The term “intellectual” has always been ambiguous. From the time it first gained currency—during the Dreyfus case—it suggested not only concern with things of the mind but also a certain estrangement from the prevailing culture and an attachment to political ideology. The critic Brunetière, responding to the Dreyfusard Manifeste des Intellectuels, thought it absurd for experts in allegedly value-free disciplines like astronomy to claim authority in politics and morals, and he imparted to the word “intellectuals” an irony it has never quite lost. When the word came into use in America early in this century it usually meant those who were regarded as rootless and irresponsible, possessing intellect without character.
During the Depression, a shift in the emotive connotation of the word “intellectual” began to take place in the United States. The business elite was bewildered, confused, and unable to suggest proposals beyond a patient attendance on economic forces for self-regulative adjustment; the labor elite wanted jobs but was still suspicious of such schemes as unemployment insurance. Numbered among the intellectuals were such figures as Rexford Tugwell, a professor of economics, an editor of The New Republic, and, above all, a believer in economic planning. The word “planning” became central for the group that grew in Washington, known as the “Phi Beta Kappa Revolutionaries.” Roosevelt himself had little respect for ideologists such as John Dewey and later Harold Laski, who he thought had lost their sense of reality. But the economists seemed to him a relatively hard-headed group of scientists, and the notion spread that social science, particularly economics, could guide society out of its morass. What we might call the “intellectual as advisor” superseded the intellectual as estranged prophet.
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