ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to understand how historians have conceptualized the relationship between intellectuals and politics from the late nineteenth century to today. It focuses mainly on intellectuals who produced texts, which implies that the term “intellectual”, and its links to politics, can be extended to producers of symbolic goods such as painting, cinema, and music, and the revolutionary song The Internationale. The chapter discusses the links between intellectuals and politics at the national level, examining the ways in which national frameworks wrote intellectuals into political stories, before turning to transnational efforts to recover an emergent global economy of ideas hitherto shrouded by historiographical Eurocentrism. It highlights the complexity of the political spectrum of affiliation when ascribing ideas to positions and vice versa, focusing on attempts to reveal diverse modes of action open to intellectuals within this spectrum, before turning to the heterogeneity of the Left-Right axis that these ways of acting have subsumed, from fascism to communism and in between.
