Intellectuals and the Popular Culture

SYMPOSIUM ON PROFESSIONALIZATION 507 11 Or as King Lear put it in a somewhat different context, 'who's in, who's out.' GEORGE WOODCOCK Intellectuals and the Popular Culture I Are we back in a new form with the old battles of Town and Gown?' I ask myself as I read the letter inviting me to take part in a discussion that begins with the question: Is there a gulf between the educated, non-academic public and the university intellectuals, a gulf that is new (or widening) and that is both the cause of a decline in public culture and the consequence of the intellectuals' commitment to their university professions? As a Towner who was once a Gowner I detect a hint of academic arrogance in the very way this question has been phrased. On one side we have the'educated non-academic public'; on the other side the 'university intellectuals.' What is this 'educated non-academic public'? High-school graduates or university graduates? And where stand the autodidactic geniuses? What, also, has happened to the non-university intellectuals? Or are we to suppose they do not exist, or perhaps never existed? Are we to pose a confrontation between a relatively small - if growing - class of academic experts, and a mass of what, for lack of a better definition, one might call 'common readers'? I will leave for the time being the dependent question of whether there has been a real 'decline in public culture,' and concentrate on the fact that before we talk about intellectuals we need to define them, and that the task of definition may not be as easy as it first seems. In that direction other cultures, less individualistic ones, are perhaps at an advantage in comparison with those of western Europe and North America, where intellectual vocations tend to follow the fissiparous traditions of ancient Greece. In tsarist Russia, and in Russia even today, the word 'intelligentsia' does not merely mean those who follow intellectual pursuits; thanks to the political circumstances of nineteenthcentury Russia, when literature - as distinct from public debate - bore so much of the burden of oblique and direct criticism of the status quo, the intelligentsia became a body of people rather like an unblessed priesthood , drawn from all levels - ex-serfs to princes - yet united in its purpose of forming public opinion. The main difference between the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia and similar close-knit groups marked by their intellectual quality, like the Confucian mandarinate of UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1989 508 GEORGE WOODCOCK imperial China, was that the tsars had not yet found a way of harnessing these intelligences; the Bolsheviks almost succeeded in doing so. The classic Russian intelligentsia were not usually university teachers, though they wielded much influence among the students, but rather educated noblemen - personified by figures like Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky - who tended to dominate the literary scene and pose quasi-political questions, and the new grouping of plebeians, sons of merchants, priests, or even serfs, whose most distinguished representative was Chekhov, and who flourished particularly, like Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, and Pisarev, in the journalism that played so important a role in the intellectual development of nineteenth-century Russia. To be regarded as a member of the intelligentsia did not imply any special political direction; the conservative Dostoevsky, the liberal Turgenev, and the radical Chernyshevsky were all included. When the concept of a class or caste of intellectuals first emerged in Europe during the nineteenth century, the term had no necessary connection with an academic calling. It applied in general to anyone who dealt with ideas in writing, though there was an ideological slant to the way the word was used, because the concept implied an emphasis on the primacy of reason, which linked the nineteenth-century intellectuals to the writers of the eclaircissement, the precursors of the French Revolution. Through the nineteenth century that association of the intellectuals with left-wing thought continued. Marx accepted the intellectuals as that part ofthe bourgeoisie which allied itselfto the workers and could be of service in shaping their ideas. (He clearly saw himself as one of them.) In late nineteenth-century France the liberal supporters...