John Lukács unmasks his own pretensions as an Hungarian-Jewish intellectual your index to these reviews your John Lukacs index The Chronicle of Higher Educati
on October 4, 2002 The Obsolescence of the American Intellectual By JOHN LUKACS THE adjective “intellectual,” obviously of Latin origin, appeared in English, occasionally but infrequently, for many centuries; but An Intellectual, as a noun, designating a recognizable type of man or woman, came into use only around 1884.
(It is so dated in the Oxford English Dictionary; I found it more than once in George Gissing’s New Grub Street, published in 1891, describing literary life in London of the 1880s.) In other languages, too, the usage of the noun does not seem to have appeared before the 19th century.
One — to me, charming — exception was the French un curieux , extant as early as the 16th century, meaning almost exactly what An Intellectual would mean three centuries later — someone who was curious or bookish. (As, for example, in the bibliophile Octave Uzanne’s 1888 Les Zigzags d’un curieux .) To the best of my knowledge, that equation of curious = intellectual = bookish has now become obsolete in French, too.
In any event, just as the adjective “intellectual” in English is not quite identical with “rational” or “educated,” the noun Intellectual was, and is, something else and not identical with educated. By and large, intellectuals have become recognizable not because of their schooling but because of their opinions.
Recognizable they became, in England and the United States, about 120 years ago — about the same time that another word, “intelligentsia,” appeared and became a designated term in the United States. The history of this word tells us fairly much. It was an importation — not only an adaptation but an exact transliteration of the Russian word “intelligentsyia,” a word that, in Russia around that time, very definitely marked certain people who were not like other literate people.
The intelligentsyia were composed of Russian curieux (and curieuses ), human beings whose opinions were thought to be, by themselves and others, broader-minded and more curious, more cultured, cosmopolitan, and compassionate than those of the government and military bureaucrats of the Russian empire, no matter what the literacy of the latter may have been.
The migration and successful naturalization of the words “Intellectual” and “intelligentsia” to the United States were inseparable from, if not altogether a result of, the considerable migration of Jewish people from the Russias after 1880. (It may be telling that these two terms were not current in Ireland at that time, even though the Irish literary and artistic renaissance occurred between 1880 and 1920.
That may be attributable to the fact that Ireland had fewer immigrants than had England or the United States; and — perhaps — because the aspiration of most Irish artists was bardic rather than intellectual.) There was a Marxist element, too: “Workers, Peasants, and Intellectuals” was a comm
on Marxist phrase. Yet, whatever the sources of the naturalization of those words, very soon most American intellectuals were neither immigrants nor Jews. Here I feel compelled to interject something from my personal history. I was born in Hungary in 1924, in a country and a society as different from Russia as from the United States.
The Hungarian translation of the Marxist “intellectual” ( ertelmisegi ) meant someone whose schooling and profession were intellectual: It was mildly approbatory but not more than that; and it did not connote anything like a class of opinion. (There were — as in a later mutation in the United States, to which I shall return — rightist as well as leftist intellectuals.) My father, a doctor, was a very learned man, with many artistic and musical interests and an impressive private library.
He could, perhaps, have been categorized as a Lateiner , meaning a professional man with a Latin-humanistic education; but not as An Intellectual — the latter would not have been customary.
I inherited that inclination (or call it disinclination): During most of my now 56 years in the United States, I have often bridled against being called An Intellectual, asserting instead (I now see, with something like false modesty or, worse, a mocking humility) that I was not An Intellectual, but a teacher and a writer. In sum — God forgive me — I often looked down on intellectuals, even though I at times enjoyed their company. I confess that, today, I miss intellectuals. Why?
Because, as I shall later explain, they are disappearing. But let me