The Intellectual as a Political Force

The 1968 Campaign will be remembered as the year intellectuals first emerged as a new national constituency in American politics. As individuals, intellectuals have long been attracted by power and fascinated by politicians. But today, as Lewis S. Feuer (the former University of California philosopher, now at the University of Toronto) has pointed out, "For the first time, the intellectual elite is trying to assert itself as a self-conscious force in the making of decisions by the Government." For some years, politicians of both parties have been vaguely aware that such a new constituency was emerging, but the events of 1968 removed any doubts they may have entertained of its political potency. In one of the numerous pieces in which friends of President Johnson have speculated on why he decided not to seek renomination, one of his "closest friends" is quoted as saying: "You cannot put your finger on any one thing that happened to start the reaction. However, attacks by the so-called intellectuals cannot be underrated. These intellectuals have more voice than real power. They represent minority opinion, but the attention paid them gives the impression that theirs is the voice of majority opinion." There is, of course, much more to the growing influence of intellectuals than this statement implies, but it is true that today they form a key link in the process of communication between politicians and the public. As much as any single group, they can shape or distort or destroy a politician's image.

Today, intellectuals are no longer content to serve politicians as speech writers, occasional consultants or brain trusters; they are insisting on a role for themselves in politics as a group, as a new constituency. In 1968, intellectuals set the stage for the revolt that resulted in Johnson's decision not to run. At the outset, he made the mistake of not taking their protests seriously; he can count votes as well as the next man and he knew that intellectuals were not numerically significant. But the bitter and eloquent criticism of the Vietnam war by intellectuals evoked the "constituency of conscience" that Senator Eugene McCarthy tapped in New Hampshire. From 1965 on, intellectuals had marched, picketed, demonstrated. They had issued manifestoes, circulated petitions, prepared full-page advertisements for The New York Times and other papers. They had conducted teach-ins, write-ins, poetry readings; they had staged antiwar art-and-poster exhibits. Arm in arm, they marched on the Pentagon in October 1967. Even before the ballots were counted in the New Hampshire primary, it was apparent that their protests had created a strong opposition movement.

This new importance of intellectuals in politics should not be regarded as a transient phenomenon. On the contrary, it is an ongoing trend of major historical importance and world-wide interest. What we are witnessing, as Alan Trachtenberg of Pennsylvania State University puts it, is "the process whereby history is invented in the chambers of consciousness." This process is obviously at work in Prague, Belgrade, Paris, Warsaw, Rome, Mexico City, West Berlin and even, in a tentative way, in Moscow. In Czechoslovakia, writers set in motion a new kind of revolutionary protest that is about the only kind of "revolution" that post-industrial societies can generate. In Paris, students formed the avant-garde of a similar protest that paralyzed the government. In Belgrade, the strike of 40,000 university students, supported by intellectuals, had major political impact. In the view of Herbert Marcuse, the philosopher of the New Left here and in Europe, these and other recent events of the same order have healed once and for all "whoever still suffers from the inferiority complex of the intellectual." The fact is that the traditional idea of a working-class revolution is no longer relevant in postindustrial societies. The new waves of protest that will generate social change in these societies will be set in motion by intellectuals, who have become the prime articulators of discontent. Oddly enough, the dramatic demonstrations of this past year in Prague, Rome, Paris and Belgrade were foreshadowed by similar developments at an earlier period in this country. "The old European notion of the intellectual as the 'conscience' of society," writes Gianfranco Corsini, literary editor of Paese Sera in Rome, "has found for many its embodiment mainly on the other side of the ocean, and travels back to Europe in American dress."

To get at the significance of this extraordinary---and most surprising---development, one must meditate briefly on the meaning of the tricky term "intellectuals" and then trace the emergence of the type in American society. Once this task is out of the way, I propose to examine why intellectuals here and abroad have become a new force in politics and to suggest what their role should be.

Who are the intellectuals? The imprecision of the term "intellectuals" has bugged historians and sociologists for a long time, and with good reason. A certain vagueness is inherent in the term; then, too, it has meant different things at different times and places. Intellectuals have never constituted a social class as such; they hail, as economist Joseph Schumpeter said, "from all corners of the social world." They are defined more by attitude than by status; that is, they think of themselves as "intellectuals." But they do share certain interests and concerns and they have at least one common bond. All intellectuals are either self-educated or formally educated. Not all educated persons, by any means, qualify as intellectuals, but any educated person is a potential intellectual. And as Schumpeter noted, the fact that "their minds are similarly furnished facilitates understanding between them and constitutes a bond."

Despite the notorious vagueness of the term, intellectuals constitute a distinct social type. Robert A. Nisbet, sociologist at the University of California in Riverside, in one of the better attempts at delineation, stresses three characteristics. The first is "commitment to ideas as such. Intellectuals are 'gatekeepers of ideas and fountainheads of ideologies.' " They transform conflicts of interest into conflicts of ideas; or, as Lewis Coser, one of the editors of Dissent, once noted, they "increase a society's self-knowledge by making manifest its latent sources of discomfort and discontent." Second, they have a strong "moral commitment," that is, a pronounced concern with the core values of a society. And, third, they take delight in the play of ideas.

So far so good. But rapid social change---and the tumultuous history of the past few decades---has poured new wine into the old bottles. For one thing, today's intellectuals are products of the cultural fragmentation that seems to characterize postindustrial societies. The old social components tend to break down into new parts, each with a kind of subculture of its own. "Adolescents" is one example; "intellectuals" is another. As with adolescents, intellectuals have acquired a new consciousness-of-kind and are asserting themselves in new ways. In present postindustrial societies, intellectuals are coming to constitute a new political constituency.

The new significance the term is acquiring relates to an earlier usage. In Europe, the term was adapted from "intelligentsia," which the Russians had begun to use in the 1860s to designate a new social class that did not fit into any of the conventional social categories. A small minority of Russians who had been educated in Europe felt a deep sense of responsibility to "modernize" Russia on the European pattern. They came to think of themselves as a kind of dedicated order, held together by a strong sense of solidarity and kinship. "Isolated and divided," writes Sir Isaiah Berlin, "by the tangled forest of a society impenetrable to rational organization, they called out to each other in order to preserve contact. They were citizens of a state within a state, soldiers of an army dedicated to progress, surrounded on all sides by reaction." Although the setting is much different, intellectuals today are coming to think of themselves in much this same light.

In Europe, the term "intellectuals" had a different connotation. European intellectuals were a product of the secularization of society. When the Church lost its monopoly of intellectual life, lay intellectuals began to take over some of the functions churchmen had once discharged. In fact, Julien Benda (author of The Treason of the Intellectuals) referred to intellectuals as "priests of the mind." As the Church had once enunciated general principles to guide public conduct, so the postmedieval intellectuals, as Harvard historian H. Stuart Hughes has written, "began to elaborate a richer and less confined pattern of behavior to offer their fellow citizens." In the first phases of this transition. intellectuals served as advisors to the ruling dynasties. Erasmus and Bacon addressed themselves to princes and the government elite. They were, as we would say, very much a part of the establishment, of the power complex.

But at a later date, the relationship began to change. Initially, intellectuals had been allies of the rising middle class; but as this class more firmly entrenched itself in power, it had less need of the intellectuals and began to regard them as a nuisance or worse. The turning point came during the anti-Dreyfus (continued on page 94)The Intellectual as a Political Force(continued from page 90) craze, when the bourgeoisie turned viciously against les intellectuels. From then on, the intellectual became a critic of the society he had once served as an advisor. The transition was not difficult; the intellectual found it easy to be critical of a bourgeois establishment that claimed to have no further need of his services. With no fixed position, he could afford to play the role of social critic. He was less secure than the doctor or lawyer; he earned less, saved less and owned less. Standing apart from society, he could view it with detachment.

For the most part, however, the intellectuals of the West centered their fire on middle-class culture and middle-class values. It would have done them little good to assert a right to participate, as intellectuals, in the decision-making process; they were not numerous enough. Besides, the Western regimes were not nearly as oppressive as the czarist type. The educated classes were larger and provided a better, more responsive audience for intellectuals. Western Europe and the United States developed a sizable middle class; Russia did not. In the West, most intellectuals belonged to the middle class or were middle class in origin. While they were often critical of the middle class, they did not think of themselves as a class apart, as did the Russian intelligentsia.

But the fact that intellectuals were so few in number, and isolated from the centers of political power, increased their feeling of alienation and predisposed them to reflect the discontents and concerns of less privileged groups. As historian Richard Hofstadter has written, "It is the historic glory of the intellectual class of the West in modern times that, of all the classes which could be called in any sense privileged, it has shown the largest and most consistent concern for the well-being of the classes which lie below it in the social scale." Oddly enough, as intellectuals have discovered "the wretched of the earth" both in their own countries and in today's world, the more conscious they have become of their own identity as "intellectuals," the more they have thought of themselves as a class apart.

More important, the very qualities that differentiate intellectuals as a distinct social type have forced them to reassess their role and function in today's world. Intellectuals are to be distinguished from "intellectual workers" in one basic respect. The "intellectual worker," as the late Paul A. Baran, a Marxist economist who taught at Stanford University, put it, "takes the existing order of things for granted and questions the prevailing state of affairs solely within the limited area of his immediate preoccupation. This preoccupation is with the job in hand....Putting it in negative terms, the intellectual worker as such does not address himself to the meaning of his work, its significance, its place within the entire framework of social activity....His 'natural' motto is to mind his own business." He is the kind of person who says "I just work here," who disclaims any responsibility for the use that is made of his talent, his brains. But what marks the real intellectual and distinguishes him from intellectual workers and from all others, as Baran stressed, is that "his concern with the entire historical process is not a tangential interest but permeates his thought and significantly affects his work. To be sure, this does not imply that the intellectual in his daily activity is engaged in the study of all of historical development. This would be a manifest impossibility. But what it does mean is that the intellectual is systematically seeking to relate whatever specific area he may be working in to other aspects of human existence ... it is this effort to interconnect which constitutes one of the intellectual's outstanding characteristics."

It is precisely this characteristic that today has catapulted the intellectual into a larger---certainly a more significant---political role. Intellectuals have vivid memories and imaginations. They do not need to visit Vietnam to know what is happening there. They experience no difficulty in making those interconnections to which Baran referred. In an age of "news management" and manipulation, in which small armies of intellectual workers help keep public opinion in line with establishment policy, intellectuals feel that they have a special responsibility to speak out as intellectuals. In a famous essay on The Responsibility of Intellectuals, Noam Chomsky hammered home the proposition that "The question 'What have I done?' is one that we may well ask ourselves, as we read, each day, of fresh atrocities in Vietnam---as we create, or mouth, or tolerate the deceptions that will be used to justify the next defense of freedom."

This heightened sense of responsibility might not imply a larger political role for intellectuals were it not for the fact that their numbers are increasing and so is the size---and the responsiveness---of their audience. Wars, revolutions and depressions produce "social critics" pretty much as certain strains of mold secrete the antibiotic known as penicillin. For much the same reason, the audience for relevant social criticism is growing. More and more people want it told the way it is. And today, no great gap separates the intellectual from "the people"; he is not isolated in the same manner or to the same degree as the Russian intelligentsia. Today, to quote a leading French leftist intellectual, Maurice Duverger, "the intellectuals ... have no wider range of potential choice than the rest of mankind---the amateur thinker or those who believe themselves to be quite devoid of thought. The only difference is that they are better at explaining their attitudes, describing their states of mind, depicting their internal struggles."

For years, American intellectuals complained that they had little political influence and that society took scant notice of what they said or thought or wrote. Indeed, until quite recently, there was far more discussion about "anti-intellectualism" than there was, say, of the role of intellectuals in politics. In 1955, I took part in a discussion of anti-intellectualism that focused entirely on the attacks then being directed against intellectuals (the papers were later published in The Journal of Social Issues). Intellectuals were not marching or demonstrating then; the "confrontations," such as they were, took place before inquisitorial Congressional committees. The public was then concerned not with student power but with student apathy; with the silence of a generation, not with the noise it was making. Sharp political conflict, we were then told, belonged to the past; consensus politics marked an end to warring ideologies. Today, just a few years later, students are rioting and intellectuals have become a new force in politics. To understand why this dramatic turnaround has taken place, one must first trace the emergence of intellectuals as a significant force in American politics.

The emergence of the intellectuals. The emergence of intellectuals as a distinct social type is a recent phenomenon in American life. Nisbet has no recollection of the serious use of the term much before the 1940s. True, individual intellectuals have always been interested in politics. But until quite recent times, intellectuals did not constitute a distinctive social group capable of exerting a cumulative influence on a national scale. The native intellectuals were too few in number, too thoroughly isolated and too thinly distributed to constitute a distinct element.

In the aftermath of World War One, many "sad young men" ran off to Europe, where living was cheap, and thumbed their noses at the America of Harding and Coolidge. It was a nice time to be young, but we have it on the authority of Scott Fitzgerald that the Jazz Age had "no interest in politics at all." The exiles were committed to living their own lives and to little else; and those who stayed home, for lack of funds or whatever reason, shared H. L. Mencken's disdainful view of politics. The issues then were personal: individual emancipation, a desire to escape from (continued on page 198)The Intellectual as a Political Force(continued from page 94) Babbittry, the discovery of Europe, a sharp reaction to the War. There was a rebellion of sorts, but it was based on a rejection of responsibility.

During the 1930s, American intellectuals began to acquire a sense of responsibility and commitment; the decade witnessed a sharp change in the attitude of many intellectuals toward social, economic and political issues. But the 1930s did not witness the emergence of intellectuals as a class. Writers formed committees, issued manifestoes and made speeches. But Nathanael West said of the period that even the writer had no outer life, only an inner one, "and that by necessity." The fact is that the crises of the times---the Depression, the imminence of war, the rise of fascism---had caught everyone unprepared, including the intellectuals. "The influx into America of intellectuals who were refugees from national socialism brought with it," writes sociologist T. B. Bottomore, "something of the urgency of the social struggles in Europe, as well as the ideas of thinkers who had long been Marxists." But the influence of Marxism was slight. The radical movement of the period failed to establish itself as a permanent force in American politics; and at the end of the period, a gulf still separated intellectuals from the great majority of the population. In fact, the isolation of the intellectuals was a prime cause of the endless infighting and sectarian wrangling of the period. In 1932, 53 prominent writers signed the famous statement on "Culture and the Crisis" on behalf of William Foster and James Ford, the Communist Party candidates. The ticket polled about 100,000 votes---one fourth of one percent of the electorate---and three years later, not one of the drafters of the statement remained in or identified with the Communist Party. By 1937, the ferment of the New Deal was about over; by then, we were preparing for World War Two.

The Spanish Civil War marked the intellectual and emotional climax of the decade. "Never before during this century," writes Frederick R. Benson in Writers in Arms, "had writers been so completely involved in a historical event about which they felt moved to express themselves." It has been called The Last Great Cause---the title of Stanley Weintraub's recent book on intellectuals and the Spanish Civil War---but it was merely the last great cause of the 1930s. The war in Vietnam has been opposed with more force, and by many more intellectuals, than rallied in support of the Spanish Loyalists. What brought the ferment of the 1930s to a close was not the defeat of the Loyalists but the fact that all of the "causes" of the period, including Spain, had been sucked into the One Big Cause, which was World War Two. As Stephen Spender has written, "If you approved of the War, you were absorbed into it....All the protests and affirmations of the anti-Fascists of the Spanish War were now systemized and swallowed up in official government anti-Nazi propaganda, while the anti-Fascists were often rejected from the service, being regarded as ideologically suspect, and despised as amateurs, now that anti-fascism had become a professional game."

Lewis Feuer is clearly right in saying that it was the involvement of the university community in World War Two and its Cold War aftermath that "changed permanently the status of the intellectuals." The Government suddenly needed not merely the trained competence to be found in the universities, it needed intellectuals of all kinds, for many purposes: in the intelligence services, in the information and propaganda services, in the expanding procurement agencies, in overseas missions. Large and expanding bureaucratic structures began to take form in Government, in business, in the foundations; and the demand for intellectuals burgeoned.

The inception of the Cold War, with its stepped-up "war for men's minds," simply intensified the need for the services of all kinds of intellectual workers. Foundations emerged as a major source of funds, in increasing volume, for all kinds of intellectual projects, many of which were Government sanctioned. Some of the foundations became, in fact, conduits for Government funds that were, in this way, covertly channeled to various organizations. In 1953, for example, Encounter was founded in London. It was sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom and covertly financed, in large part, by the CIA. Its editors had heard "rumors" of the fact but had never been able to verify the rumors.

At the end of World War Two, we were, as literary critic William Barrett has written, "at the end of a long tunnel, there was light showing ahead, and beyond that all sorts of horizons opened." But this bright vision was never realized; instead, "social life became somber, immense, massive, institutionalized." It was the inception of the Cold War---more particularly, the domestic cold war or witch hunt---that eclipsed the bright vision many had seen in 1945. During these years, which saw the rise of McCarthyism, certain American intellectuals, most of them with former left-wing backgrounds, were guilty of a dual corruption. On the one hand, they assisted Government agencies in driving from the cultural and political scene those intellectuals who had not abandoned their left-wing backgrounds. But worse, these professional "anti-Communists" reneged on their responsibilities as intellectuals. True, they had some waspish things to say now and then about "the great smuggery" of the Eisenhower years, but they did not challenge the course of American policy or the rise of the military-industrial complex or the assumptions on which the Cold War rested. They showed no interest in the poverty that the "affluence" of the period concealed. They were too concerned with "Reds" to show much interest in Negroes. In their infatuation with "value-free" judgments and problem solving, they refused to be concerned about the core values of the society.

It was during these years, in the 1950s and early 1960s, that intellectuals rose to the status of a privileged class. No two Presidents had less kinship with intellectuals than Truman (who wrote sassy letters to music critics) and Eisenhower (who was not interested in meeting Robert Frost and who preferred his and Churchill's paintings to De Kooning's), but it was during their Administrations that intellectuals began to constitute a kind of mandarinate. As Christopher Lasch, Northwestern University historian, has pointed out, "The postindustrial order ... created an unprecedented demand for experts, technicians and managers. Both business and government, under the pressure of technological revolution, expanding population and the indefinitely prolonged emergency of the Cold War, became increasingly dependent on a vast apparatus of systematized data intelligible only to trained specialists; and the universities, accordingly, became themselves industries for the mass production of experts." But while intellectuals had finally emerged as a distinct class, intellectuals in the classic sense were to be found, as Lasch notes, "chiefly in the borderland between academic life and liberal journalism."

With the election of John F. Kennedy, the mandarinate advanced into the spotlight. The new President was a Pulitzer Prize winner, a historian of sorts, a man who enjoyed the company of intellectual specialists. His favorite book, we were told, was Lord David Cecil's Melbourne; his favorite novel, Stendhal's The Red and the Black. Every intellectual heart beat a mite faster when Kennedy was inaugurated. Arthur Miller, John Steinbeck and W. H. Auden were invited to the Inauguration, and so was the octogenarian poet Robert Frost, who had heralded the New Frontier as "an Augustan age of poetry and power, with the emphasis on power." Even Norman Mailer was charmed by the new President, who said he had read The Deer Park "and the others." Mailer was inclined to believe the New Frontier intellectuals would at long last be able to escape from the "alienated circuits of the underground." Politics, he said, had quarantined us from history; we had too long left politics to those who "are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history that is being made." Intellectuals came flocking to Washington, to serve in the Peace Corps, in the CIA, in the Department of Defense, in the White House, in the diplomatic service. Adlai Stevenson, a manqué intellectual, had aroused a certain fervor among the "eggheads," a term, incidentally, that was coined during the "anti-intellectualism" of the McCarthy era. But it was under Kennedy, as Alfred Kazin has written, that to be an "intellectual" became "the latest style in American success, the mark of our manipulatable society."

The trouble was that many of these intellectuals had joined the establishment on its terms, not theirs. At first, it was such a heady experience that they did not seem to have a very clear understanding of what they were being paid to do. Some of them were simply flunkies to the military: "crisis managers," counterinsurgency experts, Kremlinologists, etc. Others traveled far and wide, in Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and Africa, on special missions of one kind or another. For most of them, it was a new experience to be close to the centers of power, to see how decisions are made, to watch the wheels spin. As long as Kennedy was at the helm, they stayed on, serving purposes that they probably did not fully approve.

The turning point came shortly after the 1964 election. President Johnson received, of course, the overwhelming support of intellectuals in that election. They did not like him---nor he them---but they supported him against Gold-water. He swept every campus community and won the nearly unanimous endorsement of the intellectuals. But with his decision to escalate the war, the intellectuals began to drop out and join the opposition. No doubt, Johnson was glad to see many of them leave; they had been serving on sufferance. But he could not have been pleased by the mounting opposition of intellectuals, of all stripes, to the war. Sensing the new power of intellectuals, he had appointed Dr. Eric Goldman early in 1964 as special White House consultant on matters relating to the intellectual community. But Dr. Goldman was unable to put down the growing intellectual opposition to the war, and the breach widened. In an effort to close it, the President named a three-man team of White House assistants to aid Dr. Goldman. But they, too, were frustrated. So the President and Mrs. Johnson, in the summer of 1965, staged a White House Festival of the Arts, which was supposed to improve relations. But the festival simply focused attention on the fact that certain guests used the occasion to speak out against the war. In late August 1966, Goldman resigned, blaming both the President and the intellectuals for what he termed "a tragic estrangement." Johnson, of course, was furious and took prompt measures to discredit the apostate. A crisp White House statement charged that Goldman had never worked anything like a fulltime schedule.

At this juncture, Vice-President Humphrey induced the President to appoint John P. Roche, professor in the department of politics at Brandeis and former chairman of A. D. A., to succeed Goldman. Roche was known chiefly, as Joseph Kraft observed, as an Irishman who had taught at a Jewish university and a liberal who supported the war in Vietnam. Instead of placating the intellectuals, Roche began to berate them. "Who are these alienated intellectuals?" he asked. "Mainly the New York artsy-craftsy set....A small body of people who live in affluent alienation on Cape Cod and fire off salvos against the vulgarity of the masses ... high-class illiterates." In March 1968, Roche conducted a press conference at the UN, "at the suggestion of Washington," on the subject of "Intellectuals and Vietnam." In the course of this conference, he referred to American intellectuals as "essentially a self-styled group rather like the intelligentsia of 19th Century Russia. That is to say, a self-defined, self-anointed, self-appointed cultural elite which has taken unto itself the job of protecting the society from various and sundry problems....It is this intelligentsia which has drummed up most of the vigorous opposition to the war." Of the war itself, he said it was a mere border skirmish, comparable with the 19th Century adventures of the British in India or the Japanese in Manchuria in the 1930s.

Surveying Roche's performance, one might conclude that Johnson had decided to carry the fight to the intellectuals. But he still kept trying to woo them. In the spring of 1966, when it was still possible for him to accept an honorary degree without being booed, he visited Princeton and boasted of what he had done for intellectuals. The 371 appointments he had made in two and a half years in office held, collectively, 758 advanced degrees. The Princeton faculty and student body listened politely and applauded listlessly. Later, Johnson used the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Brookings Institution to make a major speech on intellectuals and the Government. Nothing so clearly underscores the new importance of intellectuals in politics as the fact that the President, the master of consensus politics, felt compelled to make this speech, in which he pleaded for their support. Still later, in mid-May 1967, he invited 16 "leading intellectuals" to lunch at the White House for the stated purpose of discussing with them how his standing with the intellectual community might be improved. The luncheon had the overtones of high farce. The assembled intellectuals were mostly Government bureaucrats. Even so, they just might have given the President some sound advice, if he had been prepared to listen to them. But he did all the talking and closed the session with a 20-minute monolog. Why, he asked his guests, were so many intellectuals opposed to him, when he had done so much for them? The guests, who had enjoyed a good lunch, smiled, applauded politely and said nothing.

But the President did manage to win a minor consolation prize in his ill-fated campaign to keep the intellectuals in line. His staff---or, rather, Eric Sevareid of CBS---finally turned up an anti-intellectual intellectual who scorned the intellectual community and greatly admired Mr. Johnson. When the President was told of Sevareid's interview with Eric Hoffer, the ex-longshoreman, he promptly invited him to the White House. The President's press aide conceded that Mr. Johnson had not read any of Hoffer's books, but it turned out that Roche had long admired them. And what need was there to read the works of a man who had said that Mr. Johnson would be regarded as the foremost President of the 20th Century? The President was delighted with Hoffer, who told him how to handle intellectuals: "Pet them, but don't give them power." The President must have glowed with satisfaction when told that Hoffer had said: "Kennedy was a European. All you have to do is tabulate how many times Kennedy crossed the Atlantic and how many times he crossed the Appalachians and you know where he belonged." What is rather surprising about this "instant" friendship is that apparently neither Roche nor the White House aides advised the President that Hoffer has made a career out of cultivating middle-brow distaste for intellectuals. If anything was needed, therefore, to indicate how completely the President had misread the intellectuals, it was his sudden discovery of Hoffer, who, in high-topped work shoes, a lumber jacket and shirt without tie, was just the kind of person to reassure him that those witless "intellectuals" were not worth the effort he had devoted to them. (Later, the President appointed Hoffer to the commission named to inquire into the causes of violence after the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy. The commission contained not one critic of the war in Vietnam.)

On the memorable evening of March 31, 1968, the President told the nation he would not seek or accept renomination. What prompted the President to bow out was, of course, the mounting pressure against his Vietnam policy. In effect, the President had been defeated in advance of the election; he was compelled to step down as prime ministers step down when they lose a vote of confidence. The President read the New Hampshire returns correctly; he did not need to wait for those from Wisconsin.

Much of the credit for this remarkable political achievement must go to the dissident intellectuals who had succeeded in mounting a forceful opposition to the war. Intellectuals were the one constituency that had bolted the consensus to oppose the war; labor, business, the farm groups, the big-city machines, the ethnics, even the Negroes, by and large, had stayed in line. But the intellectual opposition, added to the regular antiwar, pro-peace constituency, had finally succeeded in turning public opinion against the war. Of course, the headlines helped---the Tet offensive, the gold crisis, the riots, the crises in the cities---but headlines alone do not account for the remarkable change that occurred. The President's decision to bomb the North triggered the first teach-in, which was held on the campus of the University of Michigan March 24, 1965. In its wake, scarcely a campus community remained immune to the ferment of opposition.

It was this mounting tide of opposition, largely set in motion by the free-lance or dissident intellectuals, that brought Senator Eugene McCarthy into the race. And his candidacy, of course, promptly brought the intellectuals, on and off campus, and the students back into the mainstream of national politics. Not all of them, to be sure, but enough to make a real stir. By the spring of 1968, the intellectual community was as solidly opposed to Johnson as it had been for him in 1964. McCarthy's candidacy simply demonstrated Johnson's vulnerability; after New Hampshire, the number of consensus dropouts, individual and institutional, rapidly increased. If intellectuals surfaced in the Kennedy Administration as a new class, they emerged in the last years of the Johnson Administration as a new political constituency. It remains to be seen, of course, how strong this constituency is and how long it can hold together under a Nixon Administration; but that it constitutes a new and continuing force in American politics there can be little doubt.

Why intellectuals are important. The importance of intellectuals as a new force in politics is certain to increase in the future. For one thing, the number of intellectual workers is rapidly increasing. The proportion of the labor force designated by the Bureau of the Census as "professional, technical and kindred" is the fastest growing of all major occupational groups. Government and business need a far larger quota of intellectual workers than in the 19th Century. Today, teachers constitute the largest single occupational group; the business of America, it is said, is no longer business but education. Government spending on science has increased from $100,000,000 in 1940 to 16 billion dollars in 1968. Business will spend something on the order of 17 billion dollars on research in 1969. Opinion Research points out that intellectual workers "are getting into every nook and cranny of business life, particularly in staff positions."

In the same way, the number of educated persons is rapidly increasing. Today, we have roughly 2000 institutions of higher learning, with 6,000,000 or more students and 400,000 teachers and administrators. America is becoming, it is said, "a knowledge state." In 1900, a man who had completed high school was regarded as a member of his generation's elite; but in 1967, about 75 percent of all young people were finishing high school. By 1965, more than two of every five young men were entering some sort of college and more than one in every five were graduating.

While only a minority of intellectual workers and college graduates are intellectuals, nevertheless, the number of intellectuals has increased as the first two categories have expanded. Intellectuals as such are vastly more numerous than they were, say, a generation back. And intellectuals interact with intellectual workers and the educated; these are no longer, if they ever were, separate and wholly distinct categories. The time is largely past, as Riesman and Jencks note, "when the uneducated considered themselves superior to those with book learning"; the level of cultural sophistication is rising and it will continue to rise. The main point, in any case, is that the increase in the number of intellectual workers and college graduates is creating an expanding constituency for intellectuals. As these categories expand, so does the intellectual's political importance. "Conditions are ripe today in the United States," writes Lewis Feuer, "for the self-assertion of the intellectual elite. The sheer numbers of the constituency to which they appeal---several million undergraduates and graduate students, officered by several hundred thousand professors---are the most massive and most easily mobilized corporate body in the country."

But the audience of the intellectuals is also undergoing a remarkable expansion. Affluence has greatly increased the size of the middle-income sector. More people have more money to spend on "culture" and they are spending it. A "cultural explosion" of sorts has occurred since 1945. A mass market has been created for recordings, for works of art, for paperback books. Museum attendance has soared. Every major city now has---or will soon have---a center for the performing arts. T. R. Fyvel, author of Intellectuals Today, estimates that no more than 15 to 20 percent of the British people participated in the dominant culture in the pre-1914 period; in this country, the percentage would have been smaller for the same period. It is now much higher for both countries. Today, an army of intellectual workers is needed to disseminate information, to serve as "communicators," to carry watered-down versions of the intellectuals' wares to an ever-expanding mass market. Intellectuals constantly inveigh against mass culture, and often with good reason, but it is incontestable that the size of their audience has expanded enormously in the past quarter century. "The position of the intellectual activists," writes Erwin D. Canham, editor of The Christian Science Monitor, "is more important than many realize. They provide a cutting edge and a solid shaft for political doctrine. They are themselves mass communicators of talent. They greatly influence youth."

Surveying the affluent society that has emerged in the post-War period, with its large bureaucratic structures, its expanding middle class, its new corporate empires, many intellectuals thought it most unlikely that new political movements could emerge in such an environment. There was no proletariat; the poor were demoralized and scarcely visible; the labor movement was fat and complacent. On the surface, there seemed to be little discontent. But an affluent society breeds its own kind of discontents that are voiced by new constituencies. "It is possible." writes John Kenneth Galbraith, "that the educational and scientific estate requires only a strongly creative political hand to become a decisive instrument of political power....As the trade unions retreat, more or less permanently, into the shadows, a rapidly growing body of educators and research scientists emerges....It is to the educational and scientific estate, accordingly, that we must turn for the requisite political initiative. The initiative cannot come from the industrial system, although support can be recruited from individuals therein. Nor will it come from the trade unions. Apart from their declining numbers and power, they are under no particular compulsion to question the goals of the industrial society." For "the educational and scientific estate" to initiate social change in an affluent society, however, it would have to be broadly defined to include intellectual workers, intellectuals, students, etc.

It may seem odd to suggest that students, in today's world, constitute a kind of proletariat; but, in a sense, they do. The more production centers on knowledge, on science, on technology, the more "brain workers" come to occupy much the same role as "the workers" once did. The university becomes, in this setting, the "knowledge factory," and students take on the role and, in many instances, the mannerisms and appearance of a new proletariat. The groups that control production begin to feel that they must control the university, not merely to be able to tap its intellectual resources but to control, in effect, their future labor supply. Students---at least the activist elements---sense these changes and are responding to them. In many cases, they feel that they are being trained for careers that are, or soon will be, obsolete. They have a feeling that education should be a continuing process, not crowded into a few brief years. They want more to say, therefore, about the kind of education they receive. Student activists are to other students and, in a way, to their instructors what the old-style proletariat was to the labor movement: a vanguard of protest. And the fact that the social base of the student population has expanded to include virtually all elements means that more volatile student bodies are to be found on the campuses.

Similar conditions prevail in European universities, east and west. It is not unusual nowadays to find references to students as "an alienated, helpless, "proletarianized' group." In postindustrial societies, we have to assemble the new cast in order to understand the action. "Marx or Lenin," writes Dr. George Keller, former assistant dean of Columbia University, "would have snickered at the notion of starting a revolution to transform society by taking over a school---an ivy-covered retreat without guns, power or money." But it is not such a startling idea today. "History teaches us," Edgard Pisani, a former cabinet minister in the Pompidou government, told the National Assembly during the debate on the great strike, "that the great upheavals have always been provoked by the determining or dominant classes: in former times the peasants, in 1789 the shopkeepers, in the 19th Century the workers, today the repositories of knowledge---students and cadres."

The great upheaval in France is perhaps the first of a new kind of revolution, the only kind that is likely to take place in a welfare-technocratic state. Essentially, the issue is how to use the new technology to build the society of the future. The spread of technology has stimulated new social expectations and created the potential for remarkable social advances. But the more production is rationalized, the more irrational become the goals and objectives to which it is dedicated. For example, arms production aborts the potential for real abundance. A potentially explosive situation is created, in both capitalist and Socialist societies, when workers are harnessed to jobs over which they have little control and, at the same time, cannot see that their work is furthering any worthwhile objectives. Under these circumstances, it does not take much of a spark to touch off a major social upheaval. Of the situation in eastern Europe, journalist Lucjan Blit writes: "It is precisely the more efficient industrial managers and 'scientific workers' and those influencing the spiritual life of their society who are now rebelling. The former because the sclerotic economic system robs them of the chance to do their job efficiently; the writers and journalists because even the most corrupt among them have by now seen the futility of their work." The situation is not essentially different in the west. Of the French upheaval, Neal Ascherson, on the staff of the London Observer, writes: "The enemy is the 'bureaucratic state'---east and west. It is the society organized for efficiency at the expense of liberty, the system which offers the people consumer goods and calls them freedom. It is the system which adapts education---so it seems---to the mass production of docile technocrats. It is the party system posing as a true democracy---repression masked as tolerance."

In such a situation, ideologies once again become the subject of intense political debate. An ideological struggle is essentially an attempt to change peoples' perspectives and to define "reality" in a new way. As such, "Ideological revolutions." writes Anatol Rapoport of the University of Michigan, "are instigated by intellectuals, whose command of verbal expression makes them the carriers of new ideals." The rise of technology was, in a way, responsible for what appeared to be "the end of ideology" in politics; but now, once again, ideological questions take precedence over specific issues. When consensus politics gives way to the ideological variety, new national constituencies begin to take the places of the old interest groups and coalitions. Intellectuals are, potentially, one of the most important of these new constituencies. We are beginning to reject, as Galbraith has said, the goals of an industrial society. What should the new goals be? What kind of society do we propose to build? These are the kinds of questions that most appeal to intellectuals and to which their style of thinking is most relevant.

If the society of the future is to be one of even greater organizational and technological complexity, with a greater reliance on planning, then it cannot fail, as George Lichtheim, author of Marxism in Modern France, has said, "to enhance the significance (and the responsibility) of the stratum which does the thinking for the rest of society ... social evolution is increasingly going to depend on mind, and consequently on the quantitative and qualitative growth of the stratum which embodies the capacity of the intellect to introduce order into the environment....When one has said the worst that can be said about the intelligentsia, it remains a fact that this stratum carries within itself the main potentiality of evolution still open to mankind."

In these terms, it should be clear that intellectuals will exert a growing influence on the politics of the future, regardless of which party is in office. As custodians of the nation's core values, they must be listened to on the question of goals and purposes; as the group most disposed to take "the general view." with the best record of disinterested judgment, they are becoming indispensable to the proper functioning of our political system. "If we define an intellectual," writes Rapoport, "not merely in terms of intellectual competence but in terms of a commitment to intellectual values, of which an important one is that of living the examined life," then intellectuals do have a class interest, the pursuit of which constitutes one of society's best offsets to the deadening effects of a thoroughly rationalized technostructure that functions in almost complete disregard of what people think and feel and want. The intellectual's chief responsibility is to this group interest. In a postindustrial society, only intellectuals can effectively voice the subtle but basic discontents that are most likely to threaten social stability. The upheavals in Prague and Paris were clearly foreshadowed in what Czech and French intellectuals have been saying for years.

In recent times, intellectuals---H. Stuart Hughes and sociologist J. P. Nettl, among others---have speculated that perhaps intellectuals would become obsolete in a bureaucratic-technological society. The usual argument has been that the intellectual is being increasingly forced to join some kind of large organization or to reject modern society as a whole without being able to propose an alternative. If he opts for the former, he loses his status as an intellectual; if for the latter, he becomes socially irrelevant. No doubt, there is something to this argument. Intellectuals cannot surrender their independence without ceasing to be intellectuals. But the political power they are beginning to assert provides significant assurance that they can maintain their independence if they wish to do so and if they will honor commitments to their own group interest. In economic terms, intellectuals are doing better than they have ever done before. In today's world, it is hard to see how they will become obsolete---unless, of course, success corrupts them and they cease to be social critics.

The enhanced political importance of intellectuals raises, of course, a key question. What should be the role of the intellectual in politics? Should he seek to move closer to the centers of power, so that he may exert his influence within and through these centers? Or should he maintain a neutral-to-hostile independence, the better to discharge his role as social critic and custodian of the nation's conscience? In point of fact, the real choice is no longer, if it ever was, this clear-cut. Precisely because of his new functional importance, the intellectual has become implicated in the processes by which power is applied and decisions are taken. He cannot, even if he would, stand wholly to one side---at least not for long. The university, for example, is a prime center of power in the new age: it is also an important base of power for intellectuals. Intellectuals cannot be "neutrals" on campus. Inescapably, they are involved in decisions affecting the administration of university affairs, the relationship of the university to government, and in faculty-student-administration as well as university-community relations. In much the same way, it would be shortsighted of intellectuals to assume that they can long remain neutral simply by refusing to serve the Government; they can serve it or oppose it, but they can hardly ignore it. Society has a way of co-opting those whose services it needs and, in the long run, intellectuals will be increasingly caught up in the bigger action.

Under these circumstances, what intellectuals can and must do is, first, recognize that politically their prime task is to protect and advance the interests of intellectuals as intellectuals, such as preserving academic freedom, insisting on the free flow of information, opposing censorship, seeking to improve the quality and integrity of mass communications, furthering free inquiry, resisting attempts to manipulate or manage news, insisting on the free pursuit of truth in all fields, etc. These are the freedoms that intellectuals must have if they are to function as intellectuals; they are also freedoms of vital importance to society. If these group interests are brushed aside or stifled, intellectuals will find themselves prisoners of huge impersonal organizations of one kind or another, serving purposes they do not approve. Second, if individual intellectuals decide to play an active role politically or to accept Government or other bureaucratic posts, they should do so with full awareness of the risks they have incurred. Not only should they have a clear-eyed awareness of the possibility that they will be "used"---for ends and purposes they do not approve---but they should be fully prepared at all times to step down whenever they feel that their integrity as intellectuals is threatened.

Obviously, this is a hard line to draw, the more so since power has its attractions and rewards. For this reason, intellectuals should be exceedingly wary about accepting such offers; ideally, they should serve Government on a short-term or interim basis and should constantly remind themselves that they are, first of all, intellectuals and only secondarily, and temporarily, wielders of power.

Third, intellectuals must realize, as most of them do, that more important than their role as specialists---technician, scientist, scholar, etc.---is their role as guardians of the moral legitimacy of society's stated values and purposes. They should be endlessly concerned with goals, purposes, values. Postindustrial societies, with their complex bureaucratic structures, require constant scrutiny and criticism; such societies tend to be propelled in directions that are determined not by conscious choice but by a kind of technological determinism.

This social role of the intellectuals far transcends in importance whatever specialized contributions they may make as individuals. Granted that society cannot function without their specialized talents, the big questions---the increasingly important questions---remain: Function to what ends? In whose interests? For what purposes? At all costs, intellectuals must preserve their freedom to question the obsolete, restrictive, arbitrary arrangements---and policies and programs, as well---that develop wherever bureaucracies flourish. The intellectual is a generalist a moralist, a questioner, a social critic. To this end, he must join with other intellectuals in defense---and in furtherance---of the interests of intellectuals as a group. These interests are not and can never be antithetical to the stated values of a democratic society; on the contrary, they guarantee the survival of these values. For if intellectuals fail to honor their responsibilities or misconceive them, society is quite capable of destroying itself or of finding its value system distorted beyond recognition.