American Intellectuals and Social Reform

Abstract

I N HIS ACCOUNT of the Academy of Lagado, Gulliver says: the School of Political Projectors I was but ill entertained, the Professors appearing in my judgment wholly out of their senses, which is a scene that never fails to make me melancholy. These unhappy people were proposing schemes for persuading monarchs to choose favorites upon the score of their wisdom, capacity and virtue; of teaching ministers to consult the public good; of rewarding merit, great abilities and eminent services; of instructing princes to know their true interest by placing it on the same foundation with that of their people; of choosing for employments persons qualified to exercise them; with many other wild chimaeras, that never entered before into the heart of man to conceive, and confirmed in me the old observation, that there is nothing so extravagant and irrational which some philosophers have not maintained for truth.2 So far, Swift. In his chapter on the effects of litte'rateurs upon the French Revolution, DeTocqueville states that political world was divided into two separate provinces without intercourse with each other. One administered the government, the other enunciated the principles on which government ought to rest. The former adopted measures according to precedent and routine, the latter evolved general laws, without ever thinking how they could be applied. The one conducted business, the other directed minds.3 From a modern we learn, that Towards the end of the nineteenth century in France, the revolutionary party thought best to avail itself of the talents of certain theorizers who were called 'intellectuals' and who, in fact, pretended to submit practice to the test of the conclusions that they reached logically from certain principles of theirs. Such 'intellectuals' naively thought they were enjoying the admira-