TSVETAN TODOROV
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intellectual and society. The book and the press, radio and television - their
pluralism has become indispensable to fi-ee expression.
So what remains today of the intellectual's traditional roles? Those of
guide and prophet have fallen out of favor; democracies distrust inspired
guides, preferring instead the prosaic security of universal suffrage. Instead
of praising poets as prophets, our society has lowered prophets to the rank of
poets. And if one searches for competent advice on a particular question to–
day, one bypasses the poet to consult the scholar - considered purely as an
expert and not as an intellectual.
"Smiting" has also been compromised, though for other reasons. For if
one
r~jects
contemporary society as such, execrating and repudiating its very
principle, one necessarily becomes the defender of a radically different soci–
ety. Yet the attempt to replace democratic principles with others - in the fas–
cist and communist utopias, for example - has been discredited. The
medicine, it turned out, was worse than the illness. The only alternative for
the "smiter," then, is not to reject the present in the name of a radiant future,
but to return to the past. This explains the rather remarkable tendency of
modern intellectuals to resemble conservatives rather than revolutionaries in
their attacks on democracy, rationality, and humanism (blaming Descartes,
for example, or Condorcet for the troubles of modernity) . Their conser–
vatism takes on various forms - running from nostalgia for the Old Regime
or even ancient Greece, to the ecology and third world movements - but al–
ways shares an attachment to what Louis Dumont called holistic values:
"community," "harmony with nature, " a preference for hierarchy over
equality, and the social over the economic.
There exists a third possibility for the intellectual, what one might call
the critical role, which seems to square particularly well with the modern age.
The difference between the critical attitude and that of the "smiters" is that
the latter appealed to the past or future to condemn the present, while critics
in democracies refer to the constitutive principles of modernity to criticize
their imperfect realization . Our heterogeneous society plays host to many
different social and political movements that nonetheless appeal to its own
constitutive principles. One can point
to
the struggle for women's rights,
thanks to which half the population received legal status comparable to that of
the other half; or to the current effort to integrate immigrants into French
society, whatever their beliefs, language, or color. The intellectual who plays
the critic does not content himself with taking part in society, but acts on it,
trying to push it closer to the ideal to which it appeals. He judges contempo–
rary
society, not from the outside, but in the hope of restoring an intensity to
those principles that have been dimmed; he wishes, not a radical revolution
or return to the past, but the reanimation of a somewhat faded ideal. To act
