This week we are starting to learn about intellectuals as a social class. Mainly, we are defining intellectuals as people who “produce decontextualized ideas.” So everyone can produce ideas. In fact, people probably produce their own ideas all the time. But what separates the layman from the intellectuals is that the intellectuals produce ideas that are decontextualized – ideas that are ought to hold true in various contexts. A contextualized idea might be “I am feeling hungry” or “I am tired because of the amount of work I have.” But a decontextualized idea can be “humans feel hungry when they need to eat food and intake energy” or “people often feel more tired and stressed when they have workload that exceeds what they are used to, thus leading to lower productivity,” like what we see in psychology research. So a mathematician can be an intellectual; scientists can be intellectuals. But we should also note that musicians and artists can also be intellectuals, as the work they produce can also be said to be decontextualized. Moreover, we can also categorize people like philosophers or people who seek to influence the society by producing decontextualized ideas as intellectuals.
As intellectuals, knowledge and ideas are like sacred objects to them, similar to religious systems. Prof. Riley also mentioned at class how excited he and his friends were to see Pierre Bourdieu. To them, Bourdieu is like both a sacred object and a saint in their field.
In Collin’s Coalitions in the Mind, we see how the interactions between intellectuals fall under Goffman’s Interaction Rituals, since intellectuals often interact with each other in such a way that they are seriously discussing topics of interest and engaged with each other deeply. Thus, for each “group” of intellectuals, they would also have their own sacred object. In Gouldner’s The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class, we learned about how the intellectuals started to rise as a new class in the 20th century. First, intellectuals started to become secularized, so they are more involved in the general populations’ lives, instead of what historically had been a church-centered society. Inside this new class, it is split between humanitarian intellectuals and technocrat intelligentsia.