Anmerkungen:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments 2009 erstellt
Beschreibung:
It is well known that intellectuals played a crucial role in shaping the discourse and forming political movements and parties against the (post-)totalitarian rule twenty years ago. However, the roles played by politically engaged intellectuals were not uniform, they played different roles in certain stages of transition just as they played several roles parallel during the regime change. There was a dynamic interplay between the dynamics of political change and the ways how different actors reacted to them. In the paper, I identify three classic models of relationships between intellectuals and politics: 1. full separation between intellectuals and the society, proposed by Julien Benda; 2. political involvement as "organic intellectuals" being attached to a particular social class, as proposed by Antonio Gramsci; and 3. socially unattached, "free-floating" intellectuals who are able to absorb different impulses of the society, and therefore able to represent universalistic human concerns, as proposed by Karl Mannheim. The paper investigates the first part of the "decade of intellectuals" (1983-93) by focusing the period before the transition. It is testing the approaches of Benda, Gramsci, and Mannheim, and concluding that none of these models cover fully the roles of 1. the radical reformer, 2. the negotiator, and 3. the movement-intellectual. It was more like a combination of Mannheimian universalism with the powerful cultivation of the "culture of critical discours" elaborated by Alvin Gouldner. The matrix, elaborated in the study, offers a better understanding of the set of political roles that intellectuals played in the non-violent revolutions of 1989