Intellectuals: History of the Concept

Christophe Charle, Professeur dhistoire contemporaine lUniversit de Paris I, Institut dHistoire Moderne et contemporaine,
Paris, France
2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
This article is reproduced from the previous edition, volume 11, pp. 76277631, 2001, Elsevier Ltd., with updates by the Editor.

Abstract
A historical and comparative approach to the term intellectuals or its equivalent in other languages shows the priority of the
French use, in but also the persistent differences in its meaning even when translated in other contexts. The French model
inuenced other European countries, but it is only in Spain and Italy that the political mobilization of intellectuals was very
similar to the French case. Whether in Russia (with the intelligentsia) or in German-speaking countries (with the Gebildete)
or in the Anglo-Saxon world, the political, religious, and academic specities remained very strong during the whole of the
twentieth century.

The noun intellectuels appeared in France in the 1890s and

was largely diffused thanks to the polemics around the Dreyfus
Affair (in particular the so-called Manifeste des intellectuels,
published after the famous Jaccuse paper by Zola issued on
13 January 1898, in LAurore). This diffusion not only occurred
in France but also, sooner or later, in the whole of Europe and
even in America (North and South) (Drouin, 1994). There are
two exceptions to this large diffusion of the new concept:
Germany and Russia where there existed former and akin
notions, Intelligenz and intelligentsia, already used as social or
political denominations (Mller, 1971). Previous uses of the
English translation, intellectuals, are attested too before the
1890s, but they seem to have been too rare to have known
a broad social circulation (Williams, 1976). In the same way, in
America, intellectuals became a common notion only in
connection with newspaper commentaries about the Dreyfus
Affair (Bender, 1987).
To understand why this new terminology received a European or even international diffusion, it is necessary to recall the
issues of this historical moment. What was at stake in this crisis
was not only a political problem but also the afrmation of
a new group, defender of universal values against the reason of
State (Charle, 1990). These values justied the fact that writers,
artists, scholars, students, members of liberal professions, and
so on, intervened on a collective basis in the political debate,
although they were not themselves, for the main part, professional politicians. The other specicity of this moment was
that, in other countries, this same cause or other similar ones
favored the intervention of intellectuals, but generally in
various patterns and with different contents. Since that period,
social sciences have debated at a theoretical level, in order to
nd universal characteristics underlying this new vocabulary
(Shils, 1972). As a matter of fact, the emergence of intellectuals
cannot be assimilated to the apparition of a new permanent
social group as some historians or sociologists suggest regularly, wrongly mixing intellectuals, intelligentsia and professions (Bell, 1973; Perkin, 1989). To know in reality what is
meant by the words, intellectuals, intellectuels, Intellektuelle,
intellettuali, intelectuales, and so on, it is necessary to dene
them within their specic cultural, social, and historical
contexts.

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 12

The French Case

In France, even before the Dreyfus Affair, the neologism intellectuels was used by avant-garde circles as a social mark. The
intellectuel was some kind of mandarin, who despised politics
and wanted to distinguish himself from middle class, dominant writers and academics. Intellectuel was a sort of superlative
of what Flaubert meant by the word artiste (Bourdieu, 1992).
But, since the neologism was widely used during the Dreyfus
Affair, the initial cultural meaning was replaced by a strong
emphasis laid upon the political acception. In the rst phase of
the Dreyfus affair, the intellectuels were an equivalent of dreyfusards and, afterwards, when antidreyfusard intellectuals also
intervened in a collective way, the word intellectuels began to
dene a special category of people who defended political
positions based on arguments of social authority, i.e., their
competence as thinkers, historians, scientists, professors,
writers, or artists.
In France, the birth of intellectuels may be rst explained by
a growing inadequacy of former cultural patterns confronted to
the buoyant cultural expansion of the last decades of the nineteenth century. Intellectual professions, far more numerous
now, defended their social and symbolic status at once so that
collective attitudes appeared, breaking with older individualistic
habits. But this defense may be argued on two different grounds:
with intellectual and pure values or on professional and
pragmatic issues. Against avant-garde writers or academics,
generally militating for the rst option, professional associations appeared during the same period that were more attached
to material interests. The rst use of the term intellectuels
was reserved for the rst type of elitist fraternity. It was to be the
germ of its political transformation as for the Russian intelligentsia diffused a bit earlier in the 1870s. As in Russia too,
reformed universities played a major role in the process of
emergence and mobilization of nonconformist intellectuals.
The second paradoxical factor of ideological and political
change, was the early crisis of parliamentary democracy in
France. After the stabilization of the Third Republic, apolitism
predominated among intellectuals as if the end of history was
already reached. A new politicization occurred with the crisis of
ofcial parties and the emergence of extremist factions, which

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Intellectuals: History of the Concept

had a large echo among avant-garde writers (in particular

anarchism and, to a lesser degree, socialism). This new trend
prepared what is the specicity of the Dreyfus Affair, the
invention of a new relationship with politics outside the ofcial
political scene. Intellectuals in this new terminology pretended
to practice politics in a different way. This was possible because
the legitimacy of Republican elite laid on the same bases as the
legitimacy of intellectuals themselves, i.e., upon merit and
individual talent. But in so far as these elite appeared incompetent or corrupted after different crises and scandals (Boulangism, Panama scandal, and so on), intellectuals preserved
from these faults might pretend to offer an alternative elite
necessary to lead any genuine democracy.
Students, avant-garde writers, and even younger generations
of academics, before and during the Dreyfus Affair, expressed
these new revendications of being the true representatives of
the people against politicians. The State itself, with its growing
intolerance towards literary innovations or extremist parties
(especially anarchism) contributed to the mobilization of
authors against juridical prosecutions through collective
manifestos just before the Dreyfus affair.
The Dreyfus affair presented both a true continuity with
preceding years and a break due to the scale of mobilization.
Afterwards, the main following mobilizations of intellectuals
obeyed the same collective rites and values (Ory and Sirinelli,
1986). Its founding importance was to prove that this type of
mobilization might lead to real political consequences. This
twofold mobilization (of dreyfusards and antidreyfusards) was
new and dened, on both sides of the political scene, a general
denition of intellectuals, which was not limited to leftist
intellectuals. On the contrary in other countries, the equivalents of intellectuels are, generally speaking, conned to one side
of the political spectrum.

The Peculiarities of English Intellectuals

In contrast with France, it is generally argued that no intellectuals exist at all, in the continental acception, in the UK. Since
around 1980, British historians and sociologists reacted against
this strong and vulgarized anti-intellectual bias. Some authors
speak of an intelligentsia (Allen, 1986; Heyck, 1982), i.e., an
elitist avant-garde, others of public moralists, which enhances
the role of dominant and academic intellectuals (Collini,
1991) or of a professional class which assimilates intellectual
professions to a new class (Perkin, 1989). A comparative
approach shows that two specic factors may explain the strong
difference with the French situation, in spite of the proximity of
economic and political conditions in intellectual life, the
persistent elitism of English academic life and the relative
proximity between intellectual professions and political elite.
Established elites, even if they were obliged to reform and
enlarge the political system at the end of the nineteenth
century, were not contested as an illegitimate power elite, to the
degree they were in France. In fact, English dominant intellectuals mainly shared the same values and background as
gentlemen and political leaders because they were largely
issued from the same public schools and universities.
In front of these dominant intellectuals, appeared, in the
last decades of the twentieth century, new types of intellectuals

who presented outsider proles. The best known were the

Fabians who could not attend the best colleges and universities
and had to nd their way through journalism, literature, new
academic institutions (e.g., the London School of Economics)
or militant politics. But these avant-gardes were very different
from contemporary French avant-gardes. They limited their
intervention to one main eld: for the Fabians, social and
political questions, for aesthetes, aesthetic life, and so on. They
pretended to create a voluntary structure and to indirectly
inuence the ofcial sphere indirectly, not at all to destroy or
affront it directly.
Even when mobilization occurred on a larger scale, as
during the Boers war, English intellectuals used the ofcial
means of actions and respected legal frameworks. Finally, the
main difference lay in the very different function of the State in
England and in Continental Europe. In England, militant
intellectuals endeavored to enlarge its role to correct social
injustice, whereas, in France and even more in Germany,
intellectuals tried rst to weaken its authoritarian trends.

The German Case

Even if the word Intellektuelle, derived from French, continues
almost until now to bear a derogatory nuance (Bering, 1978),
the German genuine equivalents Intelligenz, Gebildete, and
Geistige, have been used for a long time but do not imply, as
the French term, the same political or social behaviors. This
early appearance of the question of intellectuals may be
shown through the recurrent discussion about the academic
proletariate (rst in the Vormrz period, then in the 1880s,
and nally in the Weimar period: Titze, 1990), with the
ideological debates within the social-democratic party about
the place of Intelligenz (Gilcher-Holthey, 1986), and also with
the Antisemitimusstreit in 1879. This last famous polemic
about the role of Jews in German society between the
conservative historian Treitschke and his liberal colleague
Mommsen, a former Forty-eighter (former participant to
revolutionary troubles of 1848 in Germany), appears very
near, in its arguments, to the debate between opposing French
dreyfusards and antidreyfusards. The rights of minorities and, in
particular, of individuals and Jews, lay at the center. Other
affairs concerning academic freedom (Arons case or Spahn
case), or freedom of creation, like the mobilization against the
lex Heinze (1900), show too that the debates about intellectual autonomy were as crucial in Germany as in France and
that they succeeded several times to mobilize some groups of
intellectuals (Charle, 1996).
But, in all cases, mobilization was limited to specic groups
and to particular issues which did not put into question the
whole structure of State itself as in France. A mere political
explanation (an Empire opposed to a Republic) does not
sufce. What was specic and new in the Dreyfus case was the
convergence of different intellectual groups about common
values. In Germany, the corporatist ethos remained stronger
even about general issues; free intellectuals and State intellectuals (mainly university professors) despised each other.
Academics began at that time to live apart from the political
sphere and preferred a general cultural function as State or
Bildungs defenders through different associations. Only a small

Intellectuals: History of the Concept

minority of free intellectuals and very few in the Academe put

into question dominant elite or national causes.
The Gebildete assumed that they represented the true public
opinion and that they were the best interpreters of general
causes, but they intended to remain in their own eld in order
to serve their country best. This German intellectual and
geographical fragmentation hindered the linkage between local
or professional struggles for autonomy (Engelhardt, 1986;
Hbinger and Mommsen, 1993; Ringer, 1969, 1992).

Southern Europe
In Spain as in Italy, the local equivalent of intellectuels seemed
also to be in use in the 1890s in connection with, or even
before, the Dreyfus case. The French example was very inuential for the Spanish and Italian intellectuals because French
cultural inuence, in the two peninsulas, was already very
strong since the French Revolution. Also, the inner social and
political situations of Spanish and Italian intellectuals presented some analogies with the French context. As their French
homologues, they thought that their countries went through
a deep crisis (economic backwardness, military defeat in Spain,
emigration, social riots and parliamentary corruption in Italy),
which implied some sort of public intervention to nd solutions. The strong anticlericalism and antimilitarism, the link
between intellectuals and extreme left movements, the emergence of a new nationalism in both countries, also recalled the
French debates at the turn of the twentieth century (Serrano
and Salan, 1988). Obvious differences also existed: the
weaker public audience of intellectuals depending on the
cultural backwardness of popular classes (high level of analphabetism) and the persistence of a large sector of opinion
among Catholics, hostile to the cultural inheritance of
Enlightenment, very inuent in both countries, and an overproduction of laureati in Italy which could explain a strong
commitment of academics to extremist parties (Barbagli, 1974,
1982; Michels, 1921).

Twentieth-Century Changes of Meanings

The intertwining of the sociological and the political or ethical
viewpoints was perpetually renewed during the history of
French intellectuals after the Dreyfus affair. A new sociologization of the word occurred with the attacks against
previous dreyfusards in the pre-world-war period. The parti
intellectuel, to use Pguys phrase, was charged by their former
allies (for example Georges Sorel) for having used the political
struggle in order to conquer eminent positions of power. For
their critics, this political party in fact constituted a social
cluster of arrivists, a new elite of mandarins backing upon leftist
politicians (Prochasson, 1992).
Between the two World Wars, there was a revival of the
political and ideological emphasis on the meaning of the word
during what has been called the Franco-french war between
the right-wing parti de lintelligence and the left-wing intellectuels de gauche. This trend is enhanced because, at the same
time, extreme left movements tried to restrict the notion to
a sociological sense. The inuence of Soviet Marxism may be

275

found here in which intellectuels become a mere synonym for

the Russian word intelligentsia which is nearer a sociological
concept after the October revolution than the term intellectuels
is in French. Intellectuels in the phraseology of the Communist
Parties are assimilated to a social group in order to deny them
any political autonomy and oblige them to dene their political attitude within the limits of the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy
and to renounce to their own vision which is, in the French
political tradition, far more linked with the French Revolution
legacy and the defense of Human Rights (Benda, 1927). This
intertwining of two traditions after the 1930s explains why
leftist intellectuals used social concepts to attack their rightist
opponents, while in contrast, rightist intellectuals laid the stress
on the idealist conception of the intellectuals role; they
opposed themselves to materialism (i.e., leftist intellectuals
inuenced by Marxism) instead of only taking the defense of
tradition as before (Sapiro, 1999).
The decline of Marxism in the intelligentsia and the excess of
sociological terrorism in intellectual struggles during the 1950s
and 1960s (Boschetti, 1985) explain why French contemporary
intellectual life is dominated by some sort of revival of the
primitive meaning of the word intellectuel. This complete
historical cycle is one of the origins of the renewed interest for
the study of intellectuals as political and social actors by French
and foreign scholars in the 1980s and 1990s (Bourdieu, 1992;
Jennings, 1993; Judt, 1992; Julliard and Winock, 1996;
Sirinelli, 1990; Trebitsch and Granjon, 1998).
Anti-intellectualism, which was so frequent in England
and Germany before World War I seemed to somewhat
decline after the mobilization of all types of intellectuals
(scholars as well as writers or journalists) during the Union
sacre for propaganda or practical applications devoted to
National Defense. It conferred on them a new importance in
all political contexts. After World War I, the democratization
of politics, in both the UK and Weimar Germany, now placed
intellectuals in a political context quite similar to the French
one. The growing inuence of left parties, of Marxist ideas, of
international questions (communism, fascism, pacism, fear
for a new world war) gave birth to international debates
among European intellectuals (or even American, if the case
of New York intellectuals may be included: Wald, 1987).
Nevertheless, this did not mean that the specic national
traditions were forgotten. Even if notions like Intellektuelle or
intelligentsia were present more than before in the German or
English public debate, they never obtained the general inuence or consensus which their equivalents enjoyed in France,
Italy, or Spain (Bering, 1978; Stark, 1984). Even innovative
sociologists such as Karl Mannheim continued in general to
use the older lexis even to propose their new conceptions of
a free-oating intelligentsia (freischwebende Intelligenz:
Mannheim, 1929). Debates about the social decline of
intellectual workers in Germany or Central Europe used too
old phrases such as geistige Arbeiter (Jarausch, 1990, Titze,
1990). The anti-intellectualism of the Nazi movement and
the huge migration (after 1933) of progressist or Jewish
intellectuals out of Germany and Central Europe stopped, for
almost two decades, this timid convergence with the Latin
tradition of intellectuals.
The decline and fall of the different fascist or communist
regimes in the second half of the twentieth century gave a new

276

Intellectuals: History of the Concept

actuality to the oppositional gure of intellectuals, in particular

in Central and Eastern Europe (the dissidents who recalled the
nineteenth century meaning of intelligentsia). In Southern
Europe, in Africa, Asia, or Latin America, revolutionary intellectuals or militants for the Human Rights also rejuvenated the
nineteenth century European tradition of intellectual youth
mobilized for the nation or populist projects. All these
convergences or political cycles explain why the historical
notion of intellectuals continues to be at the center of many
historical, sociological, or philosophical reexions, trying until
today to nd general or transhistorical denitions of this term.

See also: Elites, Anthropology of; Elites: Sociological Aspects;

Intellectuals, Sociology of; Mannheim, Karl (18931947);
Professions and Professionalization, History of; Prosopography
(Collective Biography); Social Scientists as Experts and Public
Intellectuals.

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