ABSTRACT
The nineteenth century is one of the ages—Alexandrian Greece, the Rome of the Caesars, the modern Renaissance, are others—in which the portrait, whether in words, in marble, or on canvas, became an especially prized form of art. Ideal-types, or role-types, as one prefer, are sociological portraits, and irrespective of end they are, and have to be, done with an artist's skill. The concept of social role is, fundamentally, the response made by sociology in the nineteenth century to the problem posed to artists, philosophers, and social scientists by the necessity of somehow imposing an interpretative pattern or structure on eruptive individualism. At the end of the nineteenth century Weber would advance the concept of "ideal-type", applying it equally to structures, processes, and personages. Among the several role-types thrown upon the landscape by currents of history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, none has proven more important in contemporary society than that of the intellectual.
