sociology of intellectuals

7/27/2019 Sociology of Intellectuals

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Intellectuals, Sociology of

Robert J. Brym

Department of Sociology

University of Toronto

725 Spadina Avenue

Toronto M5S 2J4

Canada

[email protected]

phone 416-787-0334

fax 416-787-0795

Keywords: intellectuals, intelligentsia, professions, politics, creativity, ideas

To be published in

International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2nd ed.,

James D. Wright, ed.

Oxford UK: Elsevier, 2015

Words: 4,776
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]


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Abstract

Intellectuals, sociology of

This article first reviews the development of the term intellectual and the social and

historical circumstances that led intellectuals to become a large, moderately well-defined,

and occasionally self-conscious group. Particular attention is paid to the rise of commerce

and industry since the late Middle Ages, the spread of literacy, the growth of markets, and

the proliferation of social contexts for intellectual discussion and debate.

The article then argues that three main traditions of analysis inform the sociological

study of intellectuals: class theories, theories of classlessness, and theories of shifting social

networks. It is argued that the third of these traditions is the most fruitful.

Evidence to support this claim is drawn from analyses of the social conditions that

lead intellectuals to assume various ideological and political positions. It is concluded that,

to explain intellectuals allegiances, one must trace their paths of social mobility as they are

shaped by the capacity of various social collectivities to expand the institutional milieus

through which intellectuals pass. To the degree these milieus are imprinted with the

interests of the social collectivities that control them, they circumscribe the interests

reflected in intellectuals ideologies and political allegiances.


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Definition

Intellectuals are people who produce, evaluate, and distribute culture. Their role often

involves some mixture of endorsing or criticizing the cultural objects of their attention.

Following Michael Burawoy (2005), intellectual work may be said to vary along two

dimensions: its intended audience (which may include academics, policy makers, various

sections of the public, and the public as a whole) and the degree to which it makes

instrumental versus normative claims (what is versus what ought to be). Individual

intellectuals may specialize in one or more of the cells resulting from the cross-

classification of the two dimensions. Similarly, particular academic disciplines, professions,

schools of thought, regions, and historical periods may highlight one or more

specializations (Brym and Nakhaie, 2009).

Origins

The intellectual role has been performed in all societies. Even a nomadic tribe of fewer than

100 foragers could afford to employ a shaman to forecast the weather, predict the

movement of animals, and tend to the ill. However, the Renaissance humanists (circa 1300-

1600 CE) were the first influential group resembling todays intellectuals. Renaissance

scholars thought they lived in a golden age of virtue and learning. To emphasize the point,

they invented the term Middle Ages to refer to the dark gulf separating their era from the

glories of the ancient world. Promoting the study of poetry, grammar, rhetoric, history, and

moral philosophy, the humanists from Petrarch in the 14th century to More, Erasmus, and

Rabelais in the 16th century influenced the Reformation, the scientific revolution, and the

Age of Reason.


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Only since about 1600, however, have intellectuals become a large, moderately well-

defined, and occasionally self-conscious group. The chief factors that helped to distinguish

them were the rise of commerce and industry since the late Middle Ages, the spread of

literacy, the growth of markets, and the proliferation of social contexts for intellectual

discussion and debate. Flourishing commerce and industry permitted the accumulation of

economic surpluses. They were used to expand state and private institutions employing

intellectuals. Public education and mass literacy increased demand for intellectual services.

In turn, the evolution of markets for these services allowed intellectuals greater freedom to

define their political allegiances. The interests of aristocratic and church patrons no longer

tightly constrained them. Finally, a host of modern social settings ranging from

universities to political movements, professional societies to coffee houses, academic

journals to mass-circulation newspapers provided contexts within which intellectuals

could formulate their social and political identities.

It was not until the second half of the 19th century thatintellectual and the kindred

intelligentsia entered common parlance. The term intellectual was first employed on a

wide scale in France. In 1898, Georges Clemenceau referred to the leaders of the

anticlerical and antimilitary camp that opposed the conduct of the Dreyfus trial as les

intellectuels. Soon the political right was deriding the self-proclaimed conscience of the

French nation. Because of the resulting public debate, the term intellectual stuck. The

term intelligentsia was popularized in Central and Eastern Europe a few decades earlier.

It, too, denoted liberals, socialists, and other critics of authority. Only gradually since the

end of the 19th century has the term intellectual gained widespread acceptance and

succeeded in unwrapping itself from quotation marks.


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Theories

Many normative or moralistic treatments of the problem of intellectuals may be found in

the literature. They criticize what intellectuals do and make a case for what they ought to

do. Julian Benda (1969 [1928]), Noam Chomsky (1969), and others have written important

works in this tradition. In contrast, this article focuses on the analytical literature, which

seeks to explain whyintellectuals do what they do.

Three main analytical traditions inform the sociological study of intellectuals.

Sociologists have regarded intellectuals as (1) members of a class or as a class in their own

right; (2) relatively classless; and (3) embedded in a shifting network of class and other

group affiliations (Brym, 2010 [1980]; Kurzman and Owens, 2002).

Class Theory

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1972 [1848]) regarded intellectuals as members of the

petite bourgeoisie who would be precipitated into the proletariat as capitalism developed.

They believed that, under socialism, classes would disappear, so one could be a farmer in

the morning, a laborer in the afternoon, and a philosopher in the evening (1972 [1845-6]).

In contrast, anarchists Mikhail Bakunin (1872) and Jan Wacaw Machajski (Shatz, 1989)

chief among them asserted that intellectuals aspired to form a dominant class. In making

this claim, they anticipated the ideas of many 20th century social thinkers.

By the 1950s, the middle of the class structure had expanded enormously in both

capitalist and self-proclaimed socialist societies. People with university degrees filled many

of the intermediate ranks. Reflecting on this change, a growing number of social thinkers


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argued that intellectuals constitute a class that enjoys increasing power. Alvin Gouldner

(1979) held that intellectuals comprise a new emancipatory class. Barbara and John

Ehrenreich (1979) maintained that intellectuals form part of a new professional-

managerial class. Irving Kristol (1972) called intellectuals the new class of knowledge

workers. Defining intellectuals broadly to include economists, technocrats, administrators,

police bureaucrats, ideologists, scientists, and artists, Georg Konrad and Ivn Szelnyi

(1979) went so far as to claim that Eastern European intellectuals had assumed class

power. These and other scholars, including James Burnham (1941), Milovan Djilas (1957),

and John Kenneth Galbraith (1967), disagreed about much, but they shared the view that

intellectuals form a large, ideologically quite homogeneous, and rising or dominant class.

Steven Brints research exemplifies one important criticism of the view that

intellectuals form a class. Using American data from a series of General Social Surveys, he

demonstrated considerable ideological heterogeneity and strong cohort effects among

intellectuals. Intellectuals, it turns out, are as numerous on the right as they are on the left,

with the two camps tending to cluster in different occupational niches. Moreover, their

ideological predispositions depend partly on theZeitgeistof the historical period during

which they reach late adolescence and early adulthood (Brint, 1984). Consequently, the

ideological cohesiveness and presumed teleological movement of intellectuals toward class

power seems greatly exaggerated.

The second main criticism of the argument that intellectuals form a rising or

dominant class is that, typically, they are demonstrably subservient to other economic

and/or political classes. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union always sought to ensure

that universities, research institutes, and the nomenklatura were populated by loyalists. In


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Russia, the collapse of communism witnessed the ascent not of intellectuals but of people

with strong connections to the state security apparatus and organized crime. Lawrence

King and Ivn Szelnyi (2004) anticipate that, in capitalist societies, intellectuals will come

to dominate an increasingly autonomous state. However, this eventuality seems

increasingly unlikely in an era when giant global corporations have influenced

governments to eliminate trade barriers and give up sovereign rights to pro-free market

transnational organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

State autonomy has decreased in recent decades and there can be little doubt which socio-

economic strata are chiefly responsible for this development.

For a time, intellectuals were politically ascendant in some parts of the world. For

instance, as Charles Kurzman (2008) has shown, between 1905 and 1911, more than a

quarter of the worlds population (in China, Iran, Mexico, the countries of the Ottoman

Empire, Portugal, and Russia) was caught up in democratic revolutions led largely by self-

identified intellectuals. Many workers, peasants, members of the bourgeoisie, and in some

cases even landlords deferred to them. Within a few years, however, their ascent was

checked. Russian workers wanted more than just elections and a constitution. Chinese

intellectuals lost power to the army because of widespread social disorder. When their

commercial interests were threatened, the great powers turned against new, democratic

regimes. Among the countries listed earlier, only Portugals democratic constitution

survived, and then only until 1926.


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Theories of Classlessness

Karl Mannheim (1955 [1929]) held that modern intellectuals form neither a class nor part

of a class. Instead, they are members of a relatively classless stratum which is not too

firmly embedded in the social order. Mannheim acknowledged that intellectuals are

typically recruited from various classes. However, he also held that, because intellectuals

participate in a common educational milieu, their class differences, and the variations in

outlook normally associated with them, tend to be suppressed. Many scholars echoed

Mannheims conclusions. Talcott Parsons (1963) asserted that intellectuals putcultural

considerations before social ones. Everett Ladd and Seymour Martin Lipset (1975) wrote

that the capacity of intellectuals for social criticism, creativity, innovation, and attention to

facts enables them to overcome their class socialization and, for that matter, the

socializing influence of many other social collectivities to which they belong.

A recent and more nuanced variant of the classlessness thesis has been proposed by

Neil Gross (2002; 2008). Gross does not regard intellectuals as entirely removed from the

sway of social forces but nonetheless emphasizes that ideological and intellectual choices

are largely a function of which ideas resonate with intellectuals self-conceptions. However,

this approach begs the question of how self-conceptions are rooted in social experience.

Categories such as class, ethnicity, and gender are admittedly too broad and static to

capture the range of social forces that influence intellectuals political and other choices,

but acknowledging this fact does not necessitate a retreat to an explanatory framework

that emphasizes coincidence or a voluntaristic phenomenology of self. Instead, it suggests

the importance of discovering more precise and dynamic social variables that influence

intellectual choice.


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Theories of Shifting Social Networks

Both class theories and theories of classlessness ignore crucial issues. Notably, intellectuals

may be found at all points on the political spectrum. Class theories may briefly note

ideological heterogeneity but tend to dismiss it as an uninteresting side issue, leaving it

unexplained. Meanwhile, theories of classlessness minimize the significance of social

influences on the shaping of ideas, thereby deflecting attention from the very issue that the

sociology of intellectuals is mandated to analyze.

A third approach seeks to overcome both these problems by focusing on the

intellectuals web of shifting group affiliations. According to Pierre Bourdieu (1984 [1979];

Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992), cultural fields tie individual and organizational actors

together in various social institutions. These cultural fields are structured as social

networks. Different positions in a social network are associated with different endowments

of economic, social, cultural, and intellectual capital. Network position is also associated

with cognitive structure. Thus, intellectuals in similar network positions share tastes, ideas,

and values (Anheier, Gerhards, and Romo, 1995; Lamont, 1987).

Randall Collinss magnificent analysis of philosophical schools takes this argument a

step farther by showing how intellectuals gain reputations by successfully competing for

attention, fame, and influence in intellectual networks. Collins demonstrates that

intellectual creativity flows through chains of personal contacts. It moves by structured

rivalries between intellectual networks. And it flowers when rival circles intersect in

cultural metropoles. Because intellectual attention space is limited, no more than six, and

often as few as three, creative schools manage to propagate their ideas across generations


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in a given culture at a given time. Creativity dries up when a single orthodoxy dominates.

Contrariwise, intellectuals create new schools of thought in response to political and

economic changes that shift the distribution of material resources needed to support their

work. The stars of intellectual life tend to be people who are involved in, or close to, such

organizational transformations. Leading innovators are as likely to be conservatives as

radicals (Collins, 1998; Gross and Frickel, 2005).

Bourdieus and Collinss mesolevel theories are compatible with Robert Bryms

approach, which, however, focuses on political allegiance rather than intellectual creativity

and influence. Developing themes in Antonio Gramscis essay on intellectuals (Gramsci,

1971 [1929-35]), Brym argues that the ideologies and political allegiances of intellectuals

depend on their social origins and the structure of opportunities for education,

employment, and political involvement they face during their careers. These opportunity

structures are, in turn, shaped by the relative power of major classes and other social

collectivities. Accordingly, to explain intellectuals ideologies and political allegiances, one

must trace their paths of social mobility as they are shaped by the capacity of classes,

ethnic groups, religious orders, and other social collectivities to expand the institutional

milieus through which intellectuals pass. To the degree these milieus are imprinted with

the interests of the collectivities that control them, they circumscribe the collective

interests reflected in intellectuals ideological and political allegiances. From this point of

view, it is an oversimplification to say that intellectuals form a class, are members of a class

or are classless. They are embedded in social networks whose ties to various classes and

other collectivities shift over time and help account for their ideologies and political


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allegiances (Brym, 1978; 2010 [1980]). This theme has also been taken up by Jerome

Karabel (1996). The remainder of this article illustrates it.

Social Origins and Institutional Opportunities

Social Origins

In Weimar Germany, professors were largely antirepublican and right-wing. Mostly, their

fathers were military officers, state bureaucrats, and academics: members or handmaidens

of the aristocracy. In contrast, nonacademic intellectuals were inclined to the left. They

tended to be children of successful participants in the industrial revolution: members of the

upstart German bourgeoisie. Similarly, in the middle of the nineteenth century, Russias

conservative and politically moderate intellectuals were recruited overwhelmingly from

the aristocracy. On the other hand, the first generation of truly radical Russian intellectuals

dates from the 1860s, and it contained in its ranks a large mixture of commoners. Their

fathers were merchants, peasants, and petty officials. These examples illustrate that

support for the traditional social order is common among intellectuals who have been

reared in upper-class families that are threatened by social change. Being born into a less

advantaged class has usually been associated with greater potential for intellectual

radicalism.

But not always. In North America, it seems that rates of upward social mobility have

historically been higher than in Europe, and class has been a less important social

distinction. As a result, class origin has less bearing on the ideologies and political

allegiances of North American than European intellectuals. Especially in the United States,

ethnic and racial origin, educational background, field of expertise, professional and


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institutional status, and generational experience matter more. Accordingly, American

surveys show that professors in small provincial universities are more likely to be

politically conservative than professors in prestigious Ivy League universities. African-

American and Jewish intellectuals are usually more left-wing than are non-Jewish white

intellectuals. Young intellectuals who work in the social sciences and cultural fields are

more likely to be left-wing than are older intellectuals with business affiliations (Ladd and

Lipset, 1975).

Economic Opportunities

As intellectuals reach adulthood and enter the job market, the structure of markets for

intellectuals skills can modify their early political socialization. An abundance of secure

jobs that allow free expression can dampen intellectuals early radical impulses. A lack of

such jobs can exert a radicalizing effect. Some intellectuals may continue to express radical

political sentiments after they have taken jobs that suit them professionally. Still, the rate

and intensity of radicalism are generally greater when the number of such jobs is fewer.

For example, the Quebec educational system began to produce substantial numbers

of highly educated French-speaking graduates in the 1960s. The new graduates found that

an English-speaking minority controlled the larger and more efficient businesses in the

private sector of the economy. Many highly educated Qubcois were shut out of good jobs.

This, among other factors, encouraged some of them to develop the idea that to become

masters in their own house Quebec must become a sovereign state. Surveys show that

intellectuals became separatists in disproportionately large numbers and were a driving

force leading to the election of separatist governments in 1976 and 1994.


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Political Opportunities

The patterns of political opportunities intellectuals face also profoundly affect their ideas

and loyalties.

At the level of social organization, political opportunities are structured by the

availability of historical agents: workers, peasants, ethnic collectivities, and other groups

that intellectuals may demarcate as the chief instruments of social change. Whether

intellectuals become, say, socialists, populists or nationalists is determined partly by which

historical agents are mobilized for political action and which are relatively politically

dormantin intellectuals milieus at a given time.

At the level of the political system, the capacity of party organizations to absorb new

talent is also important in shaping intellectuals allegiances. For example, before the 1920s,

the German Social Democratic Party had attracted most of the countrys radical

intellectuals. By the 1920s, however, it became (to use the then-current catchwords)

bossified, ossified, and bourgeoisified. Old men remained incumbents in the German

Social Democratic Party for many years. Young men had little hope of rising in its ranks.

Young women were even less likely to ascend to prominence, hindered as they were by the

institutionalized inequality and sexism that, as Dale Spender (1982) documents, has

dominated intellectual life for centuries. Lack of opportunity was one reason the young

generation of radicals turned in large numbers to the Communist Party of Germany.

If historical agents are largely unmobilized and no party organization is available to

sustain the intellectuals beliefs, a process of political disillusionment is likely to set in. The


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lack of an historical agent combined with the presence of a party organization, however, is

likely to lead to intellectual elitism.

Intellectual Elitism

Ever since Plato envisaged a society ruled by philosopher-kings, some intellectuals have

been motivated by the conviction that they are better suited than are nonintellectuals to

create and maintain ideal social arrangements. For example, in 1816 Hegel referred to

Prussia as the state of the intelligentsia. Both he and Comte characterized historical

epochs as accomplishments of the human mind, which they saw as the driving force of

history. In their judgment, the intellectual was the human minds personification.

Reinforcing this elitist view was the late-19th and early 20th century conception of scientists

and other highly educated experts as a sort of ascetic priesthood whose dispassionate

approach to their subject matter allowed them to perform extraordinary cognitive feats

promoting the progress of humanity.

Lewis Feuers studies did much to dispel the supposed ascetic roots of modern

science, emphasized by Max Weber and Robert Merton, and demonstrate the

antiauthoritarian, hedonistic, and individualistic mindset that typically accompanies

creative scientific work (Feuer, 1963; Merton, 1936; Weber, 1958 [1905]). In recent

decades, scholars working in the hybrid field known as social studies of science have

succeeded in bringing intellectual creativity even more firmly down to earth by

demonstrating how (to quote Steven Shapin) science is produced by people with bodies,

situated in time, space, culture, and society, and struggling for credibility and authority

(Shapin, 2010; Johnson, 2008)


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Turning to politics, the degree of elitism expressed by intellectuals varies

independently of their position on the left-right dimension. One finds democrats and

elitists on both the left and the right. Two sets of circumstances promote intellectual

elitism: weak participatory demands by the masses and lack of competition from other

elites.

The history of Latin America illustrates how weak mass demand for political

participation encourages intellectual elitism. For example, in the 1950s, Cuban

revolutionary intellectuals were faced with a small and reformist working class and a

politically inert peasantry. Consequently, they took matters into their own hands, forming

guerilla bands in the countryside to seize state power. The low level of popular political

participation in, and mass control over, the Cuban revolutionary party diminished the

likelihood of subsequent democratic development.

The history of socialism and communism in Russia reveals a similar pattern.

However, the Russian case is also instructive because it illustrates the opposite tendency.

Even apparently unyielding elitists can democratize if they are pressured from below.

Thus, when ties between workers and Russian Marxist intellectuals were dense during

the strike wave of the 1890s, the 1905 revolution, and the period of labor militance in

1912-14 most intellectuals wanted their parties to operate according to democratic

principles. In contrast, when working class political participation fell due to labor

quiescence caused by troughs in the business cycle, strong government and police reaction

to radical activities, and enormous losses in World War I intellectuals returned to elitist

principles of party organization.


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A second precondition of democratic practice among intellectuals is vigorous elite

competition. Aristotle argued that justice can be maximized not if philosopher-kings rule,

but if constitutions are divided against themselves if, in other words, there exists what is

now called a separation of powers between the various branches of government. Following

Aristotle, scholars now commonly believe that tyranny and arbitrary rule by an elite can be

prevented if the branches of government hold each other in check. One may invoke a

broadly similar principle in analyzing intellectual elitism. Nonintellectual elites need to

keep intellectuals in check if they are to prevent the political and social dangers that can

result from intellectuals taking Plato to heart.

The most compelling case for the benefits of elite competition derives from the

history of communism, the epitome of intellectual tyranny in the twentieth century. Yet the

dangers of intellectual elitism have hardly subsided now that the communist era has

virtually ended. In much of the world, intellectuals are making bolder claims than ever

about their ability to forecast and plan social and scientific change. Governments are

respecting those claims by seeking the advice of intellectuals, awarding them research

contracts, and employing them by the legion. Emboldened by their growing numbers and

prestige, some intellectuals, particularly in the United States and Eastern Europe, have

proclaimed themselves the ruling class of the future, the real holders of power in an era

when knowledge allegedly means more than capital in determining status.

One should not take intellectuals claims about their accomplishments too seriously.

For example, as Eva Etziony-Halevy (1985) documents, economists, the hardest of the

social scientists, have generally failed to forecast and regulate economic trends. Natural


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scientists have arguably helped to create nearly as many social problems as they have

solved.

On the other hand, the dangers of too much intellectual influence on political life

should be carefully heeded. Individual intellectuals have proved to be exemplary political

leaders, but when intellectuals are in a position to impose their blueprints on society they

often do more harm than good. The shock therapy advocated by the academics who

formed the core of the Russian government late in 1991 caused tremendous social

dislocation and political reaction that undermined reform in that country. This is only one

example of what can happen when intellectuals rule. It seems reasonable to conclude that

the practice of politics is much too serious a matter to be left only to the intellectuals.


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