{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "The word \u201cintellectual,\u201d used as a noun referring to the \u201cintellectual laborer\u201d who assumes a political stance, did not exist...", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/139890495793/", "html": "The word \u201cintellectual,\u201d used as a noun referring to the \u201cintellectual laborer\u201d who assumes a political stance, did not exist until Georges Clemenceau used it in 1898 during the Dreyfus case, congratulating those \u201cintellectuals,\u201d such as Marcel Proust and Anatole France, who had joined Dreyfus\u2019s great champion, Emile Zola. Zola was an entirely new form of political eminence, a popular novelist. His famous J'accuse was published on the front page of a daily newspaper, L'Aurore (\u201cThe Dawn\u201d), which printed 300,000 copies and hired hundreds of extra newsboys who sold virtually every last one by midafternoon.
\n\nZola and Clemenceau provided a wholly unexpected leg up in life for the ordinary worker ants of \u201cpure intellectual labor\u201d (Clemenceau\u2019s term): your fiction writers, playwrights, poets, history and lit profs, that whole cottage industry of poor souls who scribble, scribble, scribble. Zola was an extraordinary reporter (or \u201cdocumenter,\u201d as he called himself) who had devoured the details of the Dreyfus case to the point where he knew as much about it as any judge, prosecutor, or law clerk. But that inconvenient detail of Zola\u2019s biography was soon forgotten. The new hero, the intellectual, didn\u2019t need to burden himself with the irksome toil of reporting or research. For that matter, he needed no particular education, no scholarly training, no philosophical grounding, no conceptual frameworks, no knowledge of academic or scientific developments other than the sort of stuff you might pick up in Section 9 of the Sunday newspaper. Indignation about the powers that be and the bourgeois fools who did their bidding-that was all you needed. Bango! You were an intellectual.
\n\nFrom the very outset the eminence of this new creature, the intellectual, who was to play such a tremendous role in the history of the twentieth century, was inseparable from his necessary indignation. It was his indignation that elevated him to a plateau of moral superiority. Once up there, he was in a position to look down at the rest of humanity. And it hadn\u2019t cost him any effort, intellectual or otherwise. As Marshall McLuhan would put it years later: \u201cMoral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.\u201d Precisely which intellectuals of the twentieth century were or were not idiots is a debatable point, but it is hard to argue with the definition I once heard a French diplomat offer at a dinner party: \u201cAn intellectual is a person knowledgable in one field who speaks out only in others.\u201d
\nTom Wolfe (via severnayazemlya)"}