ABSTRACT
The social scientists writing in this collection have responded to the recent reawakening of interest in intellectuals with a defence of the concept and a range of provocative and practical insights into their public role. The search for an understanding of the place of intellectuals is one of the distinctive features of the early twenty-first century social sciences after a period of relative neglect of the subject. It is a response to the growth of higher education, the research funders’ challenge to be ‘relevant’, the marketization of arts and literature, uncertainty about the public or publics being addressed, as well as scepticism towards the media as disseminators of serious ideas. The burgeoning literature is pervaded by a sense of growing complexity and uncertainty. But more fundamentally, there is a sense of deterioration, deficiency, even crisis, and the feeling that the ‘class’ of intellectuals has lost something, be it a certain distinctiveness, the ability to speak with authority, or the right to have a hearing. The contributions to this volume have offered an exceptional range of material for thinking this through, including the cases which show the differences between the current and previous generations of intellectuals. Their diagnosis of the changing status of intellectuals generally resists the broad narrative of decline or the impoverishment of the public sphere, and provides a counterpoint to a number of other contributions to the debate (for example, Furedi, 2004; Goldfarb, 1998; Small, 2002). The perspective is from the social sciences, but it does not advocate a role for the public engagement from the point of view a particular discipline (a prime example of which is Burawoy’s influential plea for a public sociology). Helpfully, the contributions draw attention to the positioning of particular intellectuals in the post-Cold War, post-secular, postmodern world. These are themes that any contemporary discussion of the public intellectual needs to address.
