Intelligentsia

The intelligentsia (/ɪnˌtɛlɪˈdʒɛntsiə/) (Latin: intelligentia, Polish: inteligencja, Russian: интеллигенция, tr. intelligencija, IPA: ) is a status class of educated people engaged in the complex mental labours that critique, guide, and lead in shaping the culture and politics of their society. As a status class, the intelligentsia includes artists, teachers and academics, writers, journalists, and the literary hommes de lettres. 'In order to achieve a great object, an important social object, there must be a main force, a bulwark, a revolutionary class. Next it is necessary to organize the assistance of an auxiliary force for this main force; in this case this auxiliary force is the Party, to which the best forces of the intelligentsia belong. Just now you spoke about 'educated people.' But what educated people did you have in mind? Were there not plenty of educated people on the side of the old order in England in the seventeenth century, in France at the end of the eighteenth century, and in Russia in the epoch of the October Revolution? The old order had in its service many highly educated people who defended the old order, who opposed the new order. Education is a weapon the effect of which is determined by the hands which wield it, by who is to be struck down.We should all be aware of the fact that when revolutionary—not evolutionary—changes come, things can get even worse. The intelligentsia should be aware of this. And it is the intelligentsia specifically that should keep this in mind and prevent society from radical steps and revolutions of all kinds. We've had enough of it. We've seen so many revolutions and wars. We need decades of calm and harmonious development.What Marx could not anticipate . . . was that the anti-bourgeois intellectuals of his day were the first representatives of what has become, in our time, a mass intelligentsia, a group possessing many of the cultural and political characteristics of a class in Marx's sense. By intelligentsia I mean those engaged vocationally in the production, distribution, interpretation, criticism, and inculcation of cultural values. The intelligentsia (/ɪnˌtɛlɪˈdʒɛntsiə/) (Latin: intelligentia, Polish: inteligencja, Russian: интеллигенция, tr. intelligencija, IPA: ) is a status class of educated people engaged in the complex mental labours that critique, guide, and lead in shaping the culture and politics of their society. As a status class, the intelligentsia includes artists, teachers and academics, writers, journalists, and the literary hommes de lettres. The intelligentsia status-class arose in the late 18th century, in Russian-controlled Poland, during the age of Partitions (1772–95). In the 19th century, the Polish intellectual Bronisław Trentowski coined the term intelligentcja (intellectuals) to identify and describe the educated and professionally-active social stratum of the patriotic bourgeoisie who could be the cultural leaders of Poland, then under the authoritarian régime of Russian Tsarist autocracy, from the late 18th-century to the early 20th century. In Russia, before the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) the term intelligentsiya described the status class of educated people whose cultural capital (schooling, education, enlightenment) allowed them to assume practical political leadership. In practice, the status and social function of the intelligentsia varied by society. In Eastern Europe, intellectuals were deprived of political influence and access to the effective levers of economic development; the intelligentsia were at the functional periphery of their societies. Whereas in Western Europe, especially in Germany and Great Britain, the Bildungsbürgertum (cultured bourgeoisie) and the British professions had defined roles as public intellectuals in their societies. In Europe, the intelligentsia existed as a status class (social stratum) before the coinage of the term intelligentsia (the intellectuals) in the 19th century. In their status-class functions, the intellectuals had involvement with the cultural development of cities, the dissemination of printed knowledge (books, texts, newspapers), and the economic development of rental-housing (the tenement house) for the teacher, the journalist, and the civil servant. As people whose professions placed them (physically, economically, and socially) outside the traditional places and functions of the town-and-country monarchic social-classes (royalty, aristocracy, bourgeoisie) of the time, the intelligentsia were an urban social-class. In his 2008 work The Rise of the Intelligentsia, 1750–1831, Maciej Janowski identified the intelligentsia as intellectual servants to the modern State, to the degree that their state-service policies decreased social backwardness and political repression in partitioned Poland. The Polish philosopher Karol Libelt coined the term inteligencja in his publication of O miłości ojczyzny (On Love of the Fatherland) in 1844. In the Polish language, the popular understanding of the word inteligencja is close Libelt's definition, which saw the inteligencja status-class as the well-educated people of society, who undertake to provide moral leadership, as scholars, teachers, lawyers, engineers et al.; the intelligentsia 'guide for the reason of their higher enlightenment.' In the 1860s, the writer Pyotr Boborykin popularised the term intelligentsiya (Russian: интеллигенция) in Imperial Russia; he claimed to have originated the concept of the intelligentsia as a social stratum. The Russian word intelligentsiya derived from the German word Intelligenz (intelligence) and identified and described the social stratum of people engaged in intellectual occupations; moreover, Boborykin also expanded the definition of intelligentsiya (producers of culture and ideology) to include artists (producers of high culture). Vitaly Tepikin identified the characteristics of the group copmprising the intelligentsia as follows: