Hitchens on the "public intellectuals" list
After writing about the Foreign Policy list of "The Top 100 Public Intellectuals," I picked up the print issue and was pleased to see an essay from none other than Christopher Hitchens on "The Plight of Public Intellectuals" (subscribers only). Hitchens shines in highlighting the intellectual as a dissident force:
As far as I have been able to determine, the very word "intellectual" was popularized as a term of abuse during the Dreyfus Affair, the late 19th-century political scandal that divided France over the supposed loyalties of its young Jewish artillery officer. The coinage then suggested that the pro-Dreyfus faction was insufficiently rooted in nation and loyalty, preferring as they did the urbane abstractions of "the intellect" to the verities of church and soil. I personally hope that the word never quite loses this association with the subversive. [emphasis added]