ABSTRACT
More numerous, more emancipated, more influential, nearer the centre of power—such, in our day, does the social category which we vaguely designate by the term 'intelligentsia' seem to have become. In France or in England, no-one would call an office worker an intellectual, even if he has been to a university and obtained a degree. In the Soviet Union, the enlargement of the intelligentsia worked in the interests of the men in power, who were able to attribute to socialism what was in fact the necessary outcome of economic development. France is considered to be the paradise of the intellectuals, and French intellectuals tend to be revolutionaries: the conjunction of these two facts seems rather paradoxical. The intellectuals elaborated doctrines which inspired reforms, without giving the masses a taste for revolutionary violence. In the France of the eighteenth century, the category of intellectuals is easily recognisable. Diderot, the Encyclopaedists, the 'philosophes', are intellectuals.
