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Jeffrey C. Alexander
Intellectuals in the Public Sphere
Public intellectual is a role that has become fundamental to the civil
repair of modern societies. It is rooted in the first public sphere
that emerged in Athens, and in the iconic figure of Socrates.
These
secular origins became folded into the Judeo-Christian trope of
prophetic judgment. Public intellectuals criticize society on behalf of
the putative, and necessarily unrealized, solidarity that underlies the
civil-public sphere, and they do so by pronouncements that refer to the
power of truth. Being a public intellectual must be understood
performatively. It is an expressive figure organized in sub-genres
formed by such political traditions as the revolutionary, reformist,
conservative, and counter-revolutionary, but it has also expressed
itself in the figure of the public psychotherapist initiated by Freud.
In real historical time, however, the performance of public
intellectual is not as transcendental as it seems. As much denunciation
and demonization as idealistic and inspiring, public intellectual
discourse engages the binary, bifurcating discourse of civil society.
Even while promoting civil repair, public intellectual performance
becomes a vehicle for carrying out the excluding and stigmatizing
boundary enforcement that also characterizes every civil society.
 
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