Masses of intellectuals

Here at Prospect, we are much concerned with intellectuals—a word that has graced our cover several times, from this July's symposium on Gordon Brown back to our October 2005 report on the world's top 100 intellectuals. As such lists suggest, it is a term that inevitably invokes ideas of hierarchy and exceptionality, as well as that most troubling of black boxes, "taste." An intellectual is more than a brilliant investigator of facts: he or she is an evaluator and a generator of ideas.

Clearly, discernment is a vital skill in any field, and the truly discerning are to be cherished. But just how robust an idea will "intellectualism" remain during this century of ubiquitous opinionising? As far as the English language is concerned, intellectuals began to exist in 1652—at least according to the OED, which gives that year for the first use of the word as a noun (meaning "a person having superior powers of intellect.") Far older are, respectively, the Greek and Latin terms grammatikos and literatus, which mean "lettered" and refer to the class of people able to read and write. These gave English the word "literate" as early as 1432.

It is no coincidence that, while access to the world of letters was itself exceptional, it was enough simply to call someone literate to confirm their elite status; but that, as written culture inched towards mass participation, it became necessary to find new words for the "superior powers" of those whose opinions really counted—a trend enshrined in the nineteenth century's shifting of the meaning of "intellectual" to describe public figures with opinions of great public worth. Although almost everyone may have been able to read and write, only a few could get published, and only a very few could get published in a manner that credited their words with weight.

Until a decade or so ago, this remained the case. We knew whose words were weighty because they were published accordingly. But things are changing. The masses are increasingly both seen and heard. The masses, in fact, are increasingly looking less like masses and more like millions of individual intellects with quite a lot to say. Nothing will change overnight, but trying to gaze twenty years into the future makes me wonder whether even several new words will be enough to keep a lot of the old hierarchies going.

(1652 was also the year in which the first coffee house opened in London. I'm sure there's a thesis in that somewhere.)