Reopening the Concept of the Intellectual: Before and After 1968
What makes someone an intellectual? In A Plea for Intellectuals, Sartre approaches this question by examining the social position from which intellectual intervention becomes possible. The intellectual does not begin as a distinct profession. He emerges from among what Sartre calls the “technicians of practical knowledge”: scientists, teachers, engineers, doctors, lawyers, and others whose work depends on specialized knowledge. Their expertise is directed toward particular tasks, yet it is grounded in methods and forms of knowledge that claim universal validity. The intellectual appears when this relationship between the universal and the particular becomes a problem for the technician himself.
Sartre’s example of the scientist working on atomic warfare makes the distinction clear. A scientist who contributes to the development of nuclear weapons remains, in Sartre’s terms, a technician as long as he confines himself to the technical task. When he begins to question the uses to which his knowledge is put, signs a manifesto, or addresses public opinion about the dangers of nuclear warfare, he crosses into the position of the intellectual. Intellectual activity therefore begins when specialized knowledge becomes the basis for claims about ends, values, and the conditions under which that knowledge is used.
This movement produces a contradiction. The technician possesses specialized knowledge whose methods and validity appear to transcend particular interests, yet that knowledge is put to use within particular social relations and purposes. For Sartre, the intellectual becomes conscious of this contradiction and can no longer treat his expertise as separate from the social purposes it serves. His intervention consequently extends beyond his immediate field toward the political and moral conditions within which his specialized activity acquires its meaning.
The resulting position is more complex than that of the educated expert. The intellectual uses specialized knowledge to make claims that concern society as a whole while recognizing that the conditions that gave him access to knowledge are socially and politically determined. His authority derives partly from expertise, but his intervention consists precisely in questioning the interests and structures to which that expertise has been put. This is why Sartre can describe the intellectual as someone who “meddles in what is not his business”: crossing the boundary of professional competence is not an accidental feature of the role but part of what constitutes it.
The classic intellectual thus occupies a position between specialization and universality. He possesses knowledge acquired within a particular institution and profession, yet claims the right to address questions that exceed both. He brings specialized knowledge into a public field in which it can be used to question the conditions governing society as a whole. At the same time, he remains dependent on the institutions and privileges that make such intervention possible and can turn the resources of his own formation against the structures that produced them.
Sartre later distinguished this figure from a newer form of intellectuality that emerged around the events of 1968. Yet he continued to identify himself with the older configuration, describing himself as belonging to the “classic intellectual group.” The distinction is important because the “classic intellectual” is not a category retrospectively imposed on Sartre. It is a position that Sartre himself recognized as belonging to a particular historical formation.
The question, then, is what happened to the relations that had made that position intelligible.
2. When the Concept Comes Under Pressure
To answer that question, it is necessary to look beyond the intellectual himself to the institutions, forms of knowledge, and social relations within which his authority had been constituted. During the 1960s, several developments began to unsettle those relations.
Knowledge Becomes Increasingly Specialized and Institutionalized
The first pressure concerns the relationship between specialized knowledge and universal authority. Sartre’s model depends on a relatively intelligible passage between the two: the intellectual is formed through a particular field of expertise but can use the authority of that knowledge to address questions of general significance. As knowledge becomes increasingly divided among specialized disciplines, however, that passage becomes less self-evident.
Scientific and professional work increasingly depends on institutions, research teams, technical infrastructures, and differentiated forms of expertise. Knowledge is consequently less easily imagined as something possessed by an individual who can move beyond his particular competence and speak from a comprehensive position.
The issue is therefore not that specialization makes public intervention impossible. It is that the connection between specialized competence and broader authority can no longer be assumed. Knowing something within a field does not by itself establish the right to make judgments beyond it.
The University Becomes an Object of Criticism
A second pressure concerns the institution through which much of this knowledge is produced and transmitted. The university had long been one of the principal sites in which intellectual authority was cultivated: it educated specialists, certified knowledge, and organized the passage from learning to professional status. By the late 1960s, however, the university itself had become an object of sustained criticism.
The student movements of 1968 challenged forms of hierarchy and authority embedded in university life. In France, students contested established arrangements governing teaching, participation, and institutional decision-making, while the lecture remained a highly asymmetrical form of communication in which students occupied largely receptive positions. The challenge was therefore directed not simply at particular university policies but at the organization of knowledge and authority within the institution.
The institution that produced and legitimized knowledge could no longer be treated simply as the background to intellectual authority. It had become part of the object of criticism. If universities organize access to knowledge, distribute professional credentials, and establish relations between those who teach and those who are taught, then criticism of the university also raises questions about how knowledge acquires authority in the first place.
Those Represented by the Intellectual Begin to Speak for Themselves
A third pressure concerns the relationship between intellectuals and those on whose behalf they intervene. The classic model gives the intellectual a mediating role: specialized knowledge and cultural authority enable him to articulate claims that extend beyond his professional field and to speak publicly about conditions affecting society more broadly.
During the political and social struggles of the 1960s, that arrangement became increasingly difficult to maintain. Students and workers did not merely become audiences for intellectual commentary. They organized, formulated demands, produced political texts, occupied institutions, and developed their own forms of collective expression. The direction of communication was consequently disrupted. Those who had previously been represented could increasingly insist on speaking from their own experience and political position.
The intellectual could therefore no longer assume that his task was simply to formulate, clarify, or universalize what others were unable to say for themselves. Once knowledge was recognized as institutionally organized, the university itself had become subject to criticism, and those represented by intellectuals increasingly spoke in their own name, the authority to speak for others could no longer be taken for granted.
The question changed accordingly. It was no longer simply what the intellectual should say on behalf of a universal cause. It became: Who authorizes the intellectual to speak for others?
This is a question about the structure of the position rather than the motives of individual intellectuals. The classic configuration had linked specialized knowledge, institutional authority, public intervention, and representation. By the end of the 1960s, each of these relations had become more visibly contestable.
1968 would bring these tensions together in a particularly concentrated form.
3. 1968: A Historical Convergence
1968 matters here less as a date dividing two intellectual worlds than as a moment in which several tensions converged. The French events brought together a crisis of the university, student and worker mobilization, challenges to established forms of political authority, and demands for more direct participation. The university was not simply the setting for these events; its own organization became part of what was being contested.
This is why 1968 should not be treated as the single cause of the transformation under examination. Changes in higher education, the organization of knowledge, and forms of political and social mobilization had begun earlier. The events of May brought these developments into a concentrated political and institutional confrontation, making their implications difficult to ignore.
The importance of the moment lies partly in what it revealed about intellectual authority. Students and workers were not simply waiting for established intellectuals to formulate their demands, while the university could no longer function unquestioned as the institutional setting in which knowledge and authority were produced. Intellectuals themselves were drawn into a situation in which their traditional forms of intervention became difficult to separate from the authority they were being asked to question.
Sartre’s own position illustrates this tension. His involvement with the student movement retained something of the familiar role of the engaged intellectual lending his public authority to a political struggle. Yet around and after 1968, he increasingly distinguished this position from another form of intellectuality associated with the new generation. His statement that he belonged to the “classic intellectual group” is significant precisely because it places him within the transformation rather than outside it. He could recognize another configuration without ceasing to identify himself with the older one.
This prevents a simple historical sequence in which Sartre represents everything before 1968 and Foucault or Derrida everything after it. The older and emerging forms coexisted, sometimes within the same political spaces. What changed was not the existence of intellectual intervention but the terms on which its authority could be understood.
1968 can therefore be understood as a point of convergence rather than an absolute rupture. It exposed tensions that the older concept could no longer leave implicit. The classic intellectual did not disappear, but the historical conditions supporting that figure had become visible and contestable.
The concept had not disappeared. Its adequacy had become questionable.
4. Reopening the Concept
Once the adequacy of the inherited configuration becomes questionable, the problem changes. The issue is no longer simply to describe what happened to intellectuals after 1968, but to ask what happens to a concept when the relations that once made it intelligible become objects of inquiry. Foucault and Derrida become relevant here in different ways.
Neither needs to be presented as offering a replacement definition of the intellectual. Foucault examines the relation among knowledge, authority, institutions, and political intervention. Derrida provides a way of understanding what happens when an inherited conceptual distinction comes under pressure from transformations in the field it was meant to organize. Together, they shift the question from the identity of the intellectual toward the conditions under which intellectual authority takes form.
Foucault: Authority, Representation, and the Position of Knowledge
Foucault’s discussions of intellectuals in the early 1970s challenge the idea that the intellectual’s task is to articulate, from a privileged position, a truth that others cannot formulate for themselves. In his 1972 conversation with Gilles Deleuze, he rejects the model of the intellectual as a “representing or representative consciousness.” Those involved in a struggle possess their own knowledge and are capable of expressing themselves; the problem is that systems of power can block, prohibit, or disqualify the forms of knowledge they produce.
His involvement with the Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons illustrates the resulting shift. The aim was not to produce an authoritative account of prison life in place of prisoners’ testimony, but to help create channels through which their experiences could be expressed and heard. Intellectual intervention thus concerns not simply the communication of knowledge but the conditions under which particular forms of knowledge can circulate and acquire force.
This is also the significance of Foucault’s distinction, in “Truth and Power,” between the “universal intellectual” and the “specific intellectual.” The latter remains embedded in a particular field of expertise, but the political significance of that expertise arises from its connections to institutions, social relations, and mechanisms of knowledge production. The specific intellectual therefore does not escape specialization in order to speak from a universal standpoint. Political intervention occurs within a field of knowledge whose own operations are already entangled with power.
Foucault’s concept of a “regime of truth” makes the broader implication clear: intellectual authority depends partly on the procedures through which statements become recognizable as true, on who is qualified to speak, and on how knowledge is circulated or disqualified. The question is consequently no longer simply whether an intellectual can move from specialized knowledge toward universal claims, but how a particular position within a field gives knowledge political force.
Representation changes with this shift. If those involved in a struggle can produce their own knowledge, the intellectual’s role cannot rest simply on a superior capacity to articulate their situation. His intervention may instead concern the institutional and discursive conditions that determine whether their knowledge can be heard.
Derrida: The Inherited Concept Under Pressure
Derrida approaches a related problem at a different level. Of Grammatology does not provide a theory of the intellectual, and there is no need to claim that Derrida explicitly deconstructs that figure. Its relevance here is conceptual: the book shows how an inherited category can come under pressure when developments within a field disturb the distinctions on which that category depends.
The opening of Of Grammatology is particularly instructive because Derrida does not begin by proposing an abstractly expanded definition of writing. He points to a transformation already taking place in the sciences and technologies of his time. The term “writing” was being used to describe operations extending beyond conventional graphic inscription: cinematography, choreography, pictorial and musical notation, military and political techniques, biological processes, and cybernetic information. Derrida observes that the contemporary biologist speaks of “writing and pro-gram” in relation to information processes within the living cell, while the field covered by cybernetics increasingly becomes a field of writing.
The significance of these developments is not simply that the word writing acquires a wider range of application. They place pressure on the distinctions through which writing had traditionally been understood. If inscription, programming, information, and transmission can be described without depending on the traditional opposition between speech and graphic notation, the inherited concept can no longer organize the entire field without qualification. New uses of the term expose the limits of the old conceptual arrangement.
This provides a useful model for the present argument. The problem is not that the traditional concept was badly defined and therefore needs to be replaced with a better definition. The pressure comes from developments that reveal tensions within the framework itself. The concept has to be reopened because the field it was intended to organize no longer fits comfortably within its established boundaries.
The analogy with the intellectual should remain precise. The transformations surrounding 1968 did not demonstrate that Sartre had simply chosen the wrong definition. They altered the relations among knowledge, institutions, representation, and public intervention that had made his conception intelligible. Once those relations became objects of criticism, the question could no longer be restricted to the identity of the intellectual. It had to extend to the conditions under which that position could acquire authority.
Derrida therefore contributes not a competing theory of intellectuals but a way of understanding why conceptual revision can become necessary. When developments within a field disturb the distinctions on which an inherited concept depends, the task is to examine the conceptual architecture itself: what its distinctions presupposed, what they made possible, and what has changed so that they can no longer be taken for granted.
In this sense, reopening the concept of the “intellectual” does not mean discarding Sartre’s formulation. It means recognizing it as a historically situated configuration whose conditions have themselves become part of the question.
5. From the Intellectual to the Conditions of Intellectuality
The preceding discussion changes the level at which the problem is posed. Sartre asks how the technician of practical knowledge becomes an intellectual and what leads that person beyond specialized competence toward public intervention. The question that emerges after 1968 is different: what makes the position of the intellectual possible in the first place?
Intellectual authority depends on more than the knowledge or political commitment of the individual who exercises it. Knowledge is produced within disciplines and institutions; expertise acquires social recognition; discourse circulates through particular channels; and speakers occupy positions from which their interventions can be heard. These arrangements do not merely surround intellectual activity. They help constitute the authority that makes such activity possible.
The same applies to representation. When groups possess their own forms of knowledge and political expression, the intellectual cannot be defined simply by a superior capacity to articulate what others cannot say. His intervention may instead involve connections among specialized fields, institutional practices, and political struggles, or an examination of the procedures through which some forms of knowledge acquire authority while others are marginalized.
The result is a shift from the identity of the intellectual to the conditions of intellectuality. The question is no longer simply who qualifies as an intellectual, but what historical, institutional, and discursive arrangements allow someone to occupy that position and make an intervention count as intellectually authoritative.
This reformulation does not produce a new universal definition. Nor does it make Sartre’s model obsolete. On the contrary, Sartre identifies a genuine historical configuration in which specialized knowledge, universal claims, public intervention, and representation could be connected. The significance of the later transformation is that the conditions sustaining that connection have themselves become visible.
6. A Concept That Could No Longer Remain the Same
Sartre’s statement that “I belong to that classic intellectual group” can now be read in its full historical significance. It does not mark the disappearance of the intellectual, nor does it establish a simple succession in which one type gives way to another after 1968. Sartre could continue to identify himself with the classic configuration while recognizing the emergence of another form of intellectuality around him.
That coexistence matters because historical transformation does not require the disappearance of an older figure. What changes first may be the relations that give that figure its coherence. Specialized knowledge, institutional authority, representation, and public intervention can remain in place while their connections and claims to authority become increasingly difficult to assume.
This is what makes 1968 historically significant for the concept itself. It did not produce a new intellectual overnight, nor did it invalidate the older one. Rather, it made a changing field visible: institutions of knowledge could themselves be contested; those previously represented could claim their own forms of knowledge and speech; and the authority to speak beyond one’s field could no longer be taken for granted. The older configuration could survive, but it could no longer function as an unquestioned model of intellectual authority.
The concept therefore did not simply give way to another concept. It entered a different historical situation in which its own conditions had become part of what had to be examined.
That is what it means to reopen the concept of the intellectual: not to replace the classic figure with a new definition, but to ask what has changed such that the old concept can no longer remain sufficient on its own.
The concept of the intellectual came under pressure from a changing field and had to be reopened.
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)
Sartre, J.-P. (1972). Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels. Gallimard. (Original works presented 1965)
Sartre, J.-P. (1974). Sartre on intellectualism [Video]. YouTube.
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