When Knowledge Becomes the Question: Intellectual Authority after 1968
What gives an intellectual the authority to criticize society? The question becomes easier to approach if we begin with a particular conception of intellectual work: the educated person whose specialized knowledge brings him into contact with questions that extend beyond his immediate field (Sartre, 1972). The intellectual occupies a position between specialized knowledge and public life because the practice of a particular profession can reveal problems with wider social significance.
Sartre offers a particularly useful formulation of this position. He begins with what he calls the “technicians of practical knowledge”: professors, researchers, engineers, doctors, writers, and others whose professional work involves specialized forms of knowledge. Such a person does not become an intellectual simply by doing this work. The transformation occurs when the practice itself reveals a contradiction between the universal character of the knowledge being pursued and the particular social conditions in which it is produced and used.
His example of the nuclear scientist makes the point clearly. Scientific research seeks universal laws, yet the same knowledge can contribute to the possibility of atomic warfare. When scientists recognize and denounce this contradiction, they become intellectuals in Sartre's sense. Their intervention arises from their own practice: they discover within their work a conflict between the universal claims of knowledge and the particular interests or uses to which that knowledge can be put.
The intellectual therefore occupies a double position. He remains a specialist whose work gives him access to a particular form of knowledge, while becoming conscious of the contradiction between that work and the social purposes it can serve. His intellectual role does not simply follow from possessing knowledge; it emerges when his own position enables him to recognize and expose a contradiction that his professional activity has made visible.
This conception already contains an element of self-criticism. The intellectual does not stand entirely outside the situation he condemns. He discovers the contradiction within his own activity and then gives it wider significance. Yet his intervention still begins from a specialized position whose claim to universality makes the contradiction visible. It was this relationship between specialized knowledge and critical intervention that became increasingly problematic in the intellectual climate that emerged in France around 1968.
2. When the Intellectual Becomes Part of the Problem
The upheavals surrounding 1968 brought a further question into view: what happens when the position from which criticism is made becomes part of what must itself be examined? The issue shifts from the causes or injustices being denounced to the status of the person claiming to interpret them.
Sartre's later reflections on May 1968 provide a revealing glimpse of this change. He recalled that the younger generation was questioning not only “capitalism, imperialism, the system,” but also those who claimed to oppose them. Opposition to the existing order could therefore no longer, by itself, settle the question of the intellectual's role. Someone might criticize the system and still have to account for the position from which that criticism was delivered.
Representation became particularly problematic. The established intellectual could understand his task as giving conceptual expression to the experiences of workers, students, colonized peoples, or other groups whose circumstances he sought to interpret. But the very act of speaking on behalf of others could raise a further question: why should the person with the education, vocabulary, or institutional standing be the one who explains what others experience? The problem was no longer only whether an interpretation was politically correct, but how the interpreter had come to occupy the position of interpreter in the first place.
This marks an important shift in the object of criticism. Social institutions and political arrangements remained objects of critique, but the relation between the critic and those objects also became questionable. The intellectual could no longer simply assume that opposition to power placed him outside the relations of power being examined.
This did not produce a single new doctrine, nor did it begin neatly in 1968. Rather, the period helped make visible a question that would take different forms in subsequent French thought: what makes the position of the knower possible, and what gives knowledge its authority?
The question thus moves from the intellectual's use of knowledge to the circumstances that allow knowledge to function as a basis for criticism.
3. From Knowledge to the Conditions of Knowledge
This shift becomes more explicit in Foucault's work, where the focus moves from the individual knower to the practices through which knowledge is produced, organized, and recognized. Instead of asking only whether a statement is true, one can ask under what conditions it can count as true knowledge.
Knowledge does not simply accumulate around objects that are already fully defined. Disciplines establish categories for describing them, procedures for investigating them, and criteria for determining what counts as relevant evidence. Institutions provide settings in which these practices operate and recognize particular forms of expertise. What counts as knowledge therefore depends on arrangements of concepts, practices, institutions, and rules that make some ways of speaking more credible or consequential than others.
Foucault's treatment of madness provides a clear example. The historical question is not simply whether people considered mad were allowed to speak. Their words could be heard, recorded, interpreted, classified, or rejected within frameworks that shaped how they could be understood. Once madness is constituted as an object of psychiatric knowledge, the expert occupies a position from which a patient's speech can be treated as evidence, symptom, testimony, or expression of a condition defined within the relevant system of knowledge. The issue is therefore not merely whether someone speaks, but how a particular interpretation of that speech becomes possible.
The same question extends beyond madness. In The Order of Discourse, Foucault examines the procedures through which discourse is controlled, selected, organized, and distributed. These procedures affect who may speak in recognized forms, which statements can circulate, and how discourse becomes connected with truth. His concern is therefore not simply with knowledge as a body of propositions, but with the historical practices through which particular forms of knowledge acquire their place within a social order.
The focus has consequently moved from the intellectual who possesses knowledge to the historical arrangements through which knowledge acquires its status and effects.
4. When Knowledge Becomes the Object of Criticism
Once these arrangements themselves become available for examination, criticism acquires a more reflexive dimension. Its object can include not only institutions and social practices, but the conceptual structures through which those practices become intelligible. The question is no longer simply what society is doing or who is entitled to describe it, but how the categories through which society is described have acquired their force.
Different thinkers pursued this problem in different directions. Derrida examined the conceptual structures that organize philosophical distinctions and make certain oppositions appear stable or self-evident. Lacan, in another register, challenged the assumption that the speaking subject possesses transparent knowledge of itself. Their projects took different forms, but both illustrate a broader development in which the frameworks of knowledge and the position of the knower could themselves become objects of inquiry.
The consequence is a change in the task of intellectual criticism. Knowledge remains a resource for understanding and criticizing society, but it becomes problematic as a transparent instrument through which society simply reveals itself. Once the forms through which we know the world become objects of inquiry, criticism also turns toward the conditions that make its own knowledge possible.
The intellectual shift associated with this period can therefore be understood as a movement in the object of criticism: from society, to the position of the critic, and from there to the conditions that make knowledge and criticism possible. A question that once remained largely in the background can move to the foreground:
What makes my knowledge possible, and what gives me the authority to speak from it?
References
Derrida, J. (1978). Cogito and the history of madness. In Writing and difference (A. Bass, Trans., pp. 31–63). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1967)
Foucault, M. (1971). The order of discourse. In R. Young (Ed.), Untying the text: A post-structuralist reader (R. Young, Trans., pp. 48–78). Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1970)
Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge and the discourse on language (A. M. Sheridan Smith, Trans.). Pantheon Books. (Original works published 1969 and 1971)
Lacan, J. (2006). Écrits: The first complete edition in English (B. Fink, Trans.). W. W. Norton. (Original work published 1966)
Sartre, J.-P. (1972). Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels. Gallimard. (Original works presented 1965)
Sartre, J.-P. (1974). Sartre on intellectualism [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g8JVK4Fppw
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