Abstract
This paper revisits Davie’s (1961) notion of the democratic intellect. The role
of the intellectual in society has become ever more specialist and bound up
with income generation. Gone is the notion of the intellectual being someone
who shares their knowledge with the wider public, but rather this is now with
interested stakeholders. Yet as Yeo (1996) points out, the intellectual as a
professional academic, is much more in the business of excluding rather than
including others in the activities they engage as ‘intellectual work’. It is
interesting that in Scotland there has been the beginnings of a debunking of
the notion of the democratic intellect (Barr, 2006) but the myth of the
academic as a servant of the public is still strongly held. Knowledge
production from above rather than from below is still the dominant
epistemological modus operandi. Even in areas such as sociology where it
would reasonably be expected that a public sociology would deliver a much
wider sense of gaining knowledge for outside the walls of academia, there
not much in the way of a genuine two-way street between the public and
intellectuals. This comes at as time when the public purse for higher
education is open to intense scrutiny but the argument is advanced that
perhaps the current financial woes can give a stimulus to intellectuals
connecting with the public in a way that they have not had to.
Original language | English |
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Publication status | Published - 8 May 2010 |
Event | 3rd Global Conference on Intellectuals, Knowledge, Power - Prague, Czech Republic Duration: 6 May 2010 → 8 May 2010 Conference number: 3rd |
Conference
Conference | 3rd Global Conference on Intellectuals, Knowledge, Power |
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Country | Czech Republic |
City | Prague |
Period | 6/05/10 → 8/05/10 |