Universal corporatism the role of intellectuals in the modern world (Pierre Bourdieu)

Fourth Lecture. Universal Corporatism: The Role of Intellectuals in the Modern
World
Pierre Bourdieu; Gisele Sapiro; Brian McHale
Poetics Today, Vol. 12, No. 4, National Literatures/Social Spaces. (Winter, 1991), pp. 655-669.
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Sun Jan 27 05:46:50 2008


Fourth Lecture. Universal Corporatism:
The Role of Intellectuals
in the Modern World
Pierre Bourdieu

T h e lecture I a m about to deliver, on the initiative of' the Asalli newspaper, falls within the sphere of the bicentennial celebrations of the
French Revolution. And I would like to contribute in my olvn way,

which is, no doubt, a little paradoxical o r perverse, to these celebrations by recalling, following the lecture I delivered yesterday at
Todai University, that the organizers of' these ceremonies are none
other than, in the France of 1989, the members of'this State nobility,
the power of which finds its legitimacy in cultural capital, that is,
from a naive point of view, in intelligence. One can immediately
see that this new torm of' domination raises a difficult and probably unprecedented problem for intellectuals, who are dominated
dominants, that is, the dominated among the dominant. Unlike those
whom nineteenth-century writers designated as "bourgeois" or, worse,
"shopkeepers," a good many of the modern rulers of great public
o r private bureaucracies are technocrats o r even epistenlocrats who
pretend to use science-notably, economic science-in order to gove r n and who have, by virtue of this, more power than ever- before to
contest the monopoly of' intelligence that intellectuals used to readily
appropriate to themselves.
But I a m coming to the subject. At the risk of' overstepping the
bounds tacitly prescribed for a lecturer, especially when he is also a
r h ~ Isrcturr \\as d r l ~ \ e ~ eatdthe e c l ~ t o ~ loffices
al
of 4,c1lrt on October 6. 1989
Poc2tlrs Today

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foreigner, I shall be acting here in the capacity of an intellectual, in
the precise sense of the definition which I shall be trying to give to that

term. I shall try to place whatever competence I may have as a sociologist at the service of a symbolic action (of a political type) designed to
encourage and promote a reasoned and effective intervention by intellectuals in political life. Whatever novelty my argument may possess
lies in the f'act that, tor reasons which characterize them sociologically,
intellectuals are not used to subordinating their action to sociological
knowledge, not only of the ~vorldin ~vhichthey claim to act, but of
themselves as intellectuals and of the reasons fbr (or the social determinants o f ) their actions. I would like to try to define the possible ends
and means of collective action by intellectuals of all countries on the
basis of an analysis, ~vhichseeks to be as realistic as possible, of ~ v h a t
an intellectual is and ~vhathe could be.
T h e intellectual is a paradoxical being. One can only conceive of
him as such on the condition that one calls into question the classical
alternative of pure culture and political engagement. He was historically constituted in and by the overstepping ofthis opposition: French
~vriters,artists, and scientists asserted themselves as intellectuals when,
at the moment of the "Affaire Dreyfus," they interfered in political
life as intellectuals, that is, with a specific authority grounded on their
belonging to the relatively autonomous world of art, science, and literature and on all the values that are associated with this autonomyvirtue, disinterestedness, competence, and so on.
T h e intellectual is a bidimensionnl being. To be entitled to the name of
intellectual, a cultural producer must fulfill two conditions: on the one
hand, he must belong to an autonomous intellectual ~vorld(a field),
that is, independent from religious, political, and economic powers
(and so on), and must respect its specific laws; on the other hand,
he must invest the competence and authority he has acquired in the
intellectual field in a political action, which is in any case carried out
outside the intellectual field proper.
The Genesis of the Intellectual

In order to ground these propositions, which might seem peremptory and arbitrary, and before stating the broad outlines of a collective
action by intellectuals, it is necessary to try to allude briefly to the forgotten o r repressed history of which intellectuals are the product. This
is a n extraordinarily repetitive history, since the evolution of the field
to~vardautonomy is attended ~vitha perpetual vacillation in attitudes

toward politics, between engagement in the world and retreat into the
ivory tower. I n the eighteenth century, the "engagement" of the "philosophes," which Voltaire, in 1765-in the article from the Dzctior~r~aire
PhilosoPhzqz~eentitled "L'Homme d e lettresn-opposes to the scholastic


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obscurantism of decadent universities and academies, found its logical
continuation in the participation of these same "hommes d e lettres" in
the French Kevolution.
During the postrevolutionary period of the Restoration, the
"hommes d e lettres" were held responsible not only for the movement
of subversive ideas which had led, notabl!., through newspapers, to the
Revolution itself, but also for the excesses o f t h e Terror: they were objects of' distrust, and even scorn, for the younger generation of 1820,
in particular the Kornantic poets. In the first stage of the Kornantic
movement, these poets impugned the claim of the "philosophes" to
interfere in political life and to propose a rational vision of historical development; and they affirmed their own desire for autonomy
by reestablishing religious sensibility and feeling against reason and
criticism of dogmas. But as soon as the reactionary politics o f t h e Kestoration threatened the autonomy of the intellectual field, they did
not hesitate to claim liberty tor the writer and the scientist (notably, in
the case of Michelet and Saint-Sirnon) and to recover (notably, in the
case of Victor Hugo) the prophetic function of the eighteenth-century
"philosophes."
But, in a new swing of the pendulum, the populist Romanticism

that seems to have possessed almost all writers in the period preceding the 1848 revolution did not survive the failure of the progressive
movement and the establishment of the Second Empire: the collapse
of the illusions of '48 led to this extraordinary disillusion, which is so
vigorously evoked by Flaubert in L'Education senti7rtentale, and which
furnished fertile ground for a renewed refusal of engagement. T h e
champions of "art for art's sake," such as Flaubert o r Theophile Gautier, opposed "pure" art to both "social art" and "bourgeois art," ~vhich
was subject, in the realms of art and the art of living alike, to the
bourgeois customers' norms. Refusing the servitude of "industrial literature" (except in the interests of paying the rent) and admitting
no judgment but their peers', they identified the literary field's selfenclosure with the ~vriter'srenunciation of the exercise of symbolic
power in any form whatsoever (thereby breaking with the tradition
of' the poet as zlates in the manner of Hugo and that of the scientistprophet in the manner of hlichelet).
It lvas only at the end of the nineteenth century, at the moment
~ v h e nthe literary field, the artistic field, and the scientific field acceded
to a very high degree of autonomy, that the most autonomous agents
of these autonomous fields arrived at the idea that autonomy was not
to be identified with the renunciation of politics and that they could
even intervene as artists, writers, or scientists in the political field. Unlike those cultural producers who turned into politicians (like Guirot
o r Lamartine), they entered upon the political landscape with an au-


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thority which derived from the autonomy of their own field and which
claimed all the values on which its existence was grounded-ethical
purity, competence, and so on. Emile Zola's accuse" and the petitions in support of it had an exemplary (paradigmatic) value since
properly artistic or scientific authority was affirmed there in political
interventions of a new type, rvhich tended to maximize both of the
dimensions constitutive of the intellectual's identity, namely, "purity"

and "engagement"; the); galre birth to a politics of pz~rity~vhichTvas the
perfect antithesis of the "Raison d7E:tat."
The Intellectual: An Unstable Synthesis

What rvas the basis of this anti-political politics? It was the existence
of social worlds rvhose fundamental law was the refusal of the legality
specific to the economic and political fields, the refusal of ends and
values that these fields recognized, such as rnoney, power, honors.
With Zola's "position" in the 't4ffaire Dreyf'us," the table of values
had been decisively overturned: not content with renouncing mercenary and commercial ends within the limits of their own upside-down
world, the intellectuals undertook to affirm their anti-values on the
very ground of ordinary social life, in the realm of' ethics-notably,
in the realm of' sex-and also, a graver t~ansgresszon,a t least from the
point of view of'the champions of social order, in the realm of politics
(these ethical or political transgressions became the occasions for trials
in the case of Baudelaire and Flaubert as rvell as in the case of Zola).
They affirmed the right to transgress the most sacred values of the collectivity-those of patriotism and of nationalism-by supporting, in
the name of values transcending those of' Commerce, Zola's libelous
article against the army (or, much later, during the war of Algeria, by
calling for support of the enerny in the antitorture petition o f t h e 12 1).
They founded their authority upon the unwritten laws of an ethical
and scientific universalism in order to exercise a kind of moral ministry and to launch, on certain occasions, a collective mobilization for
the purposes of a struggle designed to disperse throughout the rvhole
social world the values which rvere current in their own universe.
T h e paracloxical synthesis of the contraries of' autonomy ancl political engagement, rvhich chiiracterizes the intellectual, was not invented
all at once and was not established once and for all; it has in it something unstable and unsettled, the consequence of which, as the toand-fro movement observable in history attests, is that the holders of
cultural capital can always "regress" torvard one or another of the positions designated by the pendulum of' history, that is, torvard the role
o f t h e "pure" writer, artist, scientist, or torvard the role o f t h e simple
political actor, journalist, politician, and so on. T h e vacillations between two possible attitudes toward politics can also be explained by

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the fact that the claim of autonomy inscribed in the very existence of
a field of cultural production must take into account temporal powers
which vary from period to period in the history o f a single country and
from country to country, ~vhetherpowers exterior to the field, such as
those of the Church, the State, or the big industrial and commercial
enterprises, or polvers internal to it, especially those involving control of specific means of production and diffusion (press, publishing,
radio, television, and so on).
T h e variations which are observable from period to period and, in
the same period, from country to country in the cultural producers'
strategies, notably, in the realm of politics, and ~vhichresult from
the state of relations between the intellectual field and the temporal
powers should not be allo~vedto conceal the inilnr.iants that are the
grounds for the possible unity of intellectuals of all countries. T h e
same intent toalnrd uutonolrty can, illdeed, be expressed in diametrically
opposed "positions" (secular in one case, religious in another, engaged
here, "detached" there), depending upon the structure and history of
the temporal powers against ~vhichthis intent toward autonomy must
assert itself. Intellectuals of different countries have to be fully aware
of this mechanism if they want to avoid letting themselves be divided
by circumstantial and phenomenal oppositions stemming from the
Pact that one and the same will to emancipation encounters different
obstacles in different places. I could take the example of the bestknown French and German philosophers and sociologists no~vadays,
who, since they set the same concern fbr autonomy in opposition to

opposing historical traditions, seem opposed to one another, standing in apparently inverse relations to truth and reason. But I could
just as well take the example of a problem such as that of opinion
polls, in which certain people in the \Vest see only a means of domination, ~vhereasothers, in Eastern European countries, see a conquest
of liberty.
I n order to understand and master the oppositions that risk dividing them, intellectuals of different countries al~vayshave to keep in
mind the state of the tenlporal powers in relation to which they have
to define themselves; for example, they must be able to recognize, in
the arguments of intellectuals coming from traditions different from
their own-and especially in what seems perplexing or shocking in
these arguments-the effects of their past or present confrontation
with experiences of political despotism, such as fascism or Stalinism,
or ~vithambiguous political movements, such as the student revolts of
'68, or with policies hostile to cultural activities, or, in the realm of
internal powers, the effect of present or past confrontations with the
porvers of the press, radio, or television, or with overt or disguised
censorship of the university or the academy, and so on. (Llore gener-


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ally, they must be aware that ~ v h e nthey speak with aspirations toward
the universal, they are al~vaysliable to be nothing more than the unconscious spokesmen of an historical unconscious that is linked to the
peculiarities of a specific history of the intellectual field.)
The Struggle to Defend Autonomy

Taking this historical perspecti~.eallorzs us to distance ourselves somewhat from the situation of the intellectual field as it appears in most
contemporary societies. We are already familiar with many past examples of the refusal of the political, often associated with a return to
religion, such as we see occurring today in certain Communist countries, and the disillusioned renunciation of revolutionary utopias, such

as we observe today in France as well as in Japan and a number of
other countries-except England, which may now be discovering the
intellectual for the first time, thanks to Mrs. Thatcher's profoundly
anti-intellectual policies. And the fact of finding oneself in the "endgame" of a game in which every move that could possibly be made
has, sorne~vhereor other, already been played can lead to a disenchanted skepticism, especially in countries like France o r Japan where
intellect~~als
have passed, in the space of a single generation, through
the whole gamut of possible "positions" to~vardpolitics; but i t can also
favor a lucidity that has nothing to d o with cynical disenchantment
and that, equipped with the knowledge supplied by scientific research
(which it favors), could be the starting point tor a ~vhollynew form of
political action on the part of intellectuals.
T h e double, paradoxical nature of the intellectual, to which I
alluded at the beginning, means that all political action designed to reintbrce the political efhcacy of intellectuals must inevitably appear to
send a double message. It is a question, on the one hand, of reinforcing
autonomy from the temporal powers, especially by striving to guarantee the economic and social conditions for the autonomy of cultural
producers (first of all, in the realm of publication and evaluation of
the products of intellectual activity) and by reinforcing the position of
the most autonomous producers in each field; on the other hand, a
question of freeing the most autonomous cultural producers from the
temptation of the ivory tower by creating institutions or mechanisms
capable of giving them the means to interfere collectively in politics in
the name of their specific authority and to strive, at least, for control
of the means of intellectual production and ratification.
Thus, the first objective of intellectuals should be to work collectively in defense of their specific interests and o f t h e means necessary
for protecting their olvn autonomy. Through the effect of a kind of
guilty conscience, which has often led them to become "fello~vtravellers," not, as they supposed, of the proletariat, but of second-rate


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intellectuals who have claimed to speak on behalf of' the proletariat,
intellectuals have often given priority to the defense of' great universal
causes and refused, as corporatists, to defend their own interests, forqetting that one defends the universal by defending the defenders of'
the universal. I n fact, cultural producers have to commit themselves
to the rational defense of the economic and social conditions for the
autonomy of the different fields of' cultural production, these privileged social universes where the material and intellectual means of'
~ v h aL
t ve call science, art, philosophy, law, and so on are produced and
reproduced.
Examples should be given here of specific actions that intellectuals
should carry out with the purpose of defending the republic of artists,
writers, and scientists: for example, defense of scientific researchers'
control of their means of production and evaluation through resistance to the growing influence of scientific administrators, who, often
having left research because of failure, seek to impose on researchers directives based on ignorance of the logic of research; defense of
the net~vorksof production and diffusion of avant-garde works in all
domains of research, artistic or scientific, against commercial interests; defense of artists, writers, and scientists against the influence of
journalism, and the elaboration of an obligatory code (if not an actual
law) aiming to protect authors against distorted quotations, misrepresentations, and so on. I could go on with, for instance, the protection
of young lecturers or researchers from all forms of discrimination,
notably, political discrimination, and so on.
With a view to grounding philosophically the realpolitik of Reason
that I am defending, let me counter the transcendental illusion of
universal structures of Reason inscribed in consciousness or language
by reminding you that Reason is a product of history that has to be
incessantly re-produced through historical action aimed at guaranteeing the social co7iditio?~sfor the possibilit~of rational t l ~ i ? ~ k i nTransposing

g.
the Machiavellian vision, according to which virtue is the product of
a public order in which the citizens have an interest in virtue, one
has to work incessantly-through practical, concrete actions, o f a kind
usually left to politicians, such as the definition of the contents of
educational programs or the defense of an educational and cultural
television, o r through the struggle against patterns of cultural protectionism which stand in the \va), of the international cir-culation of
ideas-at establishing a republic of artists and scientists, the members
of which ~vouldhave an interest in reason, in disinterestedness, in
truth. Against a universal pragmatics in Habermas's sense, a politics of
the z~r~iz~ersal
should be proposed. Transhistorical universals of communication d o not exist, but socially established forms of communication
favoring the production of universals d o exist. Logic is inscribed in


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the social logic of public and regulated communication, the exemplary
achievement of which is represented by the generalized exchange of
the scientific world: in this case, the every-man-for-himself struggle (or
competition) is organized in such a way that no one can lvin, and thus
make the most of himself, except by making the most of arguments,
reasons, demonstrations, thus serving to advance truth and reason.
But these lvorlds of pure reason have not descended from heaven;
they have not been established by the operation of the Holy Ghost.
Those who are surprised, today, at the difficulties encountered by the
human sciences, in particular sociology, have forgotten the battles that
the natural sciences had to fight in order to affirm their autonomy

against the political and religious powers (which, furthermore, are
liable to return to the fray whenever important social interests are at
stake, as is the case with the theory of evolution and the origin of
man). A liberating science can develop only when appropriate social
conditions converge to make it possible, which presupposes, for example, abolition of the effects of domination, whether exerted between nations or within a given country, that can simply exclude from
scientific competition-through brutal and overt means, such as suppression of scholarships or research grants, or through the more subtle
censorship of academic decorum-those lvho d o not accept the tacit
assun~ptionsof the established scientific order.
T h e regime of rule-governed dialogue or completely fair competition between perfectly matched opponents is not easy to establish,
even in the "purest" of lvorlds, those of mathematics, music, or poetry.
T h e fields of cultural production have their olvn monopolies, their
own relations of domination, and it is only at the price of perpetual,
moment-to-moment struggle that the real exchanges of the scientific
community or the artistic ~vorldcan hope to approach the ideal of autonomy and universality. As one moves along the spectrum from those
fields, such as mathematics or pure poetry, in lvhich no directly social
"interests" are at stake, and the autonomy of which is protected by
the esoteric obscurity oftheir products, and approaches such fields as
the social sciences, where matters of greater social importance are at
stake, autonomy becomes increasingly difficult to secure and defend.
And if rational dialogue is not easy to establish, this is less because
of some peculiar inability of the researchers engaged in these fields
to control their passions, impulses, or interests than because the most
autonomous are incessantly exposed to unfair competition from those
who are more heteronomous and \vho can al\vays, by resorting to exterior polvers, find means of compensating for their olvn inferiority
from the point of view of the rules of the field. Schopenhauer considered the form "par excellence" of rhetorical bad faith to be that of
posing an argument which one's opponent cannot refute \vithout his


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refutation "going right over the head" of' an incompetent onlooker.
Economists and especially sociologists are under the constant threat
of such strategies: for instance, journalists, publicists, and bad sociologists can rely on the support of the majority whenever they invoke
common sense against the sociologist's constructions, which, as in all
science, are only achieved at the expense of common sense.
T h e struggle for autonomy is thus, first of all, a struggle against the
institutions and agents ~vhich,inside the field, introduce dependence
upon external economic, political, or religious polvers, ~vhetherthose
who subordinate their production to commercial ends or those, such
as publicists who, more subtly, make concessions to the law of success,
o r those ~ v h ouse their privileged connections with external po\$.ers
(such as the State or the Party, with all their forms of Zhdanovism)
in order to impose their domination inside the field. It is through
them that the law (nornos) of' another field displaces the specific law of'
the field of cultural production. This Trojan-horse function, through
~vhichheterononly is introduced into the fields of' cultural production,
falls to those producers who are least highly appreciated according
to internal criteria and who are thus always tempted to draw on external alliances in order to overturn the polver relations inside the
field; expecting less from the field, they are the most susceptible to
the solicitations of' temporal power. In fact, if internal ratification is
not an absolute guarantee of'autonorny, it at least guards against this
pursuit of compensatory paver for purposes of revenge; and it can
also enhance that indifference to the "grandeurs d'etablisseinent" (as
Pascal put it) which belongs to the ideal definition of the intellectual.
Up to this point I have only been describing the most general of
the mechanisms posing a constant threat to the autonomy of the fields

of' cultural production. If a conscious and organized mobilization of
intellectuals seems to me nowadays indispensable, this is because the
autonomy of' these fields is very powerfully threatened or, more precisely, because increasingly a wholly new kind of threat has come to
hang over it. I shall mention first the threat posed by the State, either
through its often excessive care or through its hostility or censorship.
In societies where "culture" has become the means and object of policy
(as witness, among other things, the existence of' ministries and ministers of culture), intellectuals have to learn, under pain of enslavement.
how to use the State in order to free themselves from the State, to
turn to account the means the State guarantees to them (such as, for
academics, the status of' civil servants which secures them from economic sanctions) in order to affirm their independence from the State.
But there are also and especially threats posed by the increasing interpenetration of the world of art or science, on the one hand, and the
world of money, on the other. I am thinking of all the new forms of


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patronage and of'the new alliances being forged between certain economic enterprises, often the most modern, and cultural producers;
I am thinking also of' the increasingly frequent recourse to sponsors
on the part of academic research and of the creation of educational
programs directly subordinated to business.
But the influence or sway of the economy over artistic o r scientific
research is also exerted inside the field itself through control of the
means of cultural production and diffusion, and even of' ratification.
T h e producers attached to the great cultural bureaucracies (newspapers, radio, television, and so on) are increasingly constrained to
accept and adopt norms (for instance, in the area of rhythms of' work)
that they come more or less unconsciously to regard as universal measures of intellectual achievement (I am thinking, for instance, of the
speed ulriting and speed reading' lvhich have become the law of'journalistic production and criticism). It can be asked whether the dilrision
into two markets, which has characterized the fields of cultural production since the middle of the nineteenth century-on the one hand,

the restricted field of' producers for producers; on the other, the field
of large-scale production and "industrial literature"-is
not threatened: the logic of commercial production tends increasingly to intrude
on avant-garde production (notably, through the constraints of' book
marketing, in the case of literature). And it could be shown that State
patronage, lvhich apparently allows producers to evade the immediate
constraints of the market, imposes, through the mechanism of commissions and committees, a real normalization of' research, whether
scientific or artistic. It is thus necessary to work to raise consciousness
about and increase vigilance toward the booby trap that patronage in
all its forms can represent.
But the most formidable danger lies, no doubt, in the fact that
intellectuals are increasingly dispossessed of the polver of' evaluating themselves according to their olvn criteria, their production. T h e
specificity of the most autonomous fields of production lies in the fact
that they are their own market or, if you like, that here the producers
have only their own competitors for consumers (this is the case, tbr
instance, in mathematics, poetry, or avant-garde painting). Journalistic criticism, through which all kinds of economic or political constraints are exerted, tends increasingly to enter into competition with
the judgment of peers. And the intellectual field increasingly becomes
the scene of the spec$c putsch-"media eventso-such as journalistic
investigations designed to produce manipulated classifications, o r the
countless prize lists that the newspapers publish on the occasion of'
birthdays, and so on, not to mention true press campaigns designed to
1. Both phrases in English in the original.


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support o r discredit authors, ~vorksof art, or schools. Moi-e generally,
the influence of journalism, and, of its mundane criteria-legibility,
topicality, "novelty," and so on-come increasingly to be imposed on
cultural production, notably, through the constraints it brings to bear
on publication (the ability to "come across well on T V " having become
a criterion of intellectual competence).
A French sociologist, Patrick Champagne, has shown that a political
demonstration is successful only if it succeeds in being perceptible by
newspapers and especially by television, so that it will receive media
coverage and massive dissemination: a symbolic demonstration by fifty
medical students ~vho,with the help of publicity advisers, create a
"media event" that attracts the attention of media professionals can
thus be a more important political event than a trade union gathering
of thousands of demonstrators organized according to the traditional,
ritual forms of demonstration. Likewise, a growing part of cultural
production is dictated, so far as its publication date, topic, title, format, volume, contents, and style are concerned, by the expectations
of journalists upon whose coverage it depends tor its very existence
(that is, when it is not simply the product of people who work in the
media themselves and who are signed onto the project for no other
reason than that they are sure to have media support). T h e influence
of those who control the means of dissemination-which also confers
a form of ratification, for instance, through the best-seller lists that the
newspapers publish-has probably never been so widespread and so
profound, o r the border between avant-garde work and best-seller so
confused: one of the characteristics of' journalistic judgment is that,
fbr want of'the requisite capacities of discernment, it tends systematically to confuse the most autonomous producers with the most heteronomous, that is, the publicists, true "doxosophers" in Plato's sense,
masters of the art of disguise who (like the pollster, the journalist, and
so on) know how to take on the appearance of scientists.
Toward a n Internationale of Intellectuals

If the capture or recapture of' the means of' guaranteeing o r defending autonomy seems to me the first objective of any action on the
part of intellectuals, the fact remains that this action, which might be
called corporatist, cannot be an end in itself. And one should investigate how this action might be extended to political intervention on the
part of'intellectuals, and how such intervention might be made maximally effective. These questions arise particularly acutely at a moment
when artists, writers, and scientists are increasingly being excluded
from public debate, even and especially when it comes to matters falling within their competence; and this is paradoxically occurring at a
time when more and more people (technocrats, journalists, pollsters,


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marketing analysts, and so on) are arrogating to themselves "intellectual" authority in order to exercise political power.
This exclusion results from a combination of factors. First, since
access to the directorships of major public and even private enterprises
and to powerful government or administrative positions is increasingly
dependent upon the possession of specialized academic qualifications,
intellectuals who, though subordinate in the economic domain, had no
difficult). in claiming superiority in the cultural domain, ha1.e hencefbrth to face rulers who can claim to rival them even on cultural
grounds. These "new mandarinsv-in the strict sense of the term,
since they exercise their power on the strength of academic qualifications-no longer hesitate to affirm the superiority of their technical o r
economico-political culture over traditional literary or philosophical
culture, which is relegated, in the name of realism, to the realm of'the
gratuitous, the frivolous, in one word, the feminine.
'This is how what I call the State nobility, that is, the greater technocracy, uses its authority to encourage (as Ulrich Beck puts it) "generalized irresponsibility," a spirit of' permanent holiday on the part of the
citizenry. T h e example par excellence is doubtless that of'the heads of'
the French nuclear industry, members of the governing bodies coming
from scientific schools, who have been given by the great majority of
the citizens an all but unconditionally free hand, a true "blank check"

(the relative weakness of the ecological movement and especially the
antinuclear struggle in France is notorious). In order to understand
this extraordinary trust, it is not enough to invoke, as has often been
done, the capacity of an expert discourse to disarm criticism. As a
matter of' h c t , the basis of' the ~ e t r / i sde
f soi from which the so-called
nucleocrats and, more generally, all technocrats have benefited, designed to impose across the board the values of productivity, yield
and competition, is nothing other than the logic of' educational meritocracy, which confers on its chosen a legitimacy without historical
precedent.
'The greater technocracy and all those political staffers, whether
on the right or the left, who aspire to reduce politics to rnnncigement
problems to be solved by competence and expertise, immediately find
accomplices in the new technocracy of conlnlunication that has come
increasingly to interfere directly, through journalistic judgments and
their economic effects, in the world of cultural production. T h e professionals of' the communication arts, who monopolize access to the
means of communication, contribute, without wanting to d o so or even
knowing that they are doing so, to the enterprise of intellectual and,
therefore, political demobilization: having very little to communicate,
they open a void at the very heart of the omnipresent cornmunication apparatus; more than the effects of' propaganda o r clandestine


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667

persuasion, it is the false problems and the everyday chitchat, not so
much false as vacuous, of the daily newspapers that occupy the whole
symbolic space, paradoxically evacuating it by filling it with padding.

This is how technocrats and their organic intellectuals monopolize
the public debate to the prejudice of professional politicians and intellectuals. And this often occurs with the complicity of intellectuals who,
because of the correlation between the progress of knowledge and the
progress of specialization, increasingly refuse the total "positions" of'
the total intellectual. Although I fully endorse the renunciation of the
prophetic role of'the old-style intellectual, I d o not think that one need
choose between the total intellectual, the role created and embodied
by Sartre, who considered it his right and duty to take "positions" on
all the problems of his time. with no other warrant than the force ofhis own intelligence, and the specific intellectual in Foucault's sense,
who limits his intervention to a particular domain of knowledge and
experience. It will be necessary today to invent forms of organization
which would give voice to a grrtit collrcti-cle intellrctual. combining the
qualifications and talents of all specific intellectuals. Great historical
precedents for this can he found (I am thinking, for instance, of the
"philosophes" of' the E n c ~ c l o p i d i e ) I. t is only a question of inventing a
model of o?;qanization which, by turning to account the modern means
of communication, would allow all competent intellectuals to give their
symbolic support to public interventions, elaborated in each specific
case hy those anlong them most competent to address the given problem.
T h e tension between central planning and spontaneous individual
action could be resolved by constructing a true international network
whose circumference (to adapt Nicholas de Cuss's formula) would be
everywhere and whose center would he nowhere. This network, endowed with its own organs of expression. could mobilize resistance to
encroachments on the autonomy of the intellectual world, and especially to all forms of' czrltural imperialism; it could work to establish the
grounds of'a true cultzrral i/ltrr,~ationtilisrr/,aiming at the abolition of all
patterns of protectionism and particularism, while seeing to it that the
specific achievements of each national tradition accede to universality.
But there is no overlooking the obstacles to such a collective mobilization. I n order to raise intellectuals' consciousness of their common
interests, it would be necessary to neutralize the propensity to division and particularisnl which is inherent in the very logic of'the field.
Nothing is more dimcult than to make intellectuals understand that

their struggles, even those for purely corporate ends and aiming only
at defending autonomy, have to be collective because so many of' the
powers to which the); are subject (such as that of journalisnl) succeed
as well as they d o only because the opposition to them is scattered
and divided against itself. Oddly enough, since the logic of competi-


668

Poetics Today 12:4

tion which sets them against one another means, in the most radical
cases, that producers' best customers are also their fiercest rivals, intellectuals are undoubtedly one of' the groups least able to discover the
common interests that unite them (and these interests need to be directly threatened, for instance, in England today, for intellectuals to
be able to see the fbrest fbr the trees, i.e., that their rivals' enemies are
their own enemies as well).
'This is a further reason for turning a corporatism directed toward
the defense of a well-understood common interest into a n absolute
preliminary to a true corporatism of' the universal. One of the major
obstacles to this "consciousness-raising" is (or has been) the myth of'
the "organic intellectual," so dear to Gramsci, which, by reducing intellectuals to the role of "fellow travellers" of the proletariat, or rather,
as I have remarked, of certain self-appointed spokesmen fbr the proletariat, prevents them from attending to the defense of' their own
interests and thus giving themselves the means to fight ef'fectively for
universal causes.
Having arrived at this point, it remains for me to say what these universal causes might be and to inquire whether intellectuals are in the
best position to define and defend them. As a matter of'fact, intellectuals themselves have never ceased believing this, and the famous "universal class," whether the Prussian bureaucracy according to Hegel o r
the proletariat according to Marx, has never been more than a figurehead fbr the intellectuals who, by nominating the "universal class,"
nominated themselves to be the ultimate judges of universality.
T h e sociology of' intellectuals inclines one to take a more modest view of their mission. It is clear, indeed, that intellectuals have
not managed to resist the universal temptation to universalize their

particular interests. And a good many of their most generous past
actions have their source-and their limits-in their position of the
dominated among the dominant or, to be more precise, of' the dominated within the field of' power, which leads them to make common
cause with the dominated tout court-and this without their ceasing to
participate in the dominant order, as possessors of one of the major
principles of domination, cultural capital. 'Thus, fbr instance, while
declaring themselves resolutely progressive by their voting and public
"positions," professors contribute in many ways to the perpetuation
of' social order, notably, through their strategies of reproduction o r
their pedagogical strategies, which unconsciously endorse the dominant values, or through their "esprit d e corps" (ranking, discipline,
and so on), which has led them, especially since the trauma of' 1968,
vigorously to resist any attempt whatsoever to change the contents of
education or the forms of pedagogical organization.
Does this realistic portrait of the ambiguities that intellectuals owe


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to the way they dangle in social space necessarily lead to radical skepticism about their claims to universality? T h e answer to this question
would in itself' deserve a further lecture. . . . I shall only say here
that among the historical factors which seem, in my opinion, to justify intellectuals' universalist ambitions more than those of any other
group is the fact that they have historically been constituted as such
precisely in and through their renunciation of' particularism; by proclaiming themselves champions of the universal or, as Husserl said
with regard to philosophers, "civil servants of humanity," they have

somehow bound themselves, through a kind of collective oath, to a
model of' the universal intellectual implying duties or, at least, the acceptance of' sacrifices which, like hypocrisy, are the homage that vice
pays to virtue. More precisely, the emergence of worlds such as the
intellectual field, where, by tradition, the defense of universal causes
(illustrated by petitions) is rewarded, means that one can rely upon
the symbolic profits associated with these actions in order to mobilize
the intellectuals in favor of' the universal. This vision will seem disenchanted, or even cynical, only to those who insist on thinking of
intellectuals as a kind of' miraculous and exemplary exception to the
laws of the social world.
'There is a final justification for the privilege granted here, entirely
relatively, to intellectuals: among the specific products of' the fields of
cultural production are all the means of' knowledge and objectification, including sociology, which, by disclosing the specific interests of
this or that intellectual, o r of intellectuals as a whole, offers to intellectuals the possibility of achieving self-consciousness and of inquiring
into the principles of'their own practices, interests, and disinterestedness, not least of all their interest in disinterestedness. These means of
knowledge especially guarantee to them the pl-i:~ilrgrof' being able to
discover the particular economic and social conditions or, to be perfectly clear, the pri-clilrges (such as leisure, skholP) that form the basis
of their claims to the universal. Thus, provided that they are able to
pursue it to the very end, as I have been trying to d o today, this critical
refiexizlit? that they monopolize can offer them the means of justifying
in practice their wildest claims to the collective monopoly of reason,
truth, and virtue: by compelling them to discover the privilege on
which their claim to the universal rests, it compels them, indeed, to
associate the pursuit of the universal with the perpetual struggle for
the uni-c~e7-.~alizatio71
of thr pl-i-clilegedco7ldition.t qf rxistruce which make the
pursuit of the universal possible.
Translated b j Gzsrle Sapzlo; edited b? Hrzan ,\.fcHalr.