Intellectual

An intellectual is a person who uses his or her intellect to study, reflect, or speculate on a variety of different ideas.

Modes of 'intellectual class'

From that time onwards, in Europe and elsewhere, some variants of the idea of an intellectual class have been important (not least to intellectuals, self-styled). The degrees of actual involvement in art, or politics, journalism and education, of nationalist or internationalist or ethnic sentiment, constituting the 'vocation' of an intellectual, have never become fixed. Some intellectuals have been vehemently anti-academic; at times universities and their faculties have been synonymous with intellectualism, but in other periods and some places the centre of gravity of intellectual life has been elsewhere.

Related Topics:
Europe - Art - Politics - Journalism - Education - Nationalist - Internationalist - Ethnic

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One can notice a sharpening of terms, in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Just as the coinage scientist would come to mean a professional, the man of letters would more often be assumed to be a professional writer, perhaps having the breadth of a journalist or essayist, but not necessarily with the engagement of the intellectual.

Related Topics:
Scientist - Journalist - Essayist

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The Dreyfus affair in France at the end of the nineteenth century is often indicated as the time of full emergence of the intellectual in public life; particularly as concerns the role of Émile Zola in speaking directly on the matter. In fact the term intellectual as we now have it became better known, from that time (and the derogatory implication sometimes attached). The use of the term as a noun in French has been attributed to Georges Clemenceau in 1898.

Related Topics:
Dreyfus affair - France - Émile Zola - Noun - French - Georges Clemenceau - 1898

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