Various members of the western intelligentsia seem to be rather enamoured with Clive James’s pronouncement that “the performance of the Western intelligentsia has never been worse”. One recognises immediately, of course, the sneaky use of ‘intelligentsia’, borrowed originally from the Russian, employed here obviously for its soupcon of sneering irony and generally unfavourable connotations rather than any descriptive exactitude. But if this term has a referent, rather than just a mode of rhetorical employment, it presumably designates people engaged primarily in intellectual work, producers of words and ideas and arguments and so on. Now it should be obvious that this group consists of people on the right and the left. Numerically, I see no reason why 'Left intellectuals' (often used as if it were a tautology) are predominant. It consists of people like Jonathan Derbyshire and Norman Geras, both of whom approvingly cite James’s remarks.
It is worth noting that almost from the start, ‘intellectual’ and its variants have been used primarily to designate others rather than as a term of self-description. Byron’s dismissive references to intellectuals are well known and well quoted. As well as referring always to others, ‘intellectual’ invariably came prefaced with ‘so-called’ and ‘pseudo-‘ as if we lived in some strange world where only inauthentic copies existed and never the real thing, as if the very idea of a genuine intellectual was inherently pretentious. Typically, the people using these pejorative designations were of course themselves ‘intellectuals’, and their reluctance to admit what they in fact were, their readiness to off-load the label onto someone else before it was applied to them, could only be seen as defensiveness and a reflex concession to social prejudice.
It is because terms like ‘intellectual’ come pre-encrusted with habits of thought and pre-loaded with bias and because to use them unthinkingly simply reproduces such bias, it is for these reasons, among others, that we need intellectuals. (* *)
nb. Jonathan Derbyshire appears to find the meaning of the above post unclear. Unfortunately, he seems to have then reached for the meaning that was nearest to hand, namely an ‘accusation of intellectual self-hatred’. Needless to say, this is neither in the post, buried underneath it, nor lodged between the lines. What it was doing lying near Jonathan Derbyshire's desk I don't know.