an
opinion poll of "intellectuals" as such for the obvious reason that it is
difficult to nail down empiricially to what clearly identifiable occu–
pational, educational or social categories these people belong.) At
the same time it is hard to think of any other social group in our
times upon which so many diverse characteristics can be projected
