yes...that's what I meant, that intellectuals almost never identify w working class. The whole point of being an intellectual, it seems, was to distance yourself from working class. ....to claim nobility on the basis of intelligence and culture.
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I have some hair left so I guess I can split some of them.
"Working class," of course, is not a relevant category except in capitalist societies. One can avoid that question by focusing on the relationship of "intellectuals" to ruling elites, and it is certainly true, as Joanna notes, that for 5+ millennia "intellectuals" usually came from and almost without exception identified with the ruling elites of their society. A dramatic exception was Protagoras and many of his fellow sophists. (Ellen Meisins Wood has a fine quotation from Mencius on those who labor and those who rule.) An older (materialist) anthropology noted the importance in early agricultural societies (e.g. Egypt) for a calendar, which in turn depended on some astronomical knowledge, and thus it made sense to exempt some from ordinary labor; all gained by it. (Something like this hypothesis might still be tenable; I haven't read any recent accounts of Neolithic and early 'class' societies. (Athena, the goddess of Wisdom, was also the Goddess of War: Military leaders were one early sector of the intelligentsia.)
What bothers me about Joanna's wording is its emphasis on motive, which is ahistorical and moralistic. "The whole point of being" suggests the isolated (rationally choosing) individual of bourgeois societies, standing back from history and making a free choice of the 'career' he will follow. "Intellectuals" (I'm bothered by the term but don't quite know why) find themselves 'distanced' from the toiling masses; they don't _distance_ themselves.
Carrol
P.S. Freedom is a collective 'good'; we are free together or we are not free at all. Fishing is a very poor metaphor for freedom.