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PARTISAN REVIEW
of the successful commercialization of intellectual fashion (see Robert
Damton's
The Business of Enlightenment).
Today, no other text mirrors the
brilliance and misery of intellectuals more clearly than the
Encyclopedie's
very short entry, "Philosophe," written by Denis Diderot, the man who
according to contemporaries had read everything. For Diderot,
intellectuals were blessed with reason as Christians were with grace.
Reason was restlessness; it made the intellectual tick like a self-winding
watch. The intellectual groped in the dark like everyone else, but at the
same time, he had the torchlight of reason to show him the way.
Diderot's characterization illustrates how the modem intellectual
overestimated himself From the French Revolution onward, especially in
the twentieth century - the bloody century of ideologies - this overesti–
mation led to unimaginable errors . It turned intellectuals into propagan–
dists of terror, disengaged masterminds, and henchmen for fascist and
communist executioners, all in the name of reason and claims to higher
knowledge. Nonetheless, Diderot's definition is also about self-commit–
ment. His intellectual does not live in an ivory tower, and his daily life is
not one of exile. Because he knows that humankind can live only in
society, he aims to develop fully his own sociability, to make himself
useful and pleasing to his neighbors. Civil society is just as commendable
for him as an earthly divinity: he knows its principles better than anyone
else and sees in its perfection his highest aim. This is how overestimation
of oneself is domesticated: propriety requires that the intellectual apply his
higher knowledge toward the good of all (at times Diderot echoes
Spinoza: he who is an atheist should live like a saint). Thus, the history of
modem intellectuals is the history of their own overestimation of them–
selves. Like every history, it is also an attempt at forgetting. Mter Diderot,
no one bothered to talk much about the kind of propriety that controls
the philosopher's ego, making him the guardian of civil society.
During the bicentennial of the French Revolution, Diderot's
"philosophe" was again resurrected in Europe . Propriety, personal
courage, commitment to civil society, the unshakable belief in the ability
of reason to work things through - all these characteristics were embodied
in the intellectuals who came to power in the post-communist societies of
Eastern Europe. Mter 1989, one couldn't think ofDiderot's quoting Plato
- when philosophers become kings, the people will be happy - without
being reminded of Vaclav Havel. For a brief time, no one said a word
about the misery of intellectuals and the history of their decline in the era
of ideologies. Intellectuals had been decisive in helping to topple the
ramparts of the last big ideology - communism. In Czechoslovakia a
writer became president; in Hungary it was a Jurist and man of letters.
Both the historian Bronislaw Geremek in Poland and the art historian
