The study of intellectuals: an overview

Abstract

The study of intellectuals has been transformed into an autonomous discipline, characterised by a differentiated analytical object and placed between different academic fields such as history, sociology and political science. In this article, we shall take a brief look at the main theoretical and methodological currents on this theme, and shall place them within the historical context in which they appeared. We shall see the appearance of intellectuals as a result of the way modernity has developed, and how the first theoretical approaches that attempt to understand its configuration start emerging. This phenomenon has spanned the entire 20th century and crossed into the beginning of the new millennium where, again, passionate academic debates on its continuity or disappearance have been unleashed. The death of the intellectual as a social actor is debatable but today, the validity of studies about intellectuals is undeniable.