Intellectual elites

This book aims to revisit the historical canon regarding the
formation of intellectual elites during successive projects of
modernization during 19th and 20th centuries. While existing
works on the topic focus either on the elimination of previous
elites in times of radical social change or on the creation of new
elites by each new political regime, we focus on a third
mechanism: the recuperation/conversion of previous intellectual
elites for new modernization projects. This mechanism of
historical and social change appears at every major transition
(“historical disjuncture”) but is given less importance both in
history/social sciences and in public discourse.
Almost without exception, the successive visions of
modernity fail in their attempt to transform the deep social
strata in spite of their explicit goals in that regard. Nevertheless,
each one creates new, imperfect, and fragmentary ways of
intervening and programming the newly instituted populations,
individuals and fields of activity. New conceptual vocabularies
were brought forth – by imitation or explicit distancing – out of
the failed discourses and reforms and larger spaces for expert-led
intervention were opened for subsequent reforms and projects
of modernization.
Scrutinizing the moments of discontinuity in modern and
contemporary Romanian history, this book will argue that, far
from a complete break with a past, each modernization projects
builds on and has to incorporate pre-existing social
processes/resources.

This paper is an analysis of Estado Novo´s political ideology, through the study of the magazine Cultura Política: revista mensal de estudos brasileiros, government s official periodic. After having read selected articles, concerning the political organization instituted in Brazil by the Golpe de 37, it was possible to examine intellectuals rationalizations for the building of a strong and centralized national state in Brazil. At the end we could verify the role played by the magazine on the authoritarian regime, realize the burocracy s importance as producers of this ideological discourse, and distinguish some of its characteristics.

The Intellectual In Front of a Mirror: A Discussion of Contemporary Intellectuals

The Croatian Encyclopaedic Dictionary from 2003 defines an intellectual as “a thinker whose public work is a force for morality and humaneness within a society”. That understanding of the public role of the intellectual is a construct dating to the turn of the turn of the 20th century. The issue of the intellectual’s position and role in the ever-changing contemporary society, as well ass the expectations the society sets before the intellectuals have always been relevant. During the entire 20th and 21st centuries, philosophers, writers, historians, sociologists and other theorists have discussed the term, thus contributing to this “monument to a problem” (Denkmäler von Problemen), as Reinhart Koselleck put it. The political scandal known today as the Dreyfuss affair
and Émile Zola’s open letter marked the beginning of a trend that has since snowballed. The emergence of mass media has begotten an industry of culture and science, while, linking it to prosperous universities, defining the intellectuals’ position in society in decreasingly uncertain terms. The term of the “intellectual” gradually entered literary and scholarly discourse, taking on different meanings in different circumstances. In the mid-1950s, American critics and theorists
introduced the model of an activist intellectual. In contrast, from the 1980s onwards, a number of more or less convincing books, written by diverse writers, sociologists, theorists and historians, which address the disappearance of “a socially active intellectual”, the downfall of “the world of the intellectual” which marked two thirds of the 20th century. In 1980, Jean-François Lyotard, polemicizing with Max Gall, referred to “the intellectual’s tombstone” in Le Monde. German linguist
Dietz Bering conducted a research of past intellectuals in 1982, examining the “history of a curse” (Die Intellektuellen: Geschichte eines Schimpfwortes). Simultaneously, across the ocean, the historian Russell Jacoby published a book entitled The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (1987), wherein he uses a comparative approach to juxtapose the former characteristics of the American society and the current situation, ostensibly caused by the “disappearance” of the intellectual. Despite there having passed more than three decades since those debates, even today there are mentions those rare intellectuals, who are still active and aren’t extinct. The breadth of education available, technological advancements and new mass media created one of the many contradictions of the new era: man does not think about society, despite participating in current events. Technology breeds a kind of mindlessness, mindless action, because it is self-applicable. Eric Hobsbawm was right when he claimed that modern technology educates younger generations, lending itself to quick use, without much thought, but the existence of science and the desire for its further advancements remain a guarantee of the intellectual’s position in modern society. It is particularly interesting to see whether the division between intellectuals in the public eye and those in academia is still valid today, or if new means and “rules” of communication force the intellectual to be exceedingly versatile in order to be heard. At the same time, the question arises whether intellectuals are even capable of responding to current problems. Can an intellectual be universal and is universality something to be strived to? On the other hand, does it make sense to strive for specialization among intellectuals or have we reached a point where we should redefine the term? There are, of course, other problems: from those bordering on the political, those which are indeed purely political, all the way to those concerning cultural heritage. Additionally, tradition of intellectual life and debates, as well as dominant influences must not be ignored. The oral history research method, surveys, a sort of oral history, opens new views of the past and the present of a circle, its attitude towards the way society develops and the world we live in through broader contacts with Croatian and international intellectuals. This provides the possibility of exploring the current situation, but also of analyzing the results of a longue durée process stretching through the second half of the 20th and the first half of the 21st century.