ABSTRACT
RADICALISATION There is much to recommend the widespread opinion that the intellec tual’s role, by its very nature, predisposes its incumbent to adopt a critical stance vis-à-vis society. The effective production of ideas requires a certain preparedness to suspend judgement on, or even to challenge, conventional wisdoms; and the application of this facility to one’s understanding of social and political phenomena involves a refusal necessarily to accept prevailing ideologies at face value. Several pieces of research have demonstrated this connection between playing an intellec tual role and adopting a radical orientation. It has been shown that disciplines generally identified as ‘intellectual’, including most of the humanities and social sciences, typically produce more radicals than disciplines generally identified as natural-scientific or professional;1 and that the greater the degree to which persons within a given discipline identify themselves as intellectuals, as opposed to professionals, the more likely they are to be left-wing activists (Hajda, 1961; Upset, 1968b, pp. 17-18; Scares in Lipset and Solari, 1967, pp. 431-53; Wood, 1959, p. 53).
