Suchergebnisse

Short story by an imprisoned writer.

In the Communist world the intellectuals' dependence on state & party is complete. In Britain, Western Germany, Italy &, particularly, in France the status of the thinker or writer as an individual enjoying a special set of privileges & a special kind of respect is very nearly the same as it was 2 generations ago - except that the intellectuals no longer have the same practical effect on society & gov. The apathy & lack of understanding for things intellectual of which US writers complain may represent some halfway point between the declared hostility to free speculation characteristic of the USSR & the traditional (but increasingly hollow) respect that the public in Western Europe accords, the intellectual's situation in the US presents a kind of paradigm for the whole of industrial society in the 20th cent. The role of the free intellectuals in Europe is sketched beginning with early modern times when the lay thinker & writer began to break the original Church monopoly of intellectual life. By the 18th cent the characteristic European intellectual had been completely converted from a defender & rationalizer of existing institutions into their implacable critic. Never in its history (except perhaps briefly in the '30's & early '40's) did the US conform to this European model. The characteristic young man of brains & promise became a 'mental technician' rather than an intellectual. The American intellectual faces a dubious future. He is obliged to withstand almost irresistable pressures toward conformity to the role of mental technician. He is robbed of both his historic functions; being the ideological bulwark of society & its utopian critic. J. A. Fishman.

A review essay on: Paul Hollander's Political Pilgrims (New York: Oxford U Press, 1981); Regis Debray's Teachers, Writers, Celebrities (London: New Left Books, 1981); & Alvin Gouldner's The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (see IRPS No. 8/81c00020, & see listings in IRPS No. 34). Hollander's work is judged an important study of Western intellectuals who have visited & then written favorably on Communist nations. The work is seriously flawed by Hollander's neoconservative bias & antipathy for the Left, feminism, & 1960s counterculture. Debray's work, however, is a theoretically sophisticated study of the way French intellectuals function within the national cultural-production system. He views recent intellectual life as falling into three major degenerative cycles -- the U (1880-1930), publishing (1920-1960), & media (1968-present) cycles -- & offers a "conservative-radical defense of the integrity of autonomous human thought & undistorted communication." Gouldner's work is a debate-provoking analysis of the morally ambiguous nature of knowledge (ie, both liberating & socially determined), in the context of the theory that a new opinion-shaping SC is emerging in advanced industrial society. However, it is cautioned that the study of intellectuals & cultural capital is an inherently limited way to treat power & belief. R. Wright