Men of letters

An intellectual is a person who uses his or her intellect tostudy, reflect, and speculate on a variety of different ideas . In some contexts, especially journalistic speech , intellectual often refers to academics, generallyin the humanities , especially philosophy , who speak about various issues of social or political import. These are so-called publicintellectuals — in effect communicators.

Table of contents

1 Men of letters

2 The clerisy and the intelligentsia

3 Modes of 'intellectual class'

4 Outside the West

5 Some public intellectuals

6 Related articles

7 See also

Men of letters

The man of letters stood in many cultures for what we might take to be the contemporary intellectual; thedistinction not having great weight when literacy was not fairly universal (and,incidentally, not assumed of a woman). Men of letters are also termed literati (fromthe Latin ), as a group; literatus, in the singular, is hardly used inEnglish.

The clerisy and the intelligentsia

Coleridge speculated early in the nineteenth century on the concept of the clerisy, a classrather than a type of individual, and a secular equivalent of the ( Anglican )clergy, with a duty of upholding (national) culture. The idea of the intelligentsia , in comparison, dates from roughly the same time, and is based more concretely on the classof 'mental' or white-collar workers.

Modes of 'intellectual class'

From that time onwards, in Europe and elsewhere, some variants of the idea of anintellectual class have been important (not least to intellectuals, self-styled). The degrees of actual involvement in art , or politics , journalism and education , of nationalist or internationalist or ethnic sentiment, constituting the 'vocation' of an intellectual, have never become fixed. Someintellectuals have been vehemently anti-academic; at times universities and their professoriat have been synonymous withintellectualism, but in other periods and some places the centre of gravity of intellectual life has been elsewhere.

One can notice a sharpening of terms, in the latter part of the nineteenth century . Just as the coinage scientist wouldcome to mean a professional, the man of letters would more often be assumed to be a professionalwriter, perhaps having the breadth of a journalist or essayist , but not necessarily with the engagement of the intellectual.

Outside the West

In ancient China literati referred to the government officials who formed theruling class in China for over two thousand years. They were a status group of educated laymen , not ordained priests .They were not a hereditary group as their position depended on their knowledgeof writing and literature. After 200 B.C. the system of selection of candidates was influenced by Confucianism and established its ethic among the literati.

The Hundred Flowers Campaign in China waslargely based on the government's wish for a mobilisation of intellectuals; with very sour consequences later. This is perhapstypical of a state's instrumentalist approach to the existence of anintellectual class.

Some public intellectuals

These figures might represent the range, if not the extent.