Sobre el concepto de intelectual

Abstract

In French, the name «intellectuel» appeared for the first time, in De Saint-Simon writings, in 1820. But the real history of the concept only begins at the end of the XIXth century. Since then, it has suffered continuous redefinitions in its different enuntiation contexts. Those contexts depended on political events (from the Dreyfus affaire to the death of political Marxism in the 1980s) or on certain sociocultural circumstances (the uninterrupted growth of schooling and college populations, or the triumph of mass culture). In order to properly reconstitute the series of historical meanings of «intellectual» it is convenient to change the approach and retrieve the microcontexts of the concrete relations among individuals. Far from reducing its meaning to the «intellectual professions», under the concept of «intellectual» we can find clues to understand political, cultural and moral problems. The attribution of the term cannot be made arbitrarily. Only the analysis, at varying degrees, of concrete historical situations can shed light on the multiple figures and metamorphoses of the concept. This article is just a first approach to that ambitious project.