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On Intellectuals, Prejudice, and Understanding the Social World

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

—Juvenal, Satires

Socrates often wandered through the marketplace in Athens asking people whether they had any knowledge to reveal to him. His practice of the Socratic dialogue and use of Socratic irony (elencthia) implied that few of his fellow-citizens knew what they were talking about.¹ Soon after he had been condemned to death by his fellow Athenian citizens, he told them, in what has since become one of the best-known philosophical phrases in the Western philosophical tradition, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”² Socrates’s point was the more you lead such a life, the more equipped you are to live a good life.

Everything we know about Socrates as one of the first public intellectuals in the Western intellectual tradition tells us that he set loose several permanent puzzles for philosophy. One of the enduring puzzles was how we are to both examine our life and establish the veridicity or truth of the knowledge we claim to possess. This problem continues to haunt the sociology of intellectuals and provides something of the big puzzle sitting behind this book. Yet in this respect a nonremediable problem attends any such exercise. It does so in terms that echo the ominous question, who guards the guardians? When we ask, how are we to make sense of the sense-makers? This is a central question in the evolution of the sociology of intellectuals.

In the twentieth century, Karl Mannheim did more than most to establish the modern contours of the sociology of intellectuals.³ Mannheim wrote between two world wars, when older and longstanding cultural values were being shaken profoundly and many of his fellow intellectuals were making dire predictions about the future of civilization. Mannheim understood his work in Socratic terms as a search for knowledge that would play a crucial role in helping construct an equal society with a tolerant citizenry. Mannheim argued that citizens developed their freedom through self-reflection and by understanding their cultural origins.⁴ This was not however meant to be an easy or effortless task undertaken by the individual. Mannheim pointed to the all-important role of the intellectual and to the intersection between the reflective practice of the intellectual and those decision-makers like politicians and policymakers who deal with day-to-day politics.

Mannheim began his seminal work Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge by addressing the problem of how men think.⁵ He distinguished between everyday thinking and the kind that is done by philosophers, mathematicians, and physicists in special circumstances. Mannheim designed a critical method he believed intellectuals could draw on to help create a better society. This method acknowledged both the specificities of historical context and the need to achieve a certain objectivity that would enable us to see the world as uncontaminated by ideology, which he understood as the kind of knowledge shaped by social interests or partisan politics.⁶

At the same time Mannheim saw the intellectual as charged with the responsibility of developing utopian ideals without retreating into a contemplative state completely removed from political life. However, Mannheim struggled to say how this would be possible. He argued that intellectuals necessarily enjoy a certain amount of freedom, because they are free-floating and the keepers of cultural standards, which allows them to operate freely from the constraints of ideology. Mannheim also offers important insights about dealing with competing value systems.

Developing a sociology of knowledge was Mannheim’s method for arbitrating this competition. He argues that intellectuals capable of operating outside particular value and belief systems or ideologies could use this method to discover how and why particular individuals and groups see the world as they do. Mannheim writes:

. . . [T]he sociology of knowledge regards the cognitive act in connection with the models to which it aspires in its existential as well as its meaningful quality, not as insights into ‘eternal’ truths arising from a purely theoretical, contemplative urge . . . but as an instrument for dealing with life-situations at the disposal of a certain kind of vital being under certain conditions of life.⁷

Mannheim’s prescriptions are not designed to be “blueprints: it is neither a list of abstract desiderata for the philosopher nor a detailed program for the administrator.”⁸ Indeed, his work might be best understood as suggestions put forward with the intent of promoting discussion about the major political concerns of the moment. Whatever the success or failure of Mannheim’s own program, his thinking about the intellectual helped inspired the subsequent development of the sociology of intellectuals. His work poses important questions that have continued to be asked throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and which are still relevant today. His work raises difficult questions about the relationship between political partisanship and truth telling, the responsibilities of the intellectual, the relevant ethical and political motivations of intellectual practice, and the standards by which we should judge intellectuals’ claims to truth. Mannheim’s ideas about the roles of the intellectuals have sparked a robust debate helping inspire and legitimate this book.

Mannheim’s ideas also point to the wider issue of sense-making with regards to the social world. The social world is distinguishable from what we typically refer to as the natural world where we can come to know reality by using scientific measures. Our major tasks as researchers when dealing with the natural world is to design and implement particular research methods that help us to understand its different elements and how they fit into the whole. Our roles as researchers are very different when dealing with things in the social world. Our understanding of it is observer-dependent. Unlike the natural world there is no objectivity in the social world. Instead it is characterized by what is usually referred to as subjectivity, or what writers like Alfred Schutz and Charles Taylor have insisted is a better way of denominating this, namely intersubjectivity.⁹

This shift away from the notion of subjectivity is meant to highlight the role played by shared systems of belief, symbolic schema, and the various social practices we rely on to understand and live in our world. Writers as diverse as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, and Nelson Goodman have pointed out that a variety of social and symbolic systems, including language, play a crucial role in both understanding and structuring the social world.¹⁰ Ferdinand de Saussure was among the first to highlight that it is our linguistic system that enables us to define concepts that we understand as existing in the social world.¹¹ Things like Wahhabism only exist because of our decision to use and manipulate symbolic systems.

Intellectuals produce a lot of what we think we know about the social world, and hold privileged positions in society as the writers of scholarly articles, books, and newspaper and magazine articles. Their interpretations of concepts like Wahhabism are widely distributed and read by the general public and policy- and decision-makers, who may have never previously thought about this phenomenon. That is to say that we tend to rely on intellectuals’ representations to make sense of things like Wahhabism that we assume exist out there in the social world. This becomes extremely important when we consider that policy- and decision-makers can draw on these representations when making policies that have the ability to cause great harm and destruction, and that the public’s support for such policies can also rely on the same representations.

To borrow a concept from Gilles Deleuze that has since been expanded by authors like Thomas Osborne, we can best understand intellectuals as mediators of ideas in today’s knowledge society.¹² Both authors emphasize the important role intellectuals play in communicating ideas about the social world to their audience. For Deleuze, the modern intellectual as a mediator is a creative catalyst of ideas. Osborne writes, “the mediator is interested above all in ideas . . . which are going to make a difference . . . in some later event.”¹³ However, the major issue with Osborne’s conception is that he considers the intellectual as a mediator to be “value-neutral,” unconcerned with “the ‘big ideas’ of the epoch of ‘grand narratives.’”¹⁴

The important question I want to address, and which is at odds with the account offered by Osborne, is whether intellectuals are indeed value-neutral mediators communicating ideas about what is happening in the social world to their audience or whether there is something else going on? Additionally, we also need to establish whether Osborne’s claim that many intellectuals are not concerned with the big ideas and grand narratives of our time is adequate. As will become clearer throughout this book, a case can certainly be made that intellectuals representing Wahhabism are indeed concerned with promoting the big ideas and grand narratives associated with popular intellectual traditions like neoconservatism and liberalism. It is equally likely that many intellectuals are also unknowingly or unconsciously promoting key beliefs that resonate with or get their authority and appeal from these prominent intellectual traditions.

In both instances the outcome is often the same, a particular sense of order is imposed on the social world and is created and recreated in particular ways. Contrary to Osborne’s claim, it is crucial to consider the intellectuals’ ideas within the political context in which they have been formed and appear. We only need to look at the fact that Wahhabism was largely ignored pre-9/11 to see that the relatively new interest in it is related to the post-9/11 period in which many Western governments and intellectuals are living during a time of heightened anxiety about radical Islamism and are fixated with the Western-led global war on terror.

Given the important roles intellectuals play in this knowledge-producing process, it matters that we pay close attention to the particular truth claims intellectuals make when justifying their interpretations and think about how we are best to understand this process. As has proven to be the case in recent times, if we are going to make policies informed and supported by these truth claims, it matters that we fully understand them. If Western nations are going to invade sovereign Islamic nations in the Middle East with the aim of promoting democracy, or bomb civilians and terrorists in the name of security then we must have an understanding of the claims supporting and justifying these kinds of actions. This understanding requires intense scrutiny that involves the careful deconstructing of representations.

I dedicate this chapter to setting out the rationale for my book. I argue that a review of the relevant literature points to a number of key problems or questions that have been the focus of considerable scholarly debate. These problems or questions provide the overarching intellectual and analytical problematic for my inquiry into the ways certain groups of intellectuals represent Wahhabism. First, it is clear there is an ongoing debate about the motivation and identity of intellectuals. I show how scholars have sought to make sense of the different motivations and inspirations influencing intellectuals. I aim to answer the question, what is it that leads some to become intellectuals? Related to this idea is how we define an intellectual. Here I ask, is the function of critique fundamental to the identity of intellectuals? Secondly, there is a discussion about the particular practices in which intellectuals play a special role. How important is the proposition that intellectuals set about constituting our world? This leads me to consider their role in constructing what Anderson called ‘Imagined communities’ and Said called ‘Imagined geographies.’¹⁵ Among the many issues about the relationship of intellectuals to conceptions of truth, I deal with the role prejudice plays in the ways intellectuals make sense of and represent the social world. The need to do this is raised by Chomsky’s provocative suggestion that it is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies and Arendt’s more nuanced account of the problem of how we are to think about the relation between truth and politics.¹⁶ At stake here is how some intellectuals justify their claims as purveyors of truth.

On the Collective Identity and Attachment of Intellectuals

Scholars differ in their understandings with regards to what defines or constitutes an intellectual, what their roles are and should be, and to whom or what they owe their allegiance. Charles Kurzman and Lynn Owens offer a useful typology that distinguishes between three major approaches scholars adopt when considering these different issues. These are intellectuals as class-less, intellectuals as class-bound, and intellectuals as a class in themselves.¹⁷ I prefer to think of and describe the second category of intellectuals as class, group, or movement-bound; for me, class-bound implies a Marxist or quasi-Marxist understanding, while class, group, or movement-bound can be used to describe intellectuals with any affiliation to an interest group. Understanding this debate is important because it informs our understanding of and helps us to distinguish between the different roles intellectuals adopt when representing Wahhabism. More specifically this helps us to understand the different factors inspiring and motivating intellectuals in their representations of Wahhabism: are they motivated and inspired by a desire to speak truth to power or by particular class and group interests?

First we will deal with the group Kurzman and Owens call the class-less intellectuals. Prominent writers belonging to this long tradition include Karl Mannheim, Noam Chomsky, Talcott Parsons, Edward Shils, and Christopher Hitchens.¹⁸ As the term suggests, these scholars maintain that intellectuals are nonpartisan and not attached or fixed to any particular group or class. Their critiques of the social world for their audience are inspired by utopian ideals, rather than personal glory or class interests. If we are to consider the roles these kinds of intellectuals play in representing Wahhabism, we can say they are motivated and inspired by bringing attention to perceived injustices and wrongs with the ultimate aim of creating a more harmonious society.

Mannheim saw intellectuals as “not too firmly situated in the social order,” “socially unattached,” and as a part of an “unanchored, relatively class-less stratum.”¹⁹He believed intellectuals to be motivated and inspired by a desire to encourage mutual understanding between different sections and groups in society or as he puts it, “to create a form outside of the party schools in which the perspective of and the interest in the whole is safeguarded.”²⁰ He believed intellectuals were entrusted with the responsibility of making sense of the current political situation for society and he saw nonintellectuals as those members of society who are firmly entrenched and participating in everyday activities. Mannheim believed that the common person, due to their relative lack of education, was incapable of having a deeper understanding of the different political forces operating and competing in society. He believed the common person absorbed a worldview as if by osmosis, “while the person who is not oriented toward the whole through his education, but rather participates directly in the social process of production, merely tends to absorb the Weltanschauung [worldview] of that particular group.”²¹

Mannheim, however, was extremely worried that intellectuals in the twentieth century were not living up to their responsibilities and were instead promoting the interests of particular groups, to the detriment of wider society. Chomsky expresses a similar concern about intellectuals, especially Western intellectuals in the twenty-first century whose relative “political liberty, from access to information and freedom of expression” means they have the responsibility “to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.”²²