Role Of Intellectuals Poem by gershon hepner

The role of intellectuals is to curb

the arrogance of those who rule,

and by analysis disturb

the people who are not in school,

the familiar reviewing,

reexamining the rules,

all platitudes eschewing,

using analytic tools.

Politicians’ wills take shake

from many factors; intellect

is one from which they can’t escape

if intellectuals gain respect.



Michel Foucault writes:


The role of the intellectual is not to tell others what they have to do. By what right would he do so? ....The work of an intellectual is not to shape others’ will; it is, through the analysis that he carries out in his field, to question over and over again what is postulated as self-evident, to disturb people’s metal habits, the way they do and think things, to dissipate what is familiar and accepted, to reexamine rules and institutions on the basis of this de-problematicization (in which he carries out his task as intellectual) to participate in the formation of a political will (in which he has his role as citizen to play) (Michel Foucault and Lawrence D. Kritzman, Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings,1977-1984, edited and translated Lawrence D. Kritzman (London: Routledge: 1988) ,265 (cited by Daniel Boyarin in ‘Semantic Differences; or “Judaism”/”Christianity”, in The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christiians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed eds., [Minneapolis: Fortress,2007], 65) .


8/20/08