>From: <JBrown72073 at cs.com>:
But I'd define intellectual for the
>moment
> >as someone who gets paid to study
Well, that rules out some of the most famous intellectuals in history: Socrates, who declined payment; Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Bacon, Leibniz, who either didn't have had to work for a living (the first two) or had to make a living at a trade (lensgrinding, law, diplomacy), not to mention one Karl Marx, who made a living as a journalist, and his friend Engels, who ran a business. It also rules out (at a much lower lever) people like me. I guess I do get paid to study, but what I get (very handsomely) paid to study is law that helps wealthy clients out of their troubles. Since I was disinvited from academe, I do not get paid to study, for example, political theory.
In my experience of academe over the 15 years I was in it, 20 if you count undergrad, few professors or grad students are what I would call intellectuals. Most of them are technicians, the best of these are good, evem excellent, at a narrow craft. They have no interest, for the most part in a broader vision. They lack cultivation or humame learning. They have no books in their homes. They might as well be auto mechanics for all their education.
Nathan:
>That's the problem-- if movement intellectuals are being paid to study,
>they
>are on the payroll of the state or elite institutions, so of course they
>don't serve activists well.
That's a pretty vulgar sort of economic reductionsim, Nathan.
I'm a big fan of Russell Jacoby's thesis in THE LAST INTELLECTUALS
>that the opening of the universities to the Left was a largely bad thing,
>in
>that it took them off the street into the cloisters.
I wasn't aware that the universities ever opened to the left. Maybe very briefly in the early 1970s. Not before and not since.
>
>I'm not a big fan of Lenin but at least he understood the basic form of
>intellectual work activists need -- "What is to be Done." Most academic
>work addresses every issue other than that. They explain history, the
>criticize activist leadership. they question "dualities", but they rarely
>lay out step-by-step programs for activists to evaluate.
This is important work, but it's not the work of an intellectual as I understand the term. I don't mean to denigrate it, on the contrary, but policy-wonking is precisely the purview of technical types who may not even benefit in their activities from being intellectuals. But maybe I have a sort of 19th century European conception of what an intellectual is.
jks
T
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