ABSTRACT
Labour’s ‘inherent suspicion of left-wing intellectuals’ has frequently been matched the intellectuals’ condescending incomprehension of the Labour Party.2 Both the party and the category were products of the late nineteenth century. It was in 1884, as the ‘socialist revival’ that culminated in the foundation of Labour Representation Committee began, that the OED recorded the first modern use of the word ‘intellectual’ as a noun to denote a particular kind of person. The change in usage from terms such as ‘men of letters’ to intellectuals was, according to Thomas Heyck, ‘no trivial change in linguistic style; rather, it marked a profound transformation of the economic, social, and conceptual relations in which the writers and thinkers stood’.3 The simultaneous birth of the intellectual and of Labour politics, that is, was more than a coincidence of timing: both were products of social change. Unfortunately for future relations their trajectories were divergent. The category of the ‘intellectual’ was the product of a process of professionalization and specialization to which socialist thought, rooted in civic humanism, was generally opposed.4 Of more immediate relevance, the newly professional and specialist
Journal of Contemporary History, 6/3 (1971), 12−38. 3 T. W. Heyck, ‘From Men of Letters to Intellectuals: The Transformation of
Intellectual Life in Nineteenth Century England’, The Journal of British Studies, 20/1 (1980), 158−83. See also P. Allen, ‘The Meaning of “an Intellectual”: Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Usage’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 55 (1986), 34−58.
