ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the emergence and social foundation of the "role of the intellectual," which allowed for a very special kind of scholarship in nineteenth-century France. One of the reasons why Renan's, Taine's, and Maury's science of man has been forgotten lies in the strategies chosen by the founders of the modern human and social sciences around 1900. They insisted on the university as the sole institutional basis for the new disciplines, on profession, and on specialization. Even when they credited the intellectual legacy of the old generation, they criticized the former practices as amateurish dilettantism, blurring the lines between science and literature, between objective knowledge and ideology, etc. In the twentieth century, the academic role model gained prominence. Its grounding values became a Leitmotiv, to which referred, for example, Marc Bloch's plea for the "historian's craft". But the philosophical, anthropological, and synthetic tone of the science de l'homme never completely disappeared.
