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Intellectual and Class Alienation: Oxford idealist diagnoses and prescriptions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Melvin Richter
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Extract

Few terms have had more complex fortunes than “alienation” and “intellectuals”; few at this time are more modish and less clear. It would be instructive to devote an entire paper to tracing their histories and plotting all their variations in present usage; it would be no less enlightening to determine just why these two concepts are so often coupled. Perhaps the single most important reason is to be found in the numerous attempts to classify and explain the great modern revolutions, particularly those of France and Russia. These have been frequently characterized as qualitatively different from all those that preceded them. Inspired by, or producing in their course, total ideologies, these revolutions have produced a new style of politics. Its origins and patterns of development have received increasingly close scrutiny. Among the most consistently favored hypotheses has been that linking revolution to intellectuals. This theory need not be phrased as did Burke and Taine, who seem to have believed that the world would be spared great political convulsions, if only there were no radical intellectuals, subverting by their impractical speculations, the bases of society and politics. Tocqueville, whose views are occasionally confounded with those of Burke and Taine, did assert that thorough-going revolutions cannot occur without the existence of a general theory about the nature of the good society, a theory that cannot be realized except by changing completely, and possibly violently, the status of persons and property under the existing order (1).

Type
Aliénation et Structure or Conscience and Consciousness
Information
European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , May 1966 , pp. 1 - 26
Copyright
Copyright © Archives Européenes de Sociology 1966

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References

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* A version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in December, 1965.

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