ancient cities

Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society,
and the Derby Philosophical Society. In France, the
academies that came to dominate provincial organized
intellectual life such as those at Bourdeaux,
Lyon, and Toulouse, were closer to states and
monarchies than their British counterparts.
Likewise in the German states, the Berlin Academy
fostered by Frederick II (the Great) was intended
to rival Italian, French, and British institutions and
nurtured the international scientific careers of philosophers
such as Leonard Euler and Pierre Louis
Maupertuis.
The broad concerns of all these European philosophical
associations reflected the Enlightenment
ideal of interdependent fields of intellectual
endeavor and practical activity from meteorology,
electricity, and botany to medicine, architecture, and
antiquities.
Nineteenth- and Twentieth-
Century Intellectuals
The importance of intellectuals in modern urban
industrial and industrializing society is demonstrated
by their diverse role in public aesthetic
culture and political activity. Major urban centers
produced intellectual cultures with their own distinctive
characteristics, and there is a complex
cultural geography of urban savant culture over
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As during
the Enlightenment, this intellectual life was often
centered on formal or public institutions, but webs
of informal social networks and semiprivate associations
were often equally important.
In postwar Parisian cafés such as Les Deux
Magots and the Café de Flore, for instance, during
the 1950s and 1960s, existentialists and poststructuralists
such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de
Beauvoir held court for their philosophical and
political discussions. Urban intellectual culture
frequently thrived in centers of mixed populations
or international entrepots, reflecting the characteristics
of immigrants and established cultures. While
the intellectual culture of fin-de-siecle Vienna, for
instance, reflected general contemporary European
cultural concerns, its special qualities stemmed
from the importance of Jewish culture, the decline
of liberalism, and the flight toward late-Romantic
escapism variously embodied in different mediums
in the works of Gustav Mahler, Sigmund Freud,
Intellectuals
397
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Arthur Schnitzler, and Hugo
von Hofmannstahl.
Similarly, New York was the polycentric gateway
between the old and new worlds, and this was
reflected in the distinctive intellectual life of a complicated
and contentious city where diverse
European ideas and cultural ideals combined with
developing U.S. culture to create rich cultural complexity.
In the milieu of 1920s and 1930s New
York, for instance, Edmund Wilson strove to
embrace European Marxism and modernism, demonstrating
how the Europeanization of American
intellectual life was encouraged by the city’s growing
international political and cultural status.
The importance of intellectual interventions in
political campaigns is evident throughout the nineteenth
century from the French Revolution (actually
eighteenth century) to the Paris commune of
1871 and the St. Petersburg uprising of 1905.
These interventions are most evident where intellectuals
act together as an intelligentsia consisting
of teachers, academics, artists, writers, and other
educated or self-taught individuals, forming powerful
groups that had a major impact on political
developments. Although some, of course, sided
with aristocratic elites, many social thinkers, as
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels hoped, formed
centers of opposition to aristocratic, monarchical,
and reactionary regimes, especially in the Austro-
Hungarian, Turkish, and Romanov empires of
Central and Eastern Europe. Working-class intellectual
movements also emerged strongly in the
period, and there was resistance to the patronizing
and debased anti-intellectualism propagated by
many communist agitators as the strength of the
British “autodidact” or self-taught working-class
intellectual movement demonstrates.
Urban intelligentsia played a less important role
in the Chinese revolution because of the continued
domination of agriculture and the slower pace of
industrialization and urbanization. It was not until
the decades up to 1949 that a recognizable modern
urban intelligentsia appeared in China, for example,
the new breed of educated professionals in
Shanghai who led organizational and ideological
challenges to imperial, postimperial, and nationalistic
governments. The relative weakness of this
Chinese intelligentsia and changes in the communist
state have meant that direct political challenges to
government and party have been muted, and