Criticism of Marxism as a Proto-theory of Cultural Capital and the “New Class”: J. W. Machajski’s Theory of Intelligentsia

Abstract

The article is devoted to the theory of intelligentsia developed by Jan Wacław Machajski (1866–1926) and to the history of its transfer and reception in modern Western social theories. The main thesis of the article is that Machajski’s theory directly influenced the shaping of several Western social theories in the second half of the 20th century, such as the theories of the new class and the post-industrial society. The article includes a review of modern research literature devoted to Machajski, a brief biographical sketch, and an explication of the main thesis of his theory of intelligentsia. A history of the reception and the criticism of Machajski’s theory is analyzed in both the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, the result being that this theory was practically excluded from the Russian conceptual and theoretical context. In the article, the history of the transfer of this theory to the Western context in which Max Nomad played the decisive part is analyzed. As the result of this transfer, these ideas became known and acknowledged by a range of social theorists of the middle of the 20th century, for example, by Daniel Bell and Alvin Gouldner. In the concluding part of the work, it is shown that Machajski’s ideas that considered access to education and knowledge as a certain type of capital can be systematically recognized in later theories, in particular, in the theory of cultural capital by Pierre Bourdieu, and in the theory of society of singularities by Andreas Reckwitz.