Status Of Intellectuals Research Articles

Academic reputations of Russian economists and their scientometric estimates

The article presents the results of an academic reputation survey of Russian economists (N = 6392). The resulting ranking is then compared with their scientometric indicators provided by the Russian Science Citation Index (citations in eLibrary and in RSCI core), as well as calculated by the authors (citations in the RSCI list of distinguished journals). The analysis demonstrates that a robust hierarchy of academic authority exists in Russia, which is, however, only moderately correlated with scientometric indicators. We can classify discrepancies into type I errors (researchers with high citation rates are not enjoying recognition by peers) and type II errors (recognized researchers have poor scientometric records). Type I errors mostly result from (1) misidentification of authors; (2) non-fractionalized authorship of collected volumes; (3) instrumental citing; (4) gaming the metrics. Type II errors arise from ambiguity of the disciplinary boundaries of economics and boundaries of national science, as well as from the ambiguous status of public intellectuals addressing economic issues and politicians responsible for economic policy. Overall, type II errors are less dramatic: it is hard for Russian economists to be widely influential, but little cited. Type I errors are much more widespread. Indicators based on the RSCI list of distinguished journals give the most accurate estimates.

Emigration to the internet: “Samizdat” and the genesis of contemporary Russian nationalism

During the mid-1990s the Pro-European concept of the Russian nation was formed in the post-Soviet ideological space, contrary to the prevailing traditionalist, soil-based forms of Russian nationalism, mainly focused on the search for a “special way”. The former is based on the values of democracy and individualism while the main emphasis of the ideology is the leadership of intellectuals in political life. This article studies the genesis of aforementioned trend in contemporary Russian nationalism in the context of two historical circumstances: the ideological and social status of post-Soviet intellectuals and the Russian-language Internet at the stage of transition to social networks. A key element of the transition period is the emergence of mass online communication, anticipating the beginning of social networks era. Combination of elitism and emphasis on the text were combined with increasing popularity and anonymity, where all these qualities were embodied in guest books. Thus, we will try to show how the communicative environment of the early Runet was arranged and how it influenced rhetorical strategies, styles of public behavior and ideology of contemporary Russian nationalists. As an example in our work, we will consider Dmitry Galkovsky’s Internet resource “Samizdat”, which was functioning in the late 1990s.

How Foucault Got Rid of (Bossy) Marxism

ABSTRACT Foucault distanced himself from Marxism even though he worked in an environment—left French theory of the 1960s and 1970s—where Marxism was the dominant frame of reference. By viewing Foucault in the context of French Marxist theoretical debates of his day, we can connect his criticisms of Marxism to his discussions of the status of intellectuals. Foucault viewed standard Marxist approaches to the role of intellectuals as a problem of power and knowledge applicable to the Communist party. Marxist party intellectuals, in his view, had developed rigid and universal theories and had used them to prescribe action, which prevented work on the sorts of problems that he uncovered—even though these problems were central to the development of capitalism.

A Study of the Intercourse between Zhang Yu and Yu Ji---the Calligrapher in Yuan Dynasty

In the Yuan Dynasty, the minority nationalities was entered the Central Plain for the first time in Chinese history. During this period, although the status of Chinese people and intellectuals was low, their ideological control was loose, thus forming a unique literary style. The rapid promotion of the status of the humanities such as painting, calligraphy and literature in the life of the scholars brought about a brand-new attitude towards life, especially in the late Yuan Dynasty, the humanities taste and the artistic orientation showed many new changes. And the development of literature, calligraphy and painting in the Song Dynasty, as well as the establishment of the regime in the Yuan Dynasty all accelerated this process.. Facing the setbacks brought by the Mongolian yuan rule, some intellectuals turned to create an atmosphere through some group activities of calligraphy and painting in this period, and literature and art were also given a higher status. As a famous calligrapher in the middle and late Yuan Dynasty, Zhang Yu was also an influential Taoist and poet. On the basis of studying Zhang Yu's calligraphy art, this paper analyzes his social intercourse and its influence on his calligraphy thoughts and artistic style. Especially in calligraphy, he was first taught by Zhao Mengfu, and then learned from Huaisu and Zhang Xu, forming a handsome and free style, which is very valuable. In addition, he made many friends all his life. After becoming a monk, he traveled to various famous mountains in the south of the Yangtze River and made friends with famous people. Therefore, studying the intercourse between Zhang Yu and yu Ji can restore the real situation of the Literati's communication in the middle and late yuan dynasty, understand the multiple Zhang Yu's accomplishments of Taoism, poet and calligrapher, and better understand the relationship between Zhang Yu and Yu Ji, It can also learn about his experience of learning calligraphy and the internal and external causes of the formation of his calligraphy style, and the influence and function of Mingxi Literati's elegant and Yuji's intercourse on the formation of his artistic style.

Comparing What, Precisely? H. M. Posnett and the Conceptual History of ‘Comparative Literature’

The emergence of Comparatism is not just a specific topic within the history of literature, or of literary criticism; it should be understood as the point of interaction of at least four major intellectual shifts in the nineteenth century. There may be more factors involved; but the four I highlight in the following pages are: 1) the progressive development of scientific methods and insights; 2) the institutional infrastructures underlying the ‘social production of knowledge’, such as the status of intellectuals (critics, historians, philologists, antiquaries) and the education system;1 3) cultural ideologies concerning the diversities within humankind and what value judgements to attach to those; and 4) political loyalties and convictions, conscious or not, concerning power relations between and within countries. To add yet another dimension to that complexity: these four forcelines were aligned differently in different countries (Britain, Germany and France being most relevant in the present context), and shifted at differential rates over the decades; yet developments in one country could act as stimuli on other, differently situated ones. ‘The’ development of a quiddity called ‘Comparative Literature’ in nineteenth-century Britain is therefore as complex a process as the development of the weather, or obesity, and all that anyone can say about it must be said under the proviso of partiality – one’s own as much as others’.2 Since the days of Foucault, we can take as a given the fact that scientific knowledge, which rests its claims to epistemic superiority (objectivity,

Academia and Cultural Production: Yu Dan and Her Confucius from the Heart: Ancient Wisdom for Today's World

Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies Vol.15 No.1 © 2015 Academy of East Asian Studies. 89-108 email of the author: cais@unimelb.edu.au 89 Introduction Yu Dan (b. 1965), a media professor at Beijing Normal University, and her wellknown book, Yu Dan Lunyu xinde, (published in the West with the English title Confucius from the Heart: Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World, hereafter Confucius), have been controversial topics in cultural discussions of contemporary China. James Leibold notes that in mainland China today, “one cannot enter a bookstore without encountering Professor Yu Dan’s depoliticized, self-help musings on the Analects, which has sold ten million legitimate and another six million pirated copies, inviting comparisons with Mao’s little red book” (Leibold 2010, 18). Recently, Confucius was published in the West, and Yu’s total royalties for the book have reached 2.6 million RMB. Confucius is a collection of Yu’s lectures about the Analects, which were broadcast via the China Central Television Station’s (CCTV’s) prime time science and education programme Lecture Room (Baijia jiangtan) in October 2006. Due to its popularity, the programme’s lectures were collected into a book in November of the same year. With the combined success of the programme and the book, Yu Dan became known across China, enjoying popularity in academic circles as well as acquiring the status of a celebrity among the general Chinese professor Yu Dan and her book Yu Dan Lunyu xinde, (Confucius from the Heart: Ancient Wisdom for Today’s World), became an immediate cultural success, contributing to the promotion and the popularity of people’s interest in the Chinese classics and national studies. As a work which bears the marks of both Confucian ideology and popular Confucian cultural traits, the Yu Dan phenomenon captures the development of the national studies craze, in particular those areas relevant to Confucian ideas and principles in contemporary China. Yu Dan’s popularity indicates a recent revival of ancient Chinese cultural, philosophical, and moral traditions in their relationship with modern Chinese society, and their use by contemporary Chinese people. This article analyses the development of the Yu Dan phenomenon and the intense debate it has stimulated, reviewing its subtle collaboration with official discourse and propaganda, and its success as a cultural product. It also analyses the role the Yu Dan phenomenon plays in changing the social status and functions of intellectuals in the contemporary Chinese political-social-cultural milieu.

New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq by Orit Bashkin (review)

Reviewed by: New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq by Orit Bashkin Kathrin Haurand Orit Bashkin , New Babylonians: A History of Jews in Modern Iraq. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2012. 310 pages. Paperback, $24.95. ISBN-10: 0-8047-7875-2. Looking at Jewish lives in Iraq during the first half of the twentieth century provides seminal insights into how European and Middle Eastern societies have historically influenced each other. Orit Bashkin's New Babylonians: The History of Jews in Modern Iraq focuses on the crossroads of Jewish, Iraqi, and European cultures. Bashkin, a historian at the University of Chicago, investigates the role of secular Jewish intellectuals in the Nahda (renaissance), the Arab nationalistic literary and cultural renewal movement, starting in the second half of the nineteenth century in Iraq. Her study sheds new light on how the secular Arab national movement influenced the self-understanding and identity of Jewish intellectuals in Iraq under Hashemite rule between 1921 and 1958. Like The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashemite Iraq (Syracuse University Press, 2009), Bashkin's earlier book on Iraq's political culture under Hashemite rule, New Babylonians challenges orientalist approaches to Middle Eastern and European history which often treat them as two discrete fields [End Page 102] of historical study. Bashkin sees herself as avoiding two traditional pitfalls of narrating Middle East Jewish history: presenting it either as a tale of peaceful, harmonious coexistence or as a story of perpetual persecution. Nonetheless New Babylonians does sketch a vision of peaceful coexistence between Muslims and Jews in Arab lands, even as it also details how that harmonious relationship was destroyed in the maelstrom of a modern Iraqi history ineludibly impacted by the political vicissitudes, sociocultural displacements, and violence of twentieth-century European history. Baskin tells how Jews were in the vanguard of modernization under the British-installed monarchy after World War I. By focusing on the experience of the Iraqi Jewish intellectual elite, she portrays a complex and vibrant "ethno-religious composition of Iraqi society that created a unique Jewish Iraqi experience, which was nonetheless intertwined with global and Western discourses." Arab language became the vernacular of social transformation, and "the educational system was key to the reconceptualization of Arab and secular identity." Transcending social barriers came at the price of disowning one's cultural and religious distinctiveness, such as abandoning certain Judeo-Arab dialects or religious observances. The "new effendia," as Bashkin terms the secular Iraqi Jewish intellectuals, moved into Baghdad's formerly Muslim, middle-class neighborhoods and became prominent in trade, politics, and Arabic literature. Less fortunate Muslims and Christians looked for answers to socio-economic inequalities in the emerging communist movement of the 1930s. The Iraqi Communist Party became a platform for poor Jewish students to raise their voices against social inequality by claiming a share in a national future and "employing the term Arab Jew." Despite the newfound status of secular Iraqi Jewish intellectuals and the vocal anti-Zionism of some prominent Jewish members in Baghdad's literary and political scene, Iraqi nationalists began to attack Jews as traitors in the 1930s. Nazi Germany's shortwave Arabic broadcasting Voice of Free Arabism began in October 1939 and continued broadcasting in Iraq daily until March 1945. The propaganda contributed significantly to a spread of anti-Semitic ideas by consolidating anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist resentment with Arab nationalism. Upon being exiled from Palestine by the British in 1937, Hajj Ammin al-Husseini, the pro-Nazi leader of the Palestinian national movement, found refuge in Baghdad, where he helped German and Arab nationalists to foment anti-Semitic violence. In the months leading up to the Farhud, the pogrom in Baghdad on June 1 and 2, 1941, most Jews placed their hope in British military intervention. Bashkin reveals that Baghdadi Jews were not just forsaken by leading Arab nationalists but also by the British, who stood by and watched the violence unfold. Bashkin contends that historians have overemphasized the larger significance of the 1941 riots. This has contributed, she asserts, to a "Farhudization" of Jewish Iraqi history, in which the Farhud is cast as typifying the overall experience of the otherwise harmonious relationship between Jews and...

New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China (review)

Hairong Yan, New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 328 pp. The subject of this book is part of the large-scale movement of tens of millions of Chinese men and women from rural areas to urban cities, where they engage in the marginal manual labor city residents increasingly reject, from construction work and factory labor to various forms of service work. Hairong Yan focuses on the experiences of domestic workers (baomu) in Beijing, an under-researched topic. Shifting between Beijing and Anhui province, she describes the role rural women play in the unfolding consumer economy of upper and middle-class Beijing. Highlighting the class realities of the post-Mao transformation of Chinese society, she unpacks the neoliberal basis of these changes. Yet, in places, this theoretical critique, supported by a range of textual sources, drowns out the actual voices of domestic laborers. This is unfortunate, because the book shows such initial promise. Yan succinctly sketches out the contradictions in the post-Maoist emphasis on utilizing labor from marginal areas in the countryside as the primary labor source of China's economic development (12). Chapter 1 provides an historical context to the recent emergence of a mobile labor class among Chinese peasants, noting its links with both the redistribution of land (28) and the social erasure of a meaningful identity for rural youth (51). While has become the foundation of Party ideology, this always occurs elsewhere other than the countryside. Chapter 2 describes the links between the development of a domestic labor economy in major cities with the post-1979 enhanced status of intellectuals and private business owners. Chapter 3 is a discussion of the key concept of suzhi, (quality), an ambiguous term that implies civility, self-discipline, proper moral behavior, and a general sense of modern consciousness. For both state leaders and intellectuals, a lack of peasant quality is now seen as the key roadblock to further national development (113). Chapter 4 describes the recruiting process of domestic workers, while Chapter 5 analyzes the self development discourse (ziwo fazhan) promoted as the means to raising peasant quality (187), a discourse that Yan argues erases any discussion of economic class realities (190). In the final chapter, Yan describes the ambiguous place of migrant workers in Chinese society; for many, they cannot ever truly return home, yet are never accepted as at home in the cities where they spend their working lives. As Yan's analysis unfolds, it remains rather thin on ethnographic depth, relying instead on newspaper accounts, contemporary fiction, and the arguments of other researchers. For example, when she turns to the gritty reality of labor recruitment and placement, Yan relies on what apparently was a one-time visit to a recruiter in Anhui, which is followed by a description of one training session for domestic workers in Beijing (148- 165). This highlights the potential pitfalls of a multi-sited study that also seeks to move beyond thick ethnographic description: the there of the story and more importantly the women of this story become secondary to a theoretically rigorous, yet obtuse analysis that times threatens to drown out lived experience. While adding to the on-going analysis of both a state and broader society focus on suzhi, Yan argues that this represents a new form of discourse, one which aims to transform the process of development into a policy focused on re-molding citizen-subjects into proper modern subjects. Yet, while she shows how this new state and Party emphasis on personal, individual development as the pathway to modernity is a rejection of the Maoist emphasis on the radical transformation of the collective nation, she does not note how this policy is a continuation of a broader modernist discourse that harkens back to the 1911 Revolution. …

The End(s) of the Intellectual: Ethics, Politics, Terror

Has the era in which intellectuals had sufficient respect and moral authority to intervene effectively in politics and influence public opinion finally come to an end? Is it possible to imagine today an Emile Zola who would publicly accuse the highest political and military authorities of injustices and crimes and be followed by large numbers of writers, artists, and academics and important segments of the general public, as was the case during the Dreyfus Affair in France over a century ago? Have the ends pursued by intellectuals of the past become totally irrelevant in an increasingly trans-national world dominated by technology? These are the kinds of questions this essay addresses as it discusses why in the last decades the decline in the status and influence of intellectuals and even their demise have so often been proclaimed, not just by conservative anti-intellectuals who equate intellectuals with subversive political ideas and movements, but also more surprisingly by intellectuals on the political left themselves. Even if the figure and status of the intellectual have radically changed in recent decades, the essay also argues that the voices of intellectuals, even if today expressed in different forms and in different media than in the past, still have a crucial critical role to play. Through analyses of essays by Foucault, Lyotard, and Albert Camus, the essay argues for what could be called a minimalist form of ethics as the basis for the struggle against injustice, an ethics that is not rooted in an idea of universal humanity or derived from a religious or political ideal but which nevertheless demands, especially in “an age of terror” such as our own, that the obligation to “save bodies” (Camus) must come before politics, or in the words of Emmanuel Levinas, that politics must always come “after.”

A Notably Absent Mind

September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd 74 Reviews A NOTABLY ABSENT MIND Michael D. Stevenson Schulich School of Business, York U. / Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. Toronto, on m3j 1p3 / Hamilton, on l8s 4m2, Canada stevenm@mcmaster.ca Stefan Collini. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 2006. Pp. x, 526. isbn 0–19-929105–5. £25.00; us$45.00. Stefan Collini’s Absent Minds provides an intriguing analysis of the question of intellectuals in Britain during the twentieth century, examining “the ways in which the existence, nature, and role of intellectuals have been thought about and argued over” (p. 1) and addressing the popular notion that British intellectuals have been “peculiarly unimportant or even non-existent” (p. 3). For the most part, Collini convincingly demonstrates that this “absence thesis” is without merit and that Britain has enjoyed a distinguished tradition of intellectual activity , even in relation to countries—particularly France—where intellectuals have been viewed to have assumed a more prominent position in a nation’s social and cultural aTairs. Collini divides his book into Wve sections. In the Wrst, he provides a detailed overview of the historical evolution beginning in the early nineteenth century of the term “intellectual” as a noun in the English language; Collini also argues that Absent Mindsz adopts the cultural sense—and not the sociological and subjective senses—of this term and focuses on leading thinkers “who deploy an acknowledged intellectual position or achievement in addressing a broader, nonspecialist public” (p. 47). The second and Wfth sections of Absent Minds document the vigorous debate that occurred during the twentieth century about the role of intellectuals in British society. In this period, Collini examines a number of case studies—from the pre-World War i journal New Agez to the bbc’s Third Programme—to demonstrate how the domestic claims of British exceptionalism became more prominent as the century progressed. Collini devotes the third part of his book to a discussion of the “absence thesis” within an international framework by examining the historical status of intellectuals in Europe and the United States. In many of these countries, Collini identiWes a strikingly similar attitude that viewed intellectuals as “z‘backward’, ‘marginalized’, or simply ‘absent’z” (p. 217). Collini notes that some of these attitudes were also in play even in France, although the role of intellectuals in French society was deWned almost exclusively in political terms after the Dreyfus ATair. The most interesting section of Absent Mindsz is the fourth, in which Collini September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd Reviews 75 provides detailed biographical portraits of Wve prominent Britons who commented negatively about intellectuals or who refused to consider themselves members of a distinct intellectual elite. T.yS. Eliot is used as an example of the amateur social critic who viewed British intellectuals as being unworthy of claiming cultural authority. R.yG. Collingwood is characterized as an intellectual manqué whose professorial cackling was largely ineTective in inXuencing contemporaryopinion .Collini saves his sharpest rhetorical barbs for George Orwell, an “antique moralist” (p. 372) whose indiscriminate criticism of the left-wing intelligentsia was primarily responsible for negative public attitudes towards intellectuals in Britain in the middle of the twentieth century. A.yJ.yP. Taylor is portrayed as an intellectual gadXy who largely abandoned his professional historical vocation in favour of pursuing journalistic celebrity. Finally, the career of A.yJ. Ayer is analyzed to illustrate Ayer’s consistent refusal to espouse authoritative truths. Russell scholars will be somewhat surprised that Bertrand Russell is not featured more prominently in Absent Minds. With the exception of some isolated references scattered throughout his text, Collini devotes fewer than Wve pages of sustained analysis (pp. 120–4) to Russell’s often contradictory attitudes towards intellectuals after the First World War. Although Collini explicitly states that he will be “more than usually unmoved by readers or reviewers who complain that this or that important Wgure is absent from its pages” (p. 8), his decision to emphasize other British intellectuals at Russell’s expense is disappointing. Nonetheless , Russellians will Wnd much useful and...

Review: The Ontology and Status of Intellectuals in Arab Academia and Society * M'hammed Sabour: The Ontology and Status of Intellectuals in Arab Academia and Society

Review: The Ontology and Status of Intellectuals in Arab Academia and Society * M'hammed Sabour: The Ontology and Status of Intellectuals in Arab Academia and Society

Contemporary ‘vehicularity’ and ‘romanticism’: debating the status of ideas and intellectuals

This essay considers the changing nature of ideas work and the role of intellectuals in contemporary informational capitalism, or, to use that ubiquitous phrase, ‘knowledge society’. It is worth re...

Independent scholars: A neglected breed

T he status of public intellectuals and part-time faculty receives frequent attention, while that of independent scholars is usually ignored.Yet the production of more scholars than campuses employ inevitably puts a growing number outside the academic orbit. Either existing insti tutions--universities, research libraries, funding programs, scholarly societies, journals, and presses--will respond to the changing ecology of scholarship; new institutions will cater to it; or the excess scholars will waste like uncropped corn.To an extent, all three alternatives are likely.This article will discuss notable features that emerge from a review of the largely uncharted terrain of independent scholarship. In various definitions, independent scholars are those unaffiliated with an academic, or with any, institution, or whose work duties do not include research and scholarship.Typically, they are Ph.D.s in the humanities, often women, who, unable to find scholarly employment ("independent," a wit says, is a euphemism for"unemployed"), pursue scholarly interests on their own.Though the term"scholar" is little used in the social sciences, many anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, economists, psychologists (75% of those who received a Ph.D. in 1999) practice their profession off campus. The definition is a cloud that can obscure such basic questions as the number of independent scholars, their professional needs, and what policies best serve their interests. In practice, an independent scholar is anyone who believes he or she is one and w h o m a professional association, granting agency, or library accepts as one. In 1989, James Bennett, who received $148,000 from the Spencer Foundation to study independent scholars (and, housed at Northwestern, was then no longer independent) , estimated that there were 20,00025,000 in the humanities and social sciences. His estimate included all nonacademic scholars; the number of unaffiliated scholars was far lower. Few academic societies accurately represent the full spect rum of persons with graduate degrees in their field.Typically, they over-represent university faculty and under-represent faculty at 2and 4-year colleges, masters and Ph.D.s in nonacademic jobs, and those who are unemployed or retired.

The transfer of allegiances of the intellectual elites

In his preface to "The Persian Letters" by Montesquieu P. Val?ry writes about an age of order based on fictions and the effective presence of absent things, on a conventional system establishing connections among individuals which, though imaginary, have quite real effects. Without such connections no society is possible. Val?ry then speculates about every human being's quest for that delightful epoch of maximum freedom and support; such an epoch is usually discovered as soon as a social system begins to disintegrate. The function and vocation of intellectuals consist in producing "fictions" required to bring about social solidarity; to exist every social order presupposes a "secular society", that is, an unanchored, relatively classless stratum, the "socially unattached intelligentsia" (Mannheim, 1991). However, the social status of intellectuals does not by itself clarify their role in shaping and reshaping people and social orders. Paradoxically, they also do much to ground anti intellectual values. For that reason it is useful to bring into relief the degree to which the cultural tasks of intellectuals are in fact ambivalent. The causes of social transformations are usually traced to the conflict between those in power and the people. Power is endowed with evil and repressive forces, the people with virtue and justice. Alexis de Tocqueville (1982) problematised the crisis of legitimacy, which arises within institutions of power and gives impetus to the mobilisation of social movements. I borrow the concept "transfer of allegiances of the intellectuals" from the "The natural history of revolutions" (1927) by Lyford Edwards (1970). The hypothesis I want to explicate is that the historical changes and crises of legit imacy experienced by communist and post-communist regimes in Russia are linked to a positional conflict within the community of

L’art, la Pensée, la Politique : un débat entre intellectuels français et américains, 1919-1922

This paper examines the debates that divided American and French intellectuals between 1919 and 1922. After analyzing briefly the status of intellectuals before 1919, both in France and in the US, it focuses on the creation of international intellectual movements after World War one and highlights the conflicting view-points of American and French intellectuals. The paper finally tries to show that a new conception of the intellectuals' role made its way both in France and in the US in the early twenties, and assesses the part played by the war and the Russian revolution in these changes.

Intellectuals, Economic Reform and Social Change: Constraints and Opportunities in the Formation of a Nigerian Technocracy

ABSTRACTCrisis and economic reforms have changed the status of intellectuals and their relations with dominant élites and policy makers. Because of the technical and ideological nature of these reforms, policy makers have tended to rely on intellectuals as opposed to bureaucrats to shape the agenda of change. This has converted a large number of intellectuals into technocrats and undermined the fabric of academic life in universities. Nowhere is this more pronounced than in developing countries with a large middle class and an economic or financial base that ensures some degree of independence from the multilateral financial institutions. Understanding the success or failure of economic reforms in developing countries requires some analysis of the complex relations between technocrats and political leaders and the societal constraints both sets of actors face. This article explores these issues in the context of Nigeria, whose academic community, bureaucrats and professionals grew in leaps and bounds in the 1970s, following an oil‐induced boom. The crisis of the 1980s led to attempts at economic reform and a highly programmed strategy of political change in which academics played a leading role. The article examines the effectiveness of intellectuals in government, and compares the Nigeria case with technocratic experiments in Ghana, Botswana and Côte d̂Ivoire.

L'engagement des intellectuels dans la France des années trente : entre culture et politique

Because of the extent and evidence of political participation of intellectuals in France of the thirties, the latter may be considered as full actors of the political life and debates of these years. The historical circumstances are however not sufficient to explain the political role they then assumed. More precisely, the article is intended to show that in order to explain the peculiarity of the phenomenon, one must necessarily turn to the cultural data, i.e. the set of values and representations that found the social recognition of intellectuals in France and that account for the believe according to which those who, because of their intellectual activity, arenotorious, have an authorized opinion on political matters. In this perspective, one may conclude that the commitment of intellectuals in France of the thirties may not be reduced to a political fact. It also constitutes a cultural fact, resulting from the combination of a value crisis and the system of political attitudes attached, in this country, to the status of intellectuals.

Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power: The Post-Stalin Era

In this unprecedented work on the status and role of intellectuals in Soviet political life, a former Soviet sociologist maps out the delicate, often paradoxical, ties between the political regime and the creative thinkers who play a major part in the movement toward modernization. Beginning with Stalin, Vladimir Shlapentokh explores the mutual need and antagonism that have existed between political leaders and intellectuals. What emerges is a fascinating portrayal of the Soviet intellectual network since the 1950s, which touches on such topics as the role of literature and film in political opposition, levels of opposition (open, legal, and private), and the spread of paranoia as fueled by the KGB. Throughout he shows how the intellectual communityusually a cohesive, liberal grouphas fared under Khrushchev's cautious tolerance, Brezhnev's repressions, and now Gorbachev's Glasnost.Shlapentokh maintains, however, that under Glasnost freer speech has revealed a more pronounced divergence between liberal and conservative thinkers, and has allowed for open conservative opposition to the reformatory measures of Gorbachev and the liberals. He argues that one of the strongest checks on reform is the growing presence of Russophilism--a movement supporting Russian nationalism and Stalin's concept of socialism--among the political elite and the masses. Although the role of the liberal intellectuals in the late 1980s was less prominent than it was in the 1960s, Shlapentokh asserts that they remain the major agent of modernization in the Soviet Union, as well as in other socialist countries.

The Status and Function of Intellectuals in State and Society in India and China: Some Critical Comparisons

Max Weber's comparative studies of the great non-European civilisations of India, China and Islam were, in spite of their breadth of content, focussed on the problem of the non-evolution of modern capitalism in them and most Webenan scholars did not, unfortunately, move far away from this. But the most mteresting topic of companson between China and India is not their common non-generation of capitalism but the totally different relation that evolved between the intellectuals and the state in each. A collaborative relation of the literati in the service of the state was evolved in China by the Han dynasty by a clever distortion of the Confucian ethic and it lasted with minor discontinuities until early this century. By contrast, the Indian Brahmin intellectuals gave only conditional support to the State, treating Dharma or Universal law as supreme and gave up hope of the impenal integration of India by the seventh century. Instead, they built a flexible pattern of cultural integration - based on Bhakti for contact with the masses and an all-India cultural elite for leadership - which has lasted all these centuries.

Instinct and Organization: Intellectuals and British Labour after 1931

In the years between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second, the estimate outside Britain of the status of intellectuals in the British Labour movement grew to prodigal dimensions.