Alienation, Dissent,’ And The Intellectual

SOCIAL ALIENATION, out of which what we now like to call “dissent” comes, is essentially a modern phenomenon in the Western world. In fact, aside from sporadic anticipation here and there, it did not emerge till the second part of the eighteenth century in France, appearing at the appropriate time elsewhere in Europe, and finally in the United States. And in France, as elsewhere in Europe, it was accompanied by the moral posture of “dissent,” of intransigent hostility to the Establishment, above all, to traditional religion and Christianity.

This radical development in Western society is usually, and rightly, associated with the appearance on the social scene of the group we have come to call the “intelligentsia” (a word originally Russian). The intelligentsia were not, and are not, made up of professional or technical intellectuals, or only incidentally; the intelligentsia has been from the beginning, composed of free-floating littérateurs and journalists, sometimes academically connected, usually free-lancers, characterized by a monumental intellectual arrogance, people who felt themselves called upon to be a kind of cosmic commentators, critics-in-general of things-as-they-are. Their bitter anti-Christianity, often enlarged into a savage anti-religion, was a reflection of this. The modern world was already producing large numbers of educated, or semi-educated, people, who were convinced that, by virtue of their facility with words and ideas, they were entitled to an exalted place, a place of intellectual direction, in the society of their time. The world, they believed, was ruled by ideas, and they, the idea-makers (or idea-mongers) ought to have first place in it. When society, constituted on very different principles, refused them the inflated prestige and power they dreamed of, they, or considerable numbers of them, became alienated from society, moral secessionists, ultimately “outsiders.” Such was the developed stance of the philosophes in eighteenth-century France. Alienation and “dissent” emerged as cultural phenomena of major importance.

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Will Herberg

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SOCIAL ALIENATION, out of which what we now like to call “dissent” comes, is essentially a modern phenomenon in the Western world. In fact, aside from sporadic anticipation here and there, it did not emerge till the second part of the eighteenth century in France, appearing at the appropriate time elsewhere in Europe, and finally in the United States. And in France, as elsewhere in Europe, it was accompanied by the moral posture of “dissent,” of intransigent hostility to the Establishment, above all, to traditional religion and Christianity.

This radical development in Western society is usually, and rightly, associated with the appearance on the social scene of the group we have come to call the “intelligentsia” (a word originally Russian). The intelligentsia were not, and are not, made up of professional or technical intellectuals, or only incidentally; the intelligentsia has been from the beginning, composed of free-floating littérateurs and journalists, sometimes academically connected, usually free-lancers, characterized by a monumental intellectual arrogance, people who felt themselves called upon to be a kind of cosmic commentators, critics-in-general of things-as-they-are. Their bitter anti-Christianity, often enlarged into a savage anti-religion, was a reflection of this. The modern world was already producing large numbers of educated, or semi-educated, people, who were convinced that, by virtue of their facility with words and ideas, they were entitled to an exalted place, a place of intellectual direction, in the society of their time. The world, they believed, was ruled by ideas, and they, the idea-makers (or idea-mongers) ought to have first place in it. When society, constituted on very different principles, refused them the inflated prestige and power they dreamed of, they, or considerable numbers of them, became alienated from society, moral secessionists, ultimately “outsiders.” Such was the developed stance of the philosophes in eighteenth-century France. Alienation and “dissent” emerged as cultural phenomena of major importance.