Abstract

As a materialist theory of history and society which has placed its hopes on the consciousness and activity of the proletariat, Marxism has nurtured an endemic hostility to those “idealists” who come to the left from outside the working class: the intellectuals. The intellectuals have, in turn, responded with an equally long lasting and endemic tradition: self-abuse, and guilt, a kind of permanant legitimation crisis of left intellectuals who yearn to join the collective identical subject-object of history. A primitive “sociology of the intellectuals” has been the theoretical handmaiden of the often unhappy marriage of Marxism and the intellectuals. It postulates that because intellectuals are far removed from “material production” and or the proletariat, they are susceptible to a number of “idealist” viruses such as humanism, individualism or cultural criticism.