ABSTRACT
If there is one ideal, one demand, that is common to all intellectuals, it is freedom. Paradoxically, intellectuals often demand boundless liberty without any conditions attached to it, even the freedom to work for the triumph of a cause that would endanger liberty. Daniel Bell's analysis focuses on historical and cultural factors, and on art history and the history of ideas, but perhaps it would be necessary to pay more attention to the social processes that explain and reinforce the cultural processes. Total autonomy for educators and journalists would introduce an element of unpredictability that would deprive citizens of genuine options and enshrine the hegemony of those ideas that happen to be dominant among intellectuals at a given moment. Relativism becomes a basis as well for the kind of pressure, a pressure that threatens the genuine liberty of intellectuals in more subtle ways.
