ABSTRACT
Although defined in various ways, intellectuals have often been portrayed as the bearers of progressive ideas and leaders of progressive historical change. This is especially true in Marxist and liberal traditions of social thought. While the latter stress the benefits of education and its connection to democratic norms of inclusion and participation, the former look to intellectuals for insight into the causes of human misery and the course of human history. This essay will look at the ways social theorists have linked intellectuals to social progress and the ways intellectuals have actually participated in politics and political movements. In this context, I define intellectuals historically, as an emergent group with direct connections to the ideologies and movements of the nineteenth century and trace the evolution of this notion in twentieth-century sociology. Central to the ideologies and movements of the nineteenth century is the idea of social progress and the distinct role of intellectuals in its historical realization, and much of modern sociology, as we know, is rooted in just these traditions. In the process of this exposition I outline a new theory of intellectuals, one which builds upon the entirely disparate work of Antonio Gramsci and Alvin Gouldner. The basic idea here is that intellectuals, those who call into question the basic taken-for-granted assumptions of a social order and of their “progressive” transcendence, are an emergent category, not a distinct social strata, whose appearance depends upon historically contingent factors. Who are tomorrow's intellectuals and what the content of their message will be is something now only taking form.
