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Key Words academic, class-less, organic, professional, "new class"
* Abstract The sociology of intellectuals has adopted three fundamentally distinct approaches to its subject. The Dreyfusards, Julien Benda, "new class" theorists, and Pierre Bourdieu treated intellectuals as potentially a class-in-themselves, that is, as having interests that distinguish them from other groups in society. Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and theorists of "authenticity" treated intellectuals as primarily class-bound, that is, representatives of their group of origin. Karl Mannheim, Edward Shils, and Randall Collins treated intellectuals as relatively class-less, that is, able to transcend their group of origin to pursue their own ideals. These approaches divided the field at its founding in the 1920s, during its mid-century peak, and in its late-century revival.
INTRODUCTION
The sociology of intellectuals, like its subjects of study, has had a checkered history. At times, the field seemed ready to emerge as a cohesive body of literature, just as its subjects-variously defined in the literature as persons with advanced educations, producers or transmitters of culture or ideas, or members of either category who engage in public issues-sometimes gelled into a cohesive social group. At other times, the field hardly existed and was subsumed into the sociology of professions, the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of science, and other fields-just as its subjects sometimes shunned the collective identity of intellectuals, preferring professional, middle-class, ethnic, and other identities. The field's ebbs and flows have not often matched those of its subjects, with the result that the sociology of intellectuals is sometimes written in a normative key, attempting to call into existence a group that no longer rallies to the name "intellectual."
Such was the field's founding moment, in the late 1920s, when three approaches to the subject emerged, treating intellectuals as a class-in-themselves, as class-bound, or as class-less (see also the categorizations in Brym 1980:12-13, 1987, 2001; Gagnon 1987b:6-10, Szelenyi & Martin 1988:649). These three approaches are reflected in the three editions of the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences: Michels (1932) adopting a class-in-itself approach, Shils (1968) adopting a class-less approach, and Brym (2001) adopting a class-bound approach. Our review of the field, focusing primarily on the English-language literature, is organized around these three approaches, discussing the updating of each approach during three waves...