The question of who or what is an intellectual may not be one that would have rocked the Mermaid Tavern or rattled the tables of 18th-century coffee houses, but in our self-conscious age it plainly has commanding importance. Used as a noun, the word “intellectual” is a curious one. For all its current popularity it is notoriously imprecise and its use is attended by various ambiguities and tricky nuances. No one out of adolescence would dream of identifying himself publicly as “an intellectual” (as he would have no diffidence about doing as, say, a writer, artist, humanist, scholar, or scientist), and it is unlikely that he would so introduce a friend, save in good-natured irony. Yet it is clearly a prestige-word, and its spreading use as a noun is among the word-explosions of the last couple of decades. The history of language suggests that whenever a word passes suddenly from long-established adjectival status to noun-form, precision and clarity are early casualties. For centuries, “intellectual” was used as an adjective and everyone knew exactly what was meant—although admittedly clarity began to dim and meaning wander when, just before the noun was born, the adjective came to be used in certain circles to refer to the interests of haute culture and, as often as not, was accented by irony or mild derision.

When we come to the noun (I have no recollection of its serious use much before the late 1940's; in the 30's, “writer” was made to serve a legion of purposes), the range of accepted meaning is nearly limitless. So is the range of context in which the word is used. One finds oneself irresistibly sniffing for motive even today whenever the word is thrown at one. Scholars and scientists are likely to feel happy with the designation only when the company is proper. To be characterized “more an intellectual than a scholar” can be as devastating in one type of company as “more a scholar than an intellectual” in another type. Yet it would appear that the word, like the type, is here to stay. It may even attain the unchallenged eminence that the word “philosopher” once had. The great Faraday, we are told, preferred for himself the title of philosopher to that of scientist. There may well be scientists today who prefer the title intellectual, but I don't know what a poll of the National Academy would reveal.

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There are some who make the word (i. e., the noun) cover literally all professionals in modern society, giving it a meaning roughly equivalent to the now defunct intelligentsia. Others give it so specialized and precarious an identity that vast numbers of scholars, scientists, and even writers and artists are excluded. I think Lewis A. Coser in his recent book, Men of Ideas: A Sociologist's View¹ is right in coming, on the whole, closer to the second than the first usage. For there is, and has been since the 18th century, a social type in the West, deserving of clear identity, that cannot easily be subsumed under the categories “professional,” “scientist,” “artist,” or “scholar.” I think the first really distinct “intellectuals” were the philosophes in the late 18th century in France, though, as Mr. Coser indicates, the type came into being in the preceding century (he cites the members of the Royal Academy; I should myself have pinpointed the charming Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, an elegant donnybrook that brought out the “intellectual” in each of its participants). The philosophes may have been philosophers but they were certainly not philosophers in the sense that Hobbes, Leibniz, Descartes, or even Locke had been. They may have been scholars and scientists, but not in the sense that puts them ordinarily in the histories of science and scholarship that experts write today. The philosophes were—there is no other word for them—intellectuals; the first luminous representatives of a type that was to become ever more distinct and, as Mr. Coser makes superbly clear, ever more potent in the cultural and political history of the contemporary world.

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What are the identifying qualities of the intellectual? Central to Mr. Coser's composite portrait is commitment to ideas as such. Intellectuals are “gatekeepers of ideas and fountainheads of ideologies.” It is characteristic of intellectuals, Mr. Coser emphasizes, that they transform conflicts of interest into conflicts of ideas and values and thus “increase a society's self-knowledge by making manifest its latent sources of discomfort and discontent.” Second is the quality of moral commitment. By nature the intellectual—unlike the pure scholar or philosopher or scientist—sits in incessant and relentless judgment on his times. He exhibits a “pronounced concern with the core values of a society,” he is forever invoking the “impractical ought” in the face of expediency. He is, in this respect, a descendant of the prophets. So, however, are clergymen and adult educators, and if the intellectual is to be distinguished from them, still a third quality must be underscored. For Mr. Coser this quality is best described as “play.” “While earnest practitioners tend to focus on the tasks at hand, the intellectual delights in the play of the mind and relishes it for its own sake.” It is in this sense, writes Mr. Coser, following Ralf Dahrendorf, that the contemporary intellectual is lineally descended from the medieval court jester who also played none of the expected roles and who had “the extraordinary privilege of dispensing with adherence to the usual proprieties because he was outside the social hierarchy and was therefore also deprived of the privileges enjoyed by those within.”

To these three attributes I would add one that Mr. Coser does not mention, one relating to the characteristic style of the intellectual. This is—I can think of no other word for it—brilliance. What profundity is to the philosopher, what depth and thoroughness are to the scholar, brilliance is to the intellectual, especially the contemporary intellectual. Brilliance is another word that has exploded in the reviews and journals only within the past two or three decades; applied, that is, to works of the mind. As praise, brilliance seems not to have been used in earlier ages except possibly with reference to schoolboys. I find no evidence that mature writers and thinkers praised each other with the word. Even today we do not, except possibly in an occasional Ph.D. diesis or student magazine, apply the word to the works of our distinguished early predecessors. It would certainly grate on the nerves to see someone today solemnly using “brilliant” with respect to, say, The Laws, King Lear, or Faust, whereas it is commonplace to write of any contemporary philosopher, playwright, or poet that his latest work is brilliant.

On the evidence of book reviews and footnotes, the present age is chock-full of brilliant minds. “Brilliant” has become in our day the most cherished, sought-after, carefully cultivated, and profitably traded adjective in the lexicon of not merely intellectuals as such, but even scientists and scholars. For an intellectual to reach middle-age without once having had the word applied to his work is the stuff of tragedy—no matter how often he may have been referred to as “thorough,” “fundamental,” “important,” “seminal,” etc. And seemingly nothing so marks the intellectual's sense of being in menopause as the lessening frequency of the word in the reviews, references, and footnotes he receives. It is surely no exaggeration to suggest that today's intellectual would cheerfully forego all praise in terms of mastery, depth, substance, and accuracy if he could but be assured of his share of attributed brilliance. And, craving it, he typically adapts his style of work to its properties: iridescence of style, the searching and sealing insight, the flashing riposte, etc.

But though the word is recent, the referent is as old precisely as the referent of the noun, intellectual. There is a natural affinity between “brilliance” and “intellectual,” and this has been true ever since the 18th century when the modern intellectual came into existence as a recognized type. The style of brilliance was perfected in the salons of Paris and the coffee houses of London and, although the legacy of the past was still of sufficient weight to lead men like Samuel Johnson, Burke, Helvetius, and Voltaire to seek to write with hoary philosophic profundity, the new style of brilliance begins to be apparent here also. It is in France, where the true intellectual first emerges, that the style of brilliance achieves contemporary luster. No one could have accused Voltaire, D'Alembert, Diderot, and Helvetius of thoroughness or depth, and I am not sure that any one of them would have claimed it. But the philosophes would have loved the praise of brilliance applied to them. And indeed they were brilliant, as are so very many of us today.

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The question of identity aside, what were the contexts in which the modern intellectual came into being? This forms the important and distinctive subject of the first part of Men of Ideas. The intellectual, as Mr. Coser makes fascinatingly clear, was washed ashore by the same tides in the 17th and 18th century that carried the economic entrepreneur, the politician, and the bureaucrat; and, as each of these required institutional settings—business enterprise, civil service, political party—for his unfolding, so did the intellectual. What was required, in sociological terms, for the emergence of the intellectual was, first, firm contexts in which intellectuals could be made conscious of themselves as a group and, second, the appearance of a public that would be predictably interested in the tracts, treatises, novels, and plays that began to pour forth in a steady stream that has in our day reached almost flood proportions.

Contexts are dealt with by Mr. Coser in a succession of generally excellent chapters on the scientific societies, the salons of Paris, the coffee houses of London, the rise of booksellers and circulating libraries, the appearance of the great quarterlies and reviews in the 19th century, political sects such as the Saint Simonians, literary Bohemia, and, for our own day, the little magazines. Mr. Coser has a good eye for the clarifying personage or event and a sure sense of what is sociologically relevant and historically germane. The general relation between ideas and contexts has rarely been made more concrete and vivid.

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The modern “public,” without which intellectuals would be as destitute as a clergy without parishioners, came into being in the 18th century. For the first time, professional men of letters could reasonably anticipate a livelihood based upon the sale of their intellectual works. The affinity between the citizen and the modern state, between entrepreneur and market, is paralleled by the affinity between the intellectual or professional, and the public. Mr. Coser does not belabor this comparison of types and affinities, or even deal with it systematically, but no one will overlook it as the essential sociological backdrop of what is explicit in his pages. In the 19th century, public became mass public, in a variant of the same process undergone by state and market. And it was in this century, as Mr. Coser emphasizes, that the all too familiar tensions between the intellectual and society first developed.

The enormous increase in publishing and circulation figures in the 19th century betokened opportunity for the man of letters to become wealthy and successful by all popular standards; but it also betokened temptation to vulgarize and popularize; and, finally, it betokened estrangement from the concrete reality of those for whom the intellectual wrote. Mr. Coser gives us a suggestive chapter on this aspect in which—through portraits of Walter Scott, Thackeray, Dickens, and George Eliot—he deals with the pressures of commercialization and the varying degrees of adaptation to them that are found in these four writers. Of the four, only George Eliot, in Mr. Coser's opinion, “triumphantly resisted” all of the pressures.

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The modern intellectual was born not merely in a widening commercial market, but also in the scene of the vast expansion of power that has marked the political history of modern Europe. The second part of Men of Ideas—illuminatingly called “Intellectuals and the House of Power”—concerns the varying adaptations intellectuals have made to the phenomenon of power in modern society. Inevitably, “the general tension between the intellectuals' preoccupation with general and abstract values and the routine institutions of society asserted itself.” Possessors of power and intellectuals “have traditionally looked upon each other with a measure of mistrust and mutual incomprehension.” That much is true, but it has not led to any general monastic retreat by intellectuals from the scene of power. On the contrary, fascination with power—its properties and uses, and the possibilities it contains for the millennial reconstruction of society—has often been a mark of the intellectual. If there are those, at one extreme, who have feared power and, like Shelley, seen it simply as “a desolating pestilence,” there were assuredly others who saw it as the indispensable machinery by which dreams are made into reality. It is one of the many merits of Men of Ideas that Mr. Coser deals coolly, objectively, and, it seems to me, comprehensively with a matter that all too often swamps those who attempt to delve into it. He does this by distinguishing clearly among what he calls “the modalities” that have characterized the relations between men of power and men of ideas. There are five such modalities:

Intellectuals may hold power, as did the early Jacobins and the early Bolsheviks. They may attempt to direct and advise the men of power, as did the Fabians or members of Roosevelt's “Brain Trust.” They may serve to legitimize the men of power and provide them with ideological justifications. The idéologues under Napoleon and the Polish “revisionists” under Gomulka are prime examples. They may be critics of power, and, like Old Testament prophets, they may castigate political men for the errors of their ways, attempting to shame men committed to an ethos of compromise by holding up absolute standards of moral righteousness. The Dreyfusards and the Abolitionists played such roles. Finally, they may despair of exercising influence at home and may turn to political systems abroad that seem more nearly to embody the image of their desire.

(Mr. Coser's examples of the last are the philosophes in 18th-century France who drew inspiration from the imagined reality of Imperial China and, second, the English and American intellectuals of the 1930's who drew it from Soviet Russia.)

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Each of these “modalities” is the subject of a chapter, and one can only admire the combination of learning and insight with which Mr. Coser deals with protagonists and conditions alike. I find him best in his treatment of Jacobins and Bolsheviks—those whose intellectualism commanded them to take power directly—and Napoleonic idéologues and Gomulka revisionists—those who were content to rationalize and legitimize what was formed by others. I think Mr. Coser's fourth modality of the intellectuals' relationship to power—that of unrelenting criticism—would have been more compelling had he chosen, instead of the Dreyfusards and Abolitionists, some representative anarchists; those for whom control of, or immunity from, power itself is the central issue rather than those whose interest in power was ancillary to a pursuit of distinguishable moral ends. And for all the skill with which he has dealt with the final modality—fascination with power abroad—I believe it would have been well to make a clearer distinction between the philosophes whose admiration for Chinese imperial absolutism was no more than a device (though a serious one) in behalf of their pre-Jacobin dreams of power at home, and the Communist or fellow-traveling American intellectuals of the 1930's who felt themselves—however naively and credulously we think today—participants in a unified and ongoing world march in which Russia formed the vanguard. Difference of context aside, however, there is still much to be gleaned from Mr. Coser's imaginative comparison of the two cases. And today, as he notes dryly, a certain crop of intellectuals in America has come full circle, for they turn again to China—this time to Mao rather than to a romanticized emperor.

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In the book's final section, Mr. Coser takes up the familiar and obsessive problem of the role of the intellectual in contemporary America. As before, he is concerned primarily with institutional settings and social processes: this time with the university, the large-scale scientific laboratory, the foundation, the government bureau, the mass-culture industry, to each of which he gives valuable attention. Plainly, contemporary settings such as these differ markedly from the earlier ones of salon, coffee house, and literary Bohemia in which intellectuals first came into being in modern Europe. And the most fateful difference for Mr. Coser as it relates to the intellectual, consists of the changed degree of attachment involved. Thus Mr. Coser writes:

One of the most important observations that can be made about unattached intellectuals in contemporary America is that there are so very few of them. . . . The relative decline of unattached intellectuals over the last thirty or forty years must be explained by both structural and ideological factors. It is part of the growing institutionalization and, more particularly, academization of intellect in America, and it is also a result of the decline of the avant-garde and of radical ideology in American culture.

One's immediate temptation is to agree with this statement. In one form or other most of us have written or spoken it. Offhand it seems as obvious as, for example, the related proposition that the number of independent economic entrepreneurs is less, relative to an earlier America, or that once there was more individualism generally, and fewer controls upon individual imagination and enterprise. Mr. Coser may be right in what he says about the relative number of unattached intellectuals, though I find myself today skeptical, and in any event no real evidence is adduced. Admittedly, the number of attached intellectuals in America today is greater than at any time before, but to deduce from this that the number of unattached intellectuals must therefore be relatively smaller is risky. Such a deduction overlooks the fact that intellectuals in general (and I use the word in Mr. Coser's sense) are vastly more numerous in the population than ever before. I suspect that in relative as well as absolute terms there are considerably more unattached intellectuals today than there were in the first quarter of the present century. It's just that there seem to be a fewer because the attached are so outnumbered, outshouted, and out-glittered by the attached—who especially in Academia have life tenure, substantial salaries, handsome apartments, secretarial help, research or technical assistance galore, and social status beyond anything that could have been dreamed of a generation ago.

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When we turn, however, from the question of numbers to the question of the influence of intellectuals today, there can be no doubt about the change in position of the unattached intellectual. There is simply no comparison today between the prestige held, and influence exerted by, the intellectual within the academy or foundation or mass-circulation prestige magazine and that held and exerted by his unattached colleague. It is very probable that at no time in history has the intellectual exerted the direct influence over the lives and beliefs of others that he does today, but he does this as the attached and salaried professor, scientist, journalist, artist, novelist or critic in residence, White House adviser, etc.

In today's university the intellectual has, not a room of his own, but a veritable palace. Never has he been more powerful, more arrogant, more pampered and, generally, so well rewarded as in our major universities. Mr. Coser writes of these institutions with respect and affection, but without illusion. His portrait of the academic intellectual seems to me the most penetrating of any that I have seen, and I am particularly indebted to him for puncturing the myth that all academics are, by virtue of being academics, allergic to administration and bureaucracy:

Anyone familiar with modern academic life knows of the well-nigh universal complaint among academicians about lack of time. But a great deal of familiarity with the case at hand is required in order to know whether or not those who complain actually are pressed for time or whether or not they involve themselves in time-consuming administrative tasks in order to distract attention from their own sterility. The academy provides mechanisms that can be used for an institutionalized evasion of the academic norms of scholarly productivity.

Well! This is unwonted candor indeed, and it is reinforced by the author's reference to what he calls the “interesting paradox” through which academic men, striving ostensibly to save the academy from bureaucracy, become involved in bureaucratic activities that “necessarily distract them from those scholarly tasks that the academy is supposed to foster and protect.” Mr. Coser is right but is, I should say, being delicate. I do not myself hesitate to say that at the present time not less than sixty per cent of all academics in the universities in this country have so profound a distaste for the classroom and for the pains of genuine scholarship or creative thought that they will seize upon anything—curriculum iconography, faculty politics, bureaucratized research, anything—to exempt themselves respectably from each. Mr. Coser only hints at—he is too polite to emphasize—the melancholy truth that the major restraint today upon faculty creativity is the administrative and political activity that faculty members themselves engender: not that which comes in the first instance from professional administrators. It is commonly done in the name of academic freedom, to be sure, and some of it is indeed necessary, but the fact remains that there are universities in this country today where, if the present rate of increase in organized self-engendered faculty bureaucracy continues, the only function of the faculty in the future will certainly be organizational.

The passion for administration among faculty members generally, I have found, lends much support to what Robert N. Wilson has somewhere written: that on the evidence it makes as much sense to pronounce all academics unsuccessful administrators as administrators unsuccessful academics. The affinity that Tocqueville and Weber noted between mass democracy and bureaucracy is as luminous in the university as elsewhere. From the point of view of the intellectual or scholar I should say that the best university government is not democracy but benevolent dictatorship tempered by fear of assassination. Under despotism in the university, the intellectual, teacher, and scholar might be inefficiently governed, but at least he would be free!

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Whether in the university, in the mass-culture industry, in government, or in society at large, the central problem for the intellectual today is, Mr. Coser concludes, that of maintaining “detached concern.” The problem is made infinitely more difficult, of course, by the sheer popularity, the nearly limitless acceptance, of the intellectual today. As Esquire, the Saturday Evening Post, the New Yorker, Time, and many others have discovered, sophistication and intellectualism are good business. And, as White House parties in both the Johnson and Kennedy administrations have made plain—good copy. If there were correspondence schools for the training of intellectuals as there are for creative writers, they might advertise as follows: “It's smart to disturb the intellectual peace. Thousands of others have enhanced income and prestige by doing so. Why not you!” The hardy intellectual proved by his geometric increase from 1840 to 1940 that he could maintain his detached concern and still hold onto all of his essential roles under the hostile eye of Victorianism, the Bible Belt, the Booboisie, Watch and Ward, Babbitt, Mrs. Grundy, and the other spooks that, fifty years ago, were out to bedevil him. He not only survived his enemies, he conquered them. Whether he can today survive his friends who would feed him and hug him until he suffocates is another matter. There is no cause for melancholy in Mr. Coser's fine book, but neither is there cause for elation.

¹ The Free Press, 374 pp., $6.95.