Could a social function for intellectuals—that is to say, could intellectuals—have existed before the invention of writing? Hardly. There has always been a social function for shamans, priests, magi, or other servants and masters of rites, and we may assume also for those whom we would today call artists. But how could intellectuals have existed before the invention of a system of writing and numbers that needed to be manipulated, understood, interpreted, learned, and preserved? However, once these modern instruments of communication, calculation, and, above all, memory had arrived, the exiguous minorities who were masters of these skills probably exercised more social power for a time than intellectuals have enjoyed ever since. The masters of writing could, as in the early cities of the first agrarian economies in Mesopotamia, become the first “clergy,” a class of priestly rulers. Until well into the 19th and 20th centuries, the monopoly of literacy in the lettered world, and the education necessary for its mastery, also implied a monopoly of power, safeguarded against competition by education in specialized, ritually or culturally prestigious written languages.
On the other hand, the pen was never mightier than the sword. The warriors could always conquer the writers, but without the latter there could be neither polities, nor larger economies, nor, even less so, the great historical empires of the old world. The educated provided the ideologies of imperial cohesion and the cadres of its administration. In China they turned the Mongolian conquerors into imperial dynasties while the empires of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane soon broke up for lack of them. The first masters of the educational monopoly were to be what Antonio Gramsci has called “the organic intellectuals of all major systems of political domination.”
All this belongs to the past. The emergence of a class of laymen literate in the regional vernaculars in the late Middle Ages created the possibility of intellectuals who were less closely determined by their social function, and appealing, as producers and consumers of literary and other communications, to a new though small public sphere. The rise of the modern territorial state once again required a growing body of functionaries and other “organic” intellectuals. These were increasingly trained in modernized universities and by the secondary-school teachers who had graduated from them. Yet the rise of universal primary education and the huge expansion of secondary and university education after World War II created a vastly greater reservoir of the literate and intellectually educated than ever before. Meanwhile, the extraordinary expansion of the new media industries in the 20th century vastly expanded the economic scope for intellectuals unconnected with any official apparatus.
Until the middle of the 19th century we are talking about a very small group. The body of students who played so great a role in the 1848 revolutions consisted of 4,000 young men (not, as yet, any women) in Prussia and 7,000 in the entire Habsburg empire outside Hungary. The novelty of this new stratum of “free intellectuals” did not lie simply in the fact that they shared the education and cultural knowledge of the ruling classes, which were themselves by now expected to have the literary and cultural formation the Germans call Bildung, a trend increasingly shared by the business classes, but also in the fact that they enjoyed a far greater possibility of earning a living as freelance intellectuals. New technical and scientific industries, and institutions for the production of science and culture, universities, the fields of journalism, publicity, and advertising, stage, and entertainment, all provided new methods of earning their living. Toward the end of the 19th century, capitalist enterprise had produced so much wealth that a number of the children and other dependents of the business middle classes could devote themselves entirely to intellectual and cultural activities. The families Mann, Wittgenstein, and Warburg are cases in point.
If we accept the marginal group of the Bohème, free intellectuals had no recognized social identity. They would simply be regarded as members of the educated bourgeoisie (in J.M. Keynes’s words, “my class the educated bourgeoisie”) or at best as a subgroup of the bourgeoisie as Bildungsbürger or Akademiker. Not until the last third of the 19th century are they described as a collective of “intellectuals” or “the intelligentsia": from 1860 on, in a turbulent czarist Russia, then in a France shaken by the Dreyfus affair. In both cases what seemed to make them recognizable as a group was the combination of mental activities and critical interventions in politics. Even today current language often tends to associate the words “intellectual” and “in opposition"—which in the days of Soviet socialism meant “politically unreliable"—not always correctly. However, the rise of a mass reading public and therefore the propagandist potential of the new media provided unexpected possibilities of prominence for well-known intellectuals that even governments could utilize. Even after a century it is embarrassing to recall the miserable manifesto of the 93 German intellectuals, as well as those of their French and British peers, designed to reinforce the spiritual case for their respective belligerent governments in the First World War. What made these individuals such valuable signatories of such manifestoes was not their expertise in public affairs, but their reputation as writers, actors, musicians, natural scientists, and philosophers.
The “short 20th century” of revolutions and wars of ideological religion was to become the characteristic era of political engagement for intellectuals. Not only were they defending their own causes in the epoch of anti-Fascism and later of state socialism, but they were recognized on both sides as acknowledged public heavyweights of the mind. Their period of glory falls between the end of the Second World War and the collapse of communism. This was the great age of countermobilizations: against nuclear war, against the last imperial wars of old Europe and the first of the new American world empire (Algeria, Suez, Cuba, Vietnam), against Stalinism, against the Soviet invasion of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and so on. Intellectuals were on the front line of almost all of them.
One such example, the British campaign for nuclear disarmament, was founded by a well-known writer, the editor of the period’s most prestigious intellectual weekly, a physicist, and two journalists; it immediately elected the philosopher Bertrand Russell as its president. The eminent names in art and literature rushed to join, from Benjamin Britten to Henry Moore and E.M. Forster, among them the historian E.P. Thompson, who was to be the most prominent face in the European nuclear-disarmament movement after 1980. Everyone knew the names of the great French intellectuals—Sartre, Camus—and those of the dissident intellectuals in the U.S.S.R., Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov. Prominent intellectuals were on the masthead of the influential literature of communist disillusion (The God That Failed). The secret services of the United States even found it worth their while to fund and found special organizations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom to win European intellectuals away from their unfortunate lack of enthusiasm for Cold War Washington. This was also the period when, for the first time since 1848, the universities of the Western world, now dramatically expanding and multiplying, could be regarded by their governments as nurseries of political and social opposition and, indeed, sometimes of revolution.
This age of the intellectual as the chief public face of political opposition has retreated into the past.
This age of the intellectual as the chief public face of political opposition has retreated into the past. Where are the great campaigners and signatories of manifestoes? With a few rare exceptions, most notably Noam Chomsky, they are silent or dead. Where are the celebrated maîtres à penser of France, the successors of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Camus, and Raymond Aron, of Foucault, Althusser, Derrida, and Bourdieu? The ideologists of the late 20th century preferred to abandon the task of pursuing reason and social change, leaving them to the automatic operations of a world of purely rational individuals, allegedly maximizing their benefits through a rationally operating market that naturally tended, when free of outside interference, toward a lasting equilibrium. In a society of unceasing mass entertainment, the activists now found intellectuals to be less useful inspirers of good causes than were world-famous rock musicians or film stars. The philosophers could no longer compete with Bono or Eno unless they reclassified themselves as that new figure in the new world of the universal media show, a “celebrity.” We are living in a new era, at least until the universal noise of Facebook self-expression and the egalitarian ideals of the Internet have had their full public effect.
The decline of the great protesting intellectuals is thus due not only to the end of the Cold War, but to the depoliticization of Western citizens in a period of economic growth and the triumph of the consumer society. The road from the democratic ideal of the Athenian agora to the irresistible temptations of the shopping center has shrunk the space available for the great demonic force of the 19th and 20th centuries: the belief that political action was the way to improve the world. Indeed, the object of neoliberal globalization was precisely to reduce the size, scope, and public interventions of the state. In this it was partly successful.
However, another element determined the shape of the new era. This was the crisis of traditional values and perspectives, perhaps, above all, the shedding of the old belief in the global progress of reason, science, and the possibility of improving the human condition. Ever since the American and French revolutions, the vocabulary of the 18th-century Enlightenment, with its firm confidence in the future of the ideologies rooted in these great upheavals, has disseminated to the champions of political and social progress all over the globe. A coalition of these ideologies and their patron states won perhaps its last triumph in the victory over Hitler in the Second World War. But since the 1970s the values of the Enlightenment have been retreating, faced with the anti-universal powers of “blood and soil” and the radical-reactionary tendencies developing in all world religions. Even in the West we see the rise of a new irrationality hostile to science, while the belief in an irresistible progress gives way to the fear of an inevitable environmental catastrophe.
And the intellectuals in this new era? The enormous growth in higher education has transformed them into an influential class of political significance. Since 1968 it has been evident that students en masse are easily mobilizable, not only nationally but even across frontiers. The unprecedented revolution in personal communications has greatly reinforced their capacity for public action. The election of the university teacher Barack Obama and the Arab Spring of 2011 are among recent examples.
The explosive progress of science and technology has created an “information society” in which production and the economy are more dependent than ever before on intellectual activity, that is to say, on men and women with university degrees and on the centers of their formation, the universities. This means that even the most reactionary and authoritarian regimes have to allow a certain degree of freedom to the sciences in universities. In the former U.S.S.R., academe provided the only effective forum for dissent and social criticism. Mao’s China, which virtually abolished higher education during the Cultural Revolution, has learned the same lesson since. To some extent this has also benefited China’s humanist and arts faculties, though these are economically and technologically less essential.
The huge growth in higher education tended to transform the degree or tertiary diploma into an essential qualification for middle-class and professional jobs, therefore turning graduates into members of the “superior classes,” at least in the eyes of the less educated. It has been easy for demagogues to present the “intellectuals” or the so-called “liberal establishment” as a presumptuous and morally unsatisfactory elite, enjoying economic and cultural privileges. In many parts of the West, notably the United States and Britain, the educational gap is at risk of becoming a class division between those whose university certificates became surefire entry tickets to career prestige and success and the resentful rest.
They were not the really rich, that tiny percentage of the population who succeeded in the last 30 years of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, in acquiring wealth beyond the dreams of avarice: men and sometimes women whose individual assets were as large as the GDP of many medium-size countries. Overwhelmingly their fortunes came from business and political power, although some of them were no doubt intellectuals by origin whether as graduates or, as in many striking cases in the United States, college dropouts. Paradoxically the luxury they flaunted with increasing self-confidence after the fall of communism provided a kind of link with the uneducated masses, whose only chance of emerging from their condition was to join the few hundreds in any country who reached the top without letters or business gifts—football players, stars of media culture, and winners of gigantic lottery prizes. Statistically, a poor person’s chance of following a similar trajectory was infinitesimal, but those who managed it really did have money and success to flaunt. In some ways that made it easier to mobilize the economically exploited, the failures and losers of capitalist society, against what American reactionaries called “the liberal establishment,” with whom they seemed to have virtually nothing in common.
It was only after some years of the most severe depression in the Western economy since the 1930s that resentment of economic polarization began to displace resentment of imputed intellectual superiority. Curiously its two most visible expressions were formulated by intellectuals. The general collapse of confidence in the ability of the free market (the “American dream”) to produce a better future for all—indeed, the growing pessimism about the future of the existing economic system—was first brought into the open by economic journalists and, with the rarest exceptions, not by the super-rich themselves. The occupation of sites close to Wall Street and other centers of international banking and finance under the slogan “We are the 99 percent” as against the 1 percent of the superrich, clearly struck a notable chord of public sympathy. Of course these demonstrators, establishing their tented camps on enemy soil, were, as so often, what has been called the stage army of intellectual activism, the mobilizable detachment of students and bohemians, conducting skirmishes in the hope they would turn into battles.
Nevertheless the question arises: How can the ancient, independent critical tradition of the 19th- and 20th-century intellectuals survive in the new era of political irrationality, reinforced by its own doubts about the future? It is a paradox of our time that irrationality in politics and ideology have had no difficulty in coexisting with, indeed in using, advanced technology.
Mankind today has characteristically got used to lives of internal contradiction, torn between a world of feeling and a technology impervious to emotion, between the realm of human-scale experience and sense-knowledge and that of meaningless magnitudes, between the “common sense” of everyday life and the incomprehensibility, except to exiguous minorities, of the intellectual operations that create the framework in which we live. Is it possible to make this systematic nonrationalism of human lives compatible with a world that depends more than ever on Max Weber’s rationality in science and society? Admittedly the globalization of the media of information, of language and of the Internet no longer make it totally possible for even the most powerful state authority to isolate a country physically and mentally from the remainder of the world. Nevertheless the question remains.
On the other hand, while high technology can be used, though not further advanced, without original thinking, science needs ideas. Hence even the most systematically counterintellectual society today has a greater need of people who have ideas, and of environments in which they can flourish. We may safely assume that these individuals will also have critical ideas about the society and the environment in which they live. In the emerging countries of East and Southeast Asia and the Muslim world, they probably still constitute a force for political reform and social change in the old manner. It is also possible that they may in our times of crisis once again constitute such a force in a beleaguered and uncertain West. Indeed, it may be argued that at present the locus of the forces of systematic social criticism is to be found in the new strata of the university-educated. But thinking intellectuals alone are in no position to change the world, even though no such change is possible without their contribution. That requires a united front of ordinary people and intellectuals. With the exception of a few isolated instances, this is probably harder to achieve today than in the past. That is the dilemma of the 21st century.
Eric Hobsbawm, who died in 2012, was a professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London. This essay, which originally appeared in German in 2010, was translated by the author himself, and is excerpted from Fractured Times: Culture and Society in the Twentieth Century, just out from the New Press.
