The Public Intellectual by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1318898
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2013-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

Finally, the rule of the infallible guide in the name of a primitive and dogmatic ideology based on the Volk or the proletariat was to carry both the triumph of a simplified idea, the power of one former intellectual, and the destruction of intellectual activity as such to their logical extreme.

FROM PARADISE TO HELL: THE INTELLECTUALS’ UTOPIA AS A REALITY

There is a sociological view sometimes propagated by dissident intellectuals, according to which Machajski’s prophecy has indeed come true. In their book The Intellectuals on the Road to State Power,10 György Konrád (a famous independent Hungarian writer, the inventor of the term “antipolitics”) and Istvan Szelenyi (an independent sociologist) described the communist regime as the one that, being based on ideology and central planning, gave intellectuals the greatest power as distinct from either capitalists or workers. But by “intellectuals” they, like Machajski, meant “the technicians, organizers, administrators, educators, and journalists.”11 If the party apparatus, as well as the opponents of the regime, is included within the broad category of the intelligentsia, then the intellectuals are by definition both rulers and oppressed. It is important to distinguish both types of intellectual (using Tocqueville’s distinction between “philosophers” or writers on the one hand and “economists” or men of action on the other) and types of relation to power. A Ukrainian author has enumerated five categories of the latter: (1) the ideologist intellectuals (or the communists in power); (2) the supernumerary clerks (or the sympathizers who were the reservoir from which the first category was selected); (3) the conformist intellectuals; (4) the marginalized intellectuals; and (5) the independent intellectuals or dissidents.12

Combining the two types of classification points to interesting paradoxes. For instance, the planners are constantly caught between the rigidity of the ideology, the arbitrary decisions of the leader, and the resistance of social and economic reality. Hence, the need for scapegoats to justify their failure. The scientists were to some extent (except in the most extreme ideological moments as when Stalin imposed his dictates on biology) protected from these perils and enjoyed a privileged material status; yet the very exercise of their task called forth frustrations and demands that could put them in conflict with the regime. Andrei Sakharov’s critique started by asking for the freedom to communicate with Western fellow scientists; from there it developed into a plea for reform and tolerance and finally into a general stance based on human rights and moral responsibility. The ideological intellectuals proper were faced with the paradox of a regime based on ideology, hence on ideas, but whose particular ideology affirmed the subordination of ideas and of truth to a non- or anti-intellectual point of view, that of the elected race in one case, of the proletariat in the other, of the tyrant’s power in both. Their task was to substitute, through terror and manipulation, belief in an imaginary world for the exercise of thought and the experience of reality. As Pasternak put it in Doctor Zhivago: “People had to be cured, through any possible

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