Mikhail Bakunin: "The aristocracy of the intellect is the most hateful, scornful, insolent, and oppressive of all aristocracies that have, each in its turn, and all at once, oppressed human society. The modern universities of Europe ... perform for the bourgeois class the same services the Church once rendered the aristocracy of nobles; this new sacerdotal caste [of intellectuals], a church of bourgeois learning, nows explains and legitimates the exploitation of workers." (1869)
Noam Chomsky: "[W]orship of the state has become a secular religion for which the intellectuals serve as the priesthood." (Deterring Democracy, p. 19, 1991)
You wouldn't believe how much Chomsky there is in Bakunin, honestly. Bakunin's scorn was also "the aristocracy of intellectuals." Basically they to seem to mean apologists for unjust power as opposed to, well, intellectuals like Howard Zinn.
Also, in past post where Bakunin mentions the "bright worker" standing by silently while a better-eductade person has the better of him, Bakunin of course meant someone who was *potentially* "bright" whose life potential was wasted in the fields while others reaped the intellectual benefits of the work he did. The "bright worker" Bakunin quote appears in his essay "All Round Education," where he argued for universal, free public schooling, something he hoped would level the playing field a bit. This kind of school is something we now take for granted but it was a hot issue back then. (Though how those schools are structured now and teach kids, now that we have them, another issue of contention.)
-B.
Sean Andrews wrote:
> But the flipside of this--and the direction Bakunin
is readed (which
> is also somewhat like a return to the idiocracy
thread), in many cases
> what passes for the "bright worker" is no more
independent minded than
> the stupid (or even bright) scholar, s/he just gets
more authority on
> account of his/her being able to marshall populist
appeals (hence
> president dufuss).