El concepto de intelectual en Hispanoamérica: génesis y evolución

Abstract

The «intellectual» concept development in twentieth century Spanish-American history, is examined with special emphasis in the Mexican case. The autor maintains that its appearance and development is a socio-cultural phenomenon typical of twentieth century. Based on Begriffsgeschichte approach some semantic variations of intellectual term are shown, without neglecting sociological context of its evolution. The term of intellectual takes part of spanish-american lexicon since the end of nineteenth century. Its transformation, however, into a generalised concept does not happen until 20' decade. The relative decline of positivist philosophy takes parallel to «public functions» declination of some groups established in the government with the emergency of a new group centered to become the moral conscience of the society. As well as in the preindustrial period «philosophers» put into question the traditional corpus of collective knowledge and built up a new one, in the same way, in twentieth century the role of conforming a new kowledge of «criticism» has been assigned to the «intellectual».