TSVETAN TODOROV
49
of this character.
There is another type of utilitarian abuse, however, when society
places intellectuals at the service of its own objectives. This happens when–
ever a thinker, a scholar, or an artist blindly commits himself to the victory of
"the revolution" - that is, to an ideology that is not dominant, but aspires to
be. (Pol Pot, remember, was once a student at the Sorbonne.) Or, if the state
itself employs intellectuals, it can turn them into well-paid official spokesmen
of its authoritarian regime, cantors of the doctrine to which it appeals or of
the dictator who guides it. Under other circumstances intellectuals turn into
experts, becoming ministers or presidential counselors. At the same time,
however, they renounce their identity as intellectuals, since their actions are
no longer guided by the single-minded pursuit of the true and the good.
Benichou has called this "the Calvary of the man ofletters": "Naturally in–
dined
to
dream of a society constituted and governed by an idea, he is never
so miserable as when his dream is realized. The two natural demands of
modern intellectuals - the free exercise of thought (that is, its exercise as
such) and its incarnation in power - are cruelly contradictory." If, at the time
of the French revolution, the
philosophes
had been firmly placed in power, a
paradoxical consequence would have followed: no
philosophes
would have
been left, since they all would have been exterminated for heterodoxy.
So one can admit that, at times, intellectuals express the interests of
their guild or class, and that under certain circumstances they also use their
skills to serve their own interests or those of "the revolution" or the state.
Still, one cannot deny the special role of intellectuals just because, in
all
these
cases, the liberty that distinguishes them has been betrayed. To get beyond
these misunderstandings we must reformulate the question of "the role ofthe
intellectual" by reviewing its recent history in our society.
It seems that all European societies (and probably others, too) under–
stand the distinction between temporal and spiritual power - between the
warrior-chief and the priest. This doesn't mean there is not a great deal of
overlap between the two, of course: the emperor receives his legitimacy
from the pope, who nonetheless may be disposed by the same emperor. In
our tradition, spiritual power has itself been either lay or religious, moving
from the first to the second with the rise of Christianity.
In
France this state
ofaffairs lasted until about the middle of the eighteenth century. While it is
true that during the Renaissance the poets of the
Pleiade
themselves hoped
to exercise sacerdotal power, the attempt failed and the episode was quickly
forgotten. And when, one century later, Malherbe judged that "a good poet is
no more useful
to
the state than a good bowler," he was not at all denigrating
spiritual power; he simply knew that it was reserved for the priests, not for
the poets.
