INTELLECTUALS & THE DIVISION OF LABOR--SARTRE ET AL

[Ralph Dumain]

Giles, I don't understand your cryptic little remark about 1848.  I hope you
don't think Marx was one of these people who gave into brute force.  1848 is
a dividing line and measuring stick for bourgeois intellectuals, though.  I
think first of Bruno Bauer, who long before Nietzsche and other
breast-beaters, thought he could huff and puff and blow down the
conservative forces of the world with the power of pure criticism.  When
Bauer was at the height of his liberalism, he was Marx's closest mentor.
Marx left him behind by 1845, as we all know.  I don't know a lot about what
happened to Bauer, but I read in one reference book that he lost faith in
the idea that rational thought could rule the world and advocated giving
into the inevitable power of empire later in life, either the Russian czar
or Bismarck or both, can't remember exactly.  If this is so, Bauer would be
the prototype for the intellectual I have in mind.

If we're going to continue to discuss this topic, maybe we could bring the
Frankfurters back into it?  I could upload Adorno's magnificent quote on
Spengler.

At 12:45 PM 7/2/97 +0100, Giles Peaker wrote:
>On 2-7-97 Ralph Dumain wrote:
>>Though I have never seen any analysis
>>of such a tendency in print, half-educated lout that I am, some time ago I
>>discerned a two-stage process in the history of bourgeois thought.  The
>>first stage is the triumphant, self-confident march of REASON, where
>>rationality is identified with the existing or a rising order, and the
>>intellectual has utmost confidence in himself as the arbiter of reason.  The
>>second, decadent stage comes when the intellectual recognizes that brute
>>force and not reason rules the world, and then he does an about-face,
>>mortifying his intellect, and masochistically denigrating the very capacity
>>that he has made his business to build up.
>
>1848 as the key point? 
>
>yours
>Giles