"The flourishing of the intelligentsia"

Writing in The New Statesman, Terry Eagleton pronounces upon the resilience of the intelligentsia:

Raymond Williams once remarked that the only sure thing about the organic society was that it had always gone, and the same applies to the flourishing of the intelligentsia. Michel Foucault proclaimed the passing of the classical, Sartrean type of intellectual, one who pronounced authoritatively on everything from aesthetics to politics as the very voice of truth and justice. With the death of grand narratives, he considered, these hubristic creatures would need to draw in their horns and think small. Yet despite Foucault's strictures, Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu and Julia Kristeva continued to operate in this public space, as though they had never heard that it had been closed down.

No one could accuse Eagleton of reticence in pronouncing on 'everything from aesthetics to politics as the very voice of truth and justice', especially as he's done it from so many different and incompatible standpoints. (Connoisseurs of fringe groups will recall his ill-fated venture from the 1960s, called Slant, to establish a revolutionary voice of Roman Catholicism.)

But you'd gain a greater insight into the type of intellectual of whom Eagleton speaks, and have a lot more fun in the process, by jettisoning this week's Statesman and reading this instead. I promise you won't regret it. (Originally published in Scribner's Magazine in 1911, it was collected in Edith Wharton's 1916 volume Xingu and Other Stories, which has unfortunately been out of print for many years.)