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An intellectual is a person who uses his or her intellect to
study, reflect, and speculate on a variety of different ideas. In some contexts, especially
journalistic speech, intellectual often refers to academics, generally
in the humanities, especially philosophy, who speak about various issues of social or political import. These are so-called public
intellectuals — in effect communicators.
Men of letters
The man of letters stood in many cultures for what we might take to be the contemporary intellectual; the
distinction not having great weight when literacy was not fairly universal (and,
incidentally, not assumed of a woman). Men of letters are also termed literati (from
the Latin), as a group; literatus, in the singular, is hardly used in
English.
The clerisy and the intelligentsia
Coleridge speculated early in the nineteenth century on the concept of the clerisy, a class
rather than a type of individual, and a secular equivalent of the (Anglican)
clergy, with a duty of upholding (national) culture. The idea of the intelligentsia, in comparison, dates from roughly the same time, and is based more concretely on the class
of 'mental' or white-collar workers.
Modes of 'intellectual class'
From that time onwards, in Europe and elsewhere, some variants of the idea of an
intellectual class have been important (not least to intellectuals, self-styled). The degrees of actual involvement in art, or politics, journalism and education, of nationalist or internationalist or ethnic sentiment, constituting the 'vocation' of an intellectual, have never become fixed. Some
intellectuals have been vehemently anti-academic; at times universities and their professoriat have been synonymous with
intellectualism, but in other periods and some places the centre of gravity of intellectual life has been elsewhere.
One can notice a sharpening of terms, in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Just as the coinage scientist would
come to mean a professional, the man of letters would more often be assumed to be a professional
writer, perhaps having the breadth of a journalist or essayist, but not necessarily with the engagement of the intellectual.
Outside the West
In ancient China literati referred to the government officials who formed the
ruling class in China for over two thousand years. They were a status group
of educated laymen, not ordained priests.
They were not a hereditary group as their position depended on their knowledge
of writing and literature. After 200 B.C. the system of selection of candidates was influenced by Confucianism and established its ethic among the literati.
The Hundred Flowers Campaign in China was
largely based on the government's wish for a mobilisation of intellectuals; with very sour consequences later. This is perhaps
typical of a state's instrumentalist approach to the existence of an
intellectual class.
Some public intellectuals
These figures might represent the range, if not the extent.
Related articles
See also
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