Intellectuals

Intellectuals and Engagement

The Dreyfus Affair established the legitimacy of intellectuals to intervene in public debate in the name of universal values. From that moment onward they have never left the political scene, announcing or accompanying its principal evolutions. The history of intellectuals during the first half of the 20th century is marked by both fascism and communism. If certain intellectuals such as the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the famous historian of the Middle Ages Ernst Kantorowicz, and the jurist Carl Schmitt appeared favorable to Nazism in its early days, most intellectuals rallied to the camp opposing Hitler. Most, like Stefan Zweig or Walter Benjamin, chose exile. The German novelist and short story writer Thomas Mann and the philosophers Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and Ernst Cassirer found refuge in the United States. Meanwhile, many intellectuals were attracted by the Soviet system, in which they saw the possibility of the realization of the communist ideal. The inter-war period marked a first peak of the membership of intellectuals in communist parties, which was renewed after World War II and the prestige gained by the victory of the Allies. This was then followed by the Cold War, and intellectuals often were regarded as compagnons de route in the image of Jean-Paul Sartre in France.

Intellectuals not only participate in political debate, but they also judge political events. They thus played a major role in the interpretation of the Holocaust and in the debates on how to deal with this legacy in public discourses, as in Germany, and also in the interpretation of the Nazi phenomenon and its German roots (see the Historikerstreit in 1986 between the historian Ernst Nolte and the philosopher Jürgen Habermas). Intellectuals also have attempted to provide an existential reflection, as in Primo Levi's works. They have been similarly involved not only in the debate against racial discrimination in America in the 1960s (Hannah Arendt and Toni Morrison) and in Third World struggles for independence (Frantz Fanon) but also in the assertion of former colonized cultures—for example, Aimé Césaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor, the spokesmen for Negritude, or more recently, Raphaël Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau for Creole.

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