It appears, then, to be the fate of intellectuals either to berate their exclusion from wealth, success, and reputation, or to be seized by guilt when they overcome this exclusion. They are troubled, for example, when power disregards the counsels of intellect, but because they fear corruption they are even more troubled when power comes to intellect for counsel. To revert to Professor Howe’s language: when bourgeois society rejects them, that is only one more proof of its philistinism; when it gives them an “honored place,” it is buying them off. The intellectual is either shut out or sold
...more
