I ask because I’ve been reading two books address that question.

On my Nook, I just finished Tony Judt’s The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century and have been reading (in a more traditional form) Edward Said’s Representations of the Intellectual.

I was, I am ashamed to confess, mostly unaware of the stories and works of Leon Blum and Raymond Aron (like many young men with intellectual pretensions and a smidgen of angst, I feel deeply and platonically in love with the idea of the Albert Camus – the tormented figure on the cover of my edition of his collected journals from 1945-1951 [see picture]: the aggressive sex appeal of Humphrey Bogart and the tormented moral questioning of Soren Kierkegaard).

Edward Said was someone I had read, but never in depth (a fact that this slim volume cannot be said to have remedied).

Whereas Said is explicitly attempting to impose stricter criteria on the intellectual (in an age where every blow hard on Fox News thinks himself to be a public intellectual), trying to take that title away from those whose actions have thrown away the right to call themselves one, Judt takes a less questioning view of the idea of the intellectual. Ultimately, he does not question that those who put themselves forward as intellectuals are exactly that. What he does do is put these three figures (Blum, Camus, and Aron) up as sort of “super-intellectuals.” Figures who somehow exceeded or at least operated outside the traditional lines that mark the French public intellectual. He even denies that Albert Camus was truly a public intellectual (not an intellectual, but a public intellectual) but rather part of a tradition of les moralistes – of moralists. Camus as a tormented Rousseau to Sartre’s self-confident Voltaire.

Said’s main beef is with professionalism, which he sees an insidious force that works to (my words, not his) neuter intellectuals (which point, Said would no longer consider them intellectuals).

It’s a hard road he calls for. One of the pitfalls of professionalism is specialization, which is singled out as a means by which a potential intellectual, with the potential to shake things up, is moved to an area of safety (safety from the perspective of those who might be called out by an “un-neutered” intellectual). This is a hard road, because he calls for the intellectual to be as close as possible to being an Renaissance man – someone who has made reasonably deep studies in a number of different fields. Arguably, it has been impossible for nearly two centuries to be a true Renaissance Man. Not since Goethe has the available scope of human knowledge (at least in the Western world) been sufficiently manageable for one man to be able to write innovative treatises on both the science and mathematics of meteorology and chromatics and to also be a world class novelist, poet, and essayist.

What Said is calling for is resistance to some of the specialization one sees in the literary and philosophical fields that, of necessity, limits wider vision.

But both Judt and Said see their respective figures (three specific figures in Judt’s case; a more nebulous construct in Said’s, though he seems to view Noam Chomsky as a sort of ideal intellectual) as being outside the dominant intellectual sphere.