The idea of the public intellectual demands a roll call of honour. Intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, Marshall Sahlins and Dr Benjamin Spock provided a critique of the Vietnam War and turned it into a great Civil Society debate. The critique of Stalin and Communist Russia was provided by the courage of an Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, an Andrei Amalrik, an Anna Akhmatova and a Joseph Brodsky.

The indictment of fascism was the work of Antonio Gramsci, Ignazio Silone and the Frankfurt School in Germany. The rise of the knowledge society was announced by intellectuals like Daniel Bell, Fritz Machulin and Ralf Dahrendorf. The first playful critiques of the hegemony or dominance of science came from Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Kuhn and Michel Foucault. The velvet revolution of Czechoslovakia was led by public intellectuals like Václav Havel and Ivan Klima.

Who are the intellectuals and public intellectuals as a category? How does one understand them sociologically? The magic of knowledge in modern life has often required the mystique of the intellectual. Intellectuals as a sociological group dance above ideology. In playfully distancing themselves from class, interest and social strata they perform a double function. As persons, they articulate the worldview of a society, as actors they emphasise the performative nature of the idea. Knowledge is one of the great operas of modern society. As knowledge got specialised, functionalised, segmented, the intellectual become more a bureaucrat of knowledge, he became an expert. Expert knowledge awed the popular imagination but never appealed to it.

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