ABSTRACT
The contemporary world is ill fitted for intellectuals as legislators; what appears to the consciousness as the crisis of civilization, or the failure of a certain historical project, is a genuine crisis of a particular role. One aspect of this crisis is the absence of sites from which authoritative statements of the kind the function of intellectual legislators involves could be made. The price of modernity is the high incidence of psychotic and neurotic ailments; civilization breeds its own discontents and sets the individual in a permanent potential or overt conflict with society. Analysis of post-modernity cannot be anything more than a mid-career report. One of the many brilliant observations of Norbert Elias's study was the idea that the successful culmination of the process consists of the historical episode of suppression being forgotten, pseudo-rational legitimations being supplied for newly introduced patterns and the whole historical form of life being naturalized'.
