Between theory and practice

Matthew Arnold, Thomas Mann, Julien Benda, and the purpose of the intellectual

pp. 99-130

in: Geoffrey A. Baker, The aesthetics of clarity and confusion, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstract

An examination of the evolving position of the public intellectual since roughly the era of Nietzsche and Zola demonstrates the importance of clarity and confusion in debates over the political purpose of criticism and intellectuals. Discussions of Matthew Arnold's "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" and Culture and Anarchy alongside Thomas Mann's Reflections of an Unpolitical Man and Julien Benda's The Treason of the Intellectuals argue that what have often been read as passionate apologies for apoliticism are in fact better understood as agendas for an intellectual activism that achieves ultimately political ends through non-political means, as an indirect route to broad social transformation that operates at levels more fundamental than those of surface, partisan, immediate political content.