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Intellectuals, Sociology of
Robert J Brym, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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.
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 (CE c.1300–1600) were the first influential group
resembling today’s 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 fourteenth century to More, Erasmus, and Rabelais in the
sixteenth century influenced the Reformation, the scientific
revolution, and the Age of Reason.
Only since about 1600, however, have intellectuals become
a large, moderately well-defined, and occasionally selfconscious 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
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 12
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 nineteenth century
that ‘intellectual’ 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 nineteenth century has the term ‘intellectual’ gained widespread
acceptance and succeeded in unwrapping itself from quotation
marks.
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. Julien 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 why intellectuals do
what they do.
Three main analytical traditions inform the sociological
study of intellectuals. Sociologists have regarded intellectuals as
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(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 Wac1aw 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
twentieth-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 argued that intellectuals constitute
a class that enjoys increasing power. Alvin Gouldner (1979)
held that intellectuals comprise a new ‘emancipatory class.’
Barbara Ehrenreich 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 Iván Szelényi (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 homogenous, and rising or
dominant class.
Steven Brint’s 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
the Zeitgeist of 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 seem 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 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 Iván
Szelényi (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
influence 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 socioeconomic 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 world’s population (in China, Iran, Mexico, the
countries of the Ottoman Empire, Portugal, and Russia) was
caught up in democratic revolutions led largely by selfidentified 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
Portugal’s democratic constitution survived, and then only
until 1926.
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 Mannheim’s conclusions. Talcott Parsons (1963)
asserted that intellectuals put ‘cultural 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 selfconceptions 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
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Intellectuals, Sociology of
of discovering more precise and dynamic social variables that
influence intellectual choice.
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 intellectual’s 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 et al.,
1995; Lamont, 1987).
Randall Collins’s 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 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).
Bourdieu’s and Collins’s mesolevel theories are compatible with Robert Brym’s approach, which, however, focuses on
political allegiance rather than intellectual creativity and
influence. Developing themes in Antonio Gramsci’s 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
279
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 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, Russia’s 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 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 are 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 leftwing 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
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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 Frenchspeaking 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 Québécois 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.
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 dormant in 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 country’s 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 intellectual’s beliefs,
a process of political disillusionment is likely to set in. The
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 ‘philosopherkings,’ 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 mind’s personification. Reinforcing this elitist view was the late nineteenth and early twentieth-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 Feuer’s 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 mind-set 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).
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 militancy 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.
A second precondition of democratic practice among
intellectuals is vigorous elite competition. Aristotle argued
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Intellectuals, Sociology of
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 among the 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 EtzioniHalevy (1985) documents, economists, the ‘hardest’ of the
social scientists, have generally failed to forecast and
regulate economic trends. Natural 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.
See also: Enlightenment; Intellectual History; Knowledge,
Sociology of; Literacy Education; Literacy and Illiteracy,
History of; Renaissance; Science and Technology Studies,
History of.
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