Intellectuals in Politics: From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie

314 Pages·1997·6.91 MB·English

by  Jeremy Jennings

Intellectuals in Politics
What has been the role of intellectuals in the twentieth-century and what, if
any, will be their role in the future? Frequently scorned and reviled,
intellectuals have nevertheless played a vital part in shaping our century.
From their original intervention in the Dreyfus affair to the case of Salman
Rushdie, intellectuals have aroused controversy.
Jeremy Jennings and Anthony Kemp-Welch edit a collection of essays from
leading academics in the fields of political theory, philosophy, history and
sociology. After their introduction on the major issues confronting
intellectuals the book explores the various different aspects of the
intellectual's role including:
• how to define the role and function of the intellectual
• how intellectuals have assumed the status of the conscience of the nation
and the voice of the oppressed
• the interaction of intellectuals with Marxism
• the place of the intellectual in American society
Covering countries as diverse as Israel, Algeria, Britain, Ireland, France,
Germany, Poland, Russia and America, this collection considers the
question of whether the intellectual can still lay claim to the language of
truth. In addressing this question Intellectuals in Politics tells us much about
the modern world in which we live.
Jeremy Jennings is Reader in Political Theory at the University of
Birmingham.
Anthony Kemp-Welch is the Dean of the School of Economic and Social
Studies at the University of East Anglia.

Intellectuals in Politics
From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman
Rushdie
Edited by Jeremy Jennings and Anthony
Kemp-Welch
London and New York
First published 1997
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
© 1997 Jeremy Jennings and Anthony Kemp-Welch, selection and editorial matter;
individual chapters, the contributors.
Typeset in Times by Routledge
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Biddies Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Intellectuals in politics: from the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie/edited
by Jeremy Jennings and Anthony Kemp-Welch.
l. Intellectuals - Political activity - History - 20th century. I. Jennings, Jeremy,
1952-. II. Kemp-Welch, A., 1949-.
HM213.15474 1997 96-47160
305.5'52-dc21 CIP
ISBN 0-415-14995-9 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-14996-7 (pbk)
Contents
Contributors Vil
1 The century of the intellectual: from the Dreyfus Affair to
Salman Rushdie
Jeremy Jennings and Tony Kemp-Welch
Part I Insiders and outsiders
2 The intellectual as social critic: Antonio Gramsci
and Michael Walzer
Richard Bellamy 25
3 Between autonomy and responsibility: Max Weber on scholars,
academics and intellectuals
Alan Scott 45
4 Of treason, blindness and silence: dilemmas of the intellectual
in modern France
Jeremy Jennings 65
Part II Priestly interventions
5 Algeria and the dual image of the intellectual
Lahouari Addi 89
6 Between the word and the land: intellectuals and the State
in Israel
Shlomo Sand I 02
7 A product of history, not a cause? Yeats, the 'Auden generation',
and the politics of poetry, 1891-1939
D. George Boyce 120
v1 Contents
Part III Slavonic jesters
8 Revolutionaries and dissidents: the role of the Russian intellectual
in the downfall of Tsarism and Communism
Edward Acton 149
9 Politics and the Polish intellectuals, 1945-89
Tony Kemp-Welch 169
10 Intellectuals and socialism: making and breaking the proletariat
Neil Harding 195
Part IV American agnostics
11 Freedom, commitment and Marxism: the predicament of
independent intellectuals in the United States, 1910-41
Steven Biel 225
12 The tragic predicament: post-war American intellectuals,
acceptance and mass culture
George Catkin 248
13 Are intellectuals a dying species? War and the Ivory Tower
in the postmodern age
David Schalk 271
Epilogue
14 What truth? For whom and where?
Martin Hollis 289
Index 300
Contributors
Edward Acton is Professor of Modern European History at the University of
East Anglia. He is the author of Alexander Herzen and the Role of the
Intellectual Revolutionary (1979), Russia: The Present and the Past (1986)
and Rethinking the Russian Revolution (1990). A revised and expanded
edition of his history of Russia has been published as Russia: the Tsarist and
Soviet legacy (1995).
Lahouari Addi is Professor of Politics at the Universite de Lyon II. He is the
author of Etat et Pouvoir (1990), L'impasse du populisme (1991) and
L'Algerie et la democratie (1994). He is a regular contributor to Le Monde on
Algerian affairs.
Richard Bellamy is Professor of Politics at the University of Reading. His
many publications include: Modern Italian Social Theory (1987), Liberalism
and Modern Society (1992) and Gramsci and the Italian State (1993).
Steven Biel teaches at Harvard University. He is the author of Independent
Intellectuals in the United States, 1910-1945 (1992) and Down with the Old
Canoe: A Cultural History of the Titanic Disaster (1996).
George Boyce is Professor of Politics at the University of Wales, Swansea. He
is the author of The Irish Question and British Politics (1988), Nineteenth
Century Ireland: The Search for Stability (1990), Nationalism in Ireland
(1991), Ireland, 1828-1923: From Ascendancy to Democracy (1992) and co
editor of Political Thought in Ireland since the Seventeenth Century (1993).
George Cotkin is Professor of History at Cal Poly State University, San Luis
Obispo. He is the author of William James, Public Philosopher (1990) and
Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880-1900 (1992). He
is currently working on an intellectual and cultural history of existentialism
in America.
Neil Harding is Professor of Politics at the University of Wales, Swansea. He
is the author of Lenin's Political Thought (1983), winner of the Isaac
Deutscher Memorial Prize, and editor of Marxism in Russia (1983) and The
State in Socialist Society (1984).
vm Contributors
Martin Hollis is Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia
and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is the author of many books,
amongst the most recent of which are The Cunning of Reason (1989) and The
Philosophy of the Social Sciences (1994).
Jeremy Jennings is Reader in Political Theory at the University of
Birmingham. He is the author of Georges Sorel (1985) and Syndicalism in
France: A History of Ideas (1990), and editor of Intellectuals in Twentieth
Century France: Mandarins and Samurais (1993).
Tony Kemp-Welch is Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations
at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of The Birth of Solidarity
( 1991 ), Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia ( 1994) and editor of The Ideas of
Nikolai Bukharin (1992).
Shlomo Sand is Professor in the Department of History at the University of
Tel Aviv and Associate Professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales, Paris. He is the author of L'Jllusion du politique (1985) and (with
Jacques Julliard) of Georges Sorel en son temps (1985). He is the editor of a
recently published collection of the writings of Bernard Lazare.
David Schalk is Professor of History at Vassar College and Visiting
Professor at the University of Columbia and the Institute of French Studies
at NYU. He is the author of Roger Martin du Gard: The Novelist and History
(1967), The Spectrum of Political Engagement ( 1979) and War and the Ivory
Tower: Algeria and Vietnam (1991).
Alan Scott is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of East Anglia.
He is the author of Ideology and New Social Movements (1990), co-author of
The Uncertain Science (1992) and editor of The Limits of Globalization
(1997).
1 The century of the intellectual
From the Dreyfus Affair to Salman Rushdie
Jeremy Jennings and Tony Kemp-Welch
Every year the BBC organizes a series of lectures in London. Dating from
1948, when they were first given by Bertrand Russell, the Reith Lectures are
a major event in British cultural life and generally lead to wider public
discussion. In 1993 the person chosen to present these lectures was Edward
Said: his subject was the role of the intellectual.
Said is a fascinating figure. A Palestinian Christian, educated in Cairo, he
is now Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia
University. When his lectures referred to the intellectual in exile there was a
clear element of autobiography. Moreover, Professor Said's academic
interest in intellectuals is of long-standing. Ten years earlier he had
described them as a 'class badly in need today of moral rehabilitation and
social redefinition' 1 and he vigorously restated this view in his widely read
Culture and Imperialism. 2 There, the argument was directed against the
American intellectual cocooned in the 'munificence' and 'Utopian
sanctuary' of the American university campus. The professionalization of
intellectual life, Said contended, was such that the 'true' intellectual had all
but disappeared, leaving the landscape to be dominated by 'policy-oriented
intellectuals' who had internalized the norms of the state. This was most
obviously the case in foreign policy where the necessity of American use of
force and the ultimate justice of its cause was never to be questioned. Wider
social and economic issues, such as racism, poverty, ecological disaster and
disease were now thought to be none of the intellectual's concern.
Intellectuals had been 'defanged' and their task had been reduced to that
of the 'manufacturing of consent'.
Not surprisingly, therefore, Said's lectures were, in part, a contemporary
restatement of Julien Benda's classic definition of the intellectual: the guardian
and possessor of independent judgement owing loyalty to truth alone. 3 This
'compelling and attractive' portrait, Said told his audience, reveals:
the figure of the intellectual as a being set apart, someone able to speak
the truth, a ... courageous and angry individual for whom no worldly
power is too big and imposing to be criticised and pointedly taken to task.
The real or 'true' intellectual is therefore always an outsider, living in