The Intellectual as Celebrity

The Intellectual as Celebrity

A new intellectual type has risen on the American scene, the celebrity intellectual. He addresses a semieducated mass public that makes little claim to expert knowledge or refined taste, and that adheres to no commonly shared cultural standards. The celebrity intellectuals, figures like Erich Segal, Charles Reich, and Marshall McLuhan, come to the fore under identifiable conditions and exhibit a distinct set of relations with an admiring public.

Societies like our own are characterized by a pronounced segmentation of social and intellectual circles.’ Florian Znaniecki has developed the notion that thinkers are likely to speak not to the total society but to a selected public. Specific social circles, he argued, bestow recognition, provide material or psychic income, and help shape the selfimage of the thinker as he internalizes their normative expectations. Men of knowledge are supposed to respond to or anticipate certain demands of their circles and these in turn grant certain rights and immunities. Men of ideas, he argued further, define data and problems in terms of actual or anticipated audiences.