Fourth Lecture. Universal Corporatism: The Role of Intellectuals in the Modern World

Abstract

The lecture I am about to deliver, on the initiative of the Asahi newspaper, falls within the sphere of the bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution. And I would like to contribute in my own way, which is, no doubt, a little paradoxical or perverse, to these celebrations by recalling, following the lecture I delivered yesterday at Todai University, that the organizers of these ceremonies are none other than, in the France of 1989, the members of this State nobility, the power of which finds its legitimacy in cultural capital, that is, from a naive point of view, in intelligence. One can immediately see that this new form of domination raises a difficult and probably unprecedented problem for intellectuals, who are dominated dominants, that is, the dominated among the dominant. Unlike those whom nineteenth-century writers designated as bourgeois or, worse, shopkeepers, a good many of the modern rulers of great public or private bureaucracies are technocrats or even epistemocrats who pretend to use science-notably, economic science-in order to govern and who have, by virtue of this, more power than ever before to contest the monopoly of intelligence that intellectuals used to readily appropriate to themselves. But I am coming to the subject. At the risk of overstepping the bounds tacitly prescribed for a lecturer, especially when he is also a