Intellectuals and their Publics: Perspectives from the Social Sciences - by Christian Fleck, Andreas Hess, E. Stina Lyon

 

Book Description

Reflecting and commenting on their professional calling are two activities intellectuals do regularly – and they do so with passion. Ever since the term ‘intellectual’ became defined in more specific terms at the turn of the last century during the Dreyfus Affair, intellectuals have been engaged in debates in which they try to position themselves sociologically, politically and culturally. A newly defined modern public has become the space where intellectuals float their ideas or where they battle out their differences against real and imaginary rivals – sometimes even to the extent of trying to exclude competitors from the agora. Over the years, new groups of intellectuals have entered the public arena while older ones have disappeared. New social differentiations developed and with the help of new conceptual tools intellectuals have tried to make sense of some of the changes. Just a quick cursory look reveals that the twenty-first-century intellectual is very different in his or her aspirations and functioning role when compared to the type that more than a hundred years ago was just about to emerge. Today there exist considerably more agendas and competing views in terms of what defines intellectual life and what intellectuals should or should not do. The latest but certainly not the last invention in a series of such self-creations is that of the so-called ‘public intellectual’.

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