European and Other Intellectuals

In a collection of essays as valuable and wide‐ranging as this, focusing as it does on Europe as well as on national and European intellectuals, many of whom are supposed to be engaged in a conversation on European integration, there may be some merit in pausing to raise the questions: What is an intellectual? What is a national or European intellectual? And what do we mean by ‘European integration’? I will devote most of this chapter to the first, and then offer very brief remarks on the second and third.

‘In every society there are social groups whose special task it is to provide an interpretation of the world for that society.’ Thus Karl Mannheim, writing some eighty years ago about the ‘intelligentsia’ (Mannheim 1936: 10). For him a crucial feature of the intelligentsia (and I refer to that term as a collective noun for intellectuals, rather than as a designation for a cultural class) is their detachment from socially determined or inspired viewpoints. (Indeed, that perspective later metamorphosed into conceptions of a rootless intelligentsia, as in Russian usage: see Jennings and Kemp‐Welch 1997: 7.) While Mannheim’s general approach is to be lauded, it regrettably led him to two related errors of analysis. The one was the expectation that intellectuals would converge on a single perspective of understanding; the other was to assume the possibility of unadulterated detachment. The first error – appealing to an evidential basis of epistemology – still linked Mannheim to the Marxist tradition: the removal of false or partial perspectives would enable scientific social knowledge to claim its rightful, objective status, if not absolutely then with reference to a specific historical situation (Mannheim 1936: 78–9, 86). The possibility that even free‐floating intellectuals might create a multitude of perspectives did not occur to him. Free‐floating would, after all, only be possible in a reasonably free society, and that would ipso facto be one in which many viewpoints cohabited.

The second error – appealing to a neutral‐rational basis of epistemology – put an exaggerated premium on the possibility, even desirability, of ‘objective’ (p.78) detachment, or at least a ‘total orientation’ or a synthesis produced by a ‘relatively classless stratum’ (Mannheim 1936: 153–4, 161). It made a sharp distinction between ‘truth’ and ‘ideology’ – a distinction that was often then directed to differentiate between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ intellectuals: those who were committed to the virtuous and the reasonable, and those who treacherously put their skills at the disposal of manipulative and mendacious states and governments. In an extreme version of that approach, Louis Feuer (1975: 110, 190) called the latter ‘marginal’ or ‘semi’ intellectuals. Though that was not Mannheim’s view, he did not consider the possibility that all social views might be contestable interpretations of a moving and fluctuating reality rather than historically anchored truths, and that ideologies are competitions over the control of the languages of interpretation – many of which are plausible and meet the requirements of reflective distance that intellectuals are supposed to fulfil (Freeden 1996).

It is important that we realize which of the many senses of ‘intellectual’ are deployed in a project that is dedicated to exploring what European intellectuals are and what they may be contributing to a state of ‘being European’. One crucial dividing line is whether intellectuals are there to provide understanding or to stimulate action. In a sense that distinction is partly spurious since non‐random action must emanate from some understanding or other. But it is frequently the case that intellectuals are believed to be charged with the responsibility to changethe world, not ‘merely’ to interpret it, in Marx’s disdainful phrase. Their vital hermeneutic role – that of enabling a society to understand itself – has frequently been overtaken by those intellectuals who assume a pontificating or missionary role. The question ‘what should we be?’ has left the question ‘what are we?’ far behind. It also diminishes the process of transformation from the one question to the other which has been seen as a feature of intellectual work (Shils 1968). Maybe that was always so, but it is also at risk of re‐attaching itself to a peculiar arrogance and elitism. Being an intellectual is an elite activity, and an ideological activity, and ideologies are often tempted to mask their inevitable partiality (which is not the same as falsehood, because falsehood assumes the availability of truth) by employing myths of non‐evaluative neutrality or special insight that serve, among others, to protect the status of intellectuals. Some intellectuals are not only ideologists in the broad sense – that is perfectly normal – but ideologues: they possess a doctrinaire and often totalizing prescriptive view of the world, and from there it is but one step to regard intellectuals as dangerous manipulators at the service of ruthless rulers and their belief systems. Conviction then becomes not a vessel through which to channel social responsibility but a poisoned chalice. However, you can possess an ideology without being an ideologue, and it is mistaken to suggest that ‘old‐type’ intellectuals engaged through ideologies which have now lost their appeal (Fleck, Hess, and Lyon 2009: 5).

(p.79) The intellectuals discussed in this volume are understood in the specific sense of having specialized in thinking about, and in prescribing plans for, society. Yet intellectuals should be interpreters – that signified their essence for Mannheim – at least as much as they are prescriptionists. Their role as proper intellectuals is also to be engaged in the Weberian objective of Verstehen. Edward Shils saw this as perceiving, experiencing, and expressing ‘a general significance in particular, concrete events’ (Shils 1968: 399). That view was also captured by Julien Benda, whose famous definition of the intellectual or, more accurately, the ‘clerk’, referred to all those non‐realists and non‐materialists ‘whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice of an art or a science or metaphysical speculation’ (Benda 1955: 30). As Shils noted, ‘the belief in the intrinsic and practical value of scientific knowledge has also contributed to the increase in the size of the intellectual stratum’ (Shils 1990: 287). This kind of intellectual is now mostly to be found amongst the ranks of academics, though it must also be emphasized that some academics are closer to being technicians than intellectuals. That said, a distinction needs to be maintained between specialist academics, with their contribution to European integration policies, and non‐expert ‘prophetic’ visionaries with messages to large audiences.

At any rate, when some chapters in this book relate to political theorizing about Europe as primarily normative, they seem to mean the attempt to implement a value agenda, usually a political one. Perhaps there are two senses of ‘normative’ lurking here. According to Alan Montefiore (1990