Scholars, Intellectuels, and Their Publics in Times of Anti-Intellectualism

Teaching at New York University's Institute of French Studies from 1989 to 1994 made me realize how the intellectuel , a figure that first emerged during the Dreyfus Affair and has continued to play a significant role in French history throughout the twentieth century, makes sense in what I then called a “transatlantic mirror.” In the United States, or at least among American academics, it signifies Frenchness. It may even be part of the attraction of French Studies for students with intellectual aspirations. Indeed, the term needs to be qualified to be translated into English: the public intellectual is defined by his (and sometimes her) public beyond academia. So is the French intellectuel —but that goes without saying: the public dimension defines both the word and the man (much more often than the woman: écriture inclusive might be misleading here). It is hard to imagine a nonpublic one. Intellectuel privé would sound like a contradiction in terms, unless followed by a complement: de son public. For American students of France, the desire to address a wider audience, beyond the proverbial “ivory tower,” thus affirms the public relevance of intellectual work; and this is in part in reaction against the long history of Anti-Intellectualism in American Life recounted by American historian Richard Hofstadter in the wake of McCarthyism in in his eponymous book of 1963.