ABSTRACT
Foucault and Weber were intellectuals who stylized the relation between truth and criticism in particular ways; such that they can now be said to represent not so much historical figures but proper names to which such styles are irrevocably attached. Obviously other examples could have been chosen, and no great significance should be attached to my choice of those two figures as exemplars of particular kinds of critical attitudes to the question of enlightenment. What I want to get across is not any definitive advocacy for this or that thinker, but rather a sense of the importance just of the fact of such activities of stylization; indeed that such activities are central to all forms of intellectual enlightenment, of whatever kind. I think that this realization can serve quite usefully to complicate that question that has proved to be so dear to so many intellectuals: namely, What is an intellectual? That is the question that I consider in the reflections that make up this chapter. I shall review some ways of thinking about intellectuals, consider the apparently improbable idea of the English intellectual as a test-case, and then conclude with some brief comments about the functions of intellectuals and their role in the University.
