ABSTRACT

T HERE WAS PERHAPS always a sense in which the intellectual expressed the critical consciousness of society: Socrates not only paid the ultimate price for his philosophical skepticism, but exposed the limits of freedom in ancient Greece. The willingness of critical intellectuals to employ their talents with an eye on common political aims, however, derives from the Enlightenment. The critique of arbitrary power and religious intolerance, which was directed by the philosophes against a crumbling aristocratic order and a stultifying church, would later extend into an assault on other forms of social and economic injustice. Nevertheless, in our postmodern condition, this old sense of political purpose has been called into question and the social position of the critical intellectual has become ever more difficult to comprehend.