Chapter Nine: Intellectual Elites Against Democracy

2017 ◽  
pp. 159-183
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual Elites

The Elite Circuit

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaime Kucinskas
Keyword(s):  
Social Skill ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Symbolic Power ◽  
High Status ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Social Reforms ◽  
Contemplative Practices ◽  
Intellectual Elites ◽  
Cultural Movement ◽  
Over Time

The mindful elite attracted new high-status sympathizers in targeted organizations by using their professional symbolic power, social status, and social skill to build legitimacy for meditation and other contemplative practices. In this chapter the author builds upon scholarship on legitimation by identifying the various kinds of legitimation the contemplatives are able to secure. These different kinds of legitimacy are interrelated and build upon each other over time, creating a cultural movement that is increasingly difficult to derail. However, in building their base among a privileged coterie of social, economic, and intellectual elites, the contemplatives risk losing touch with ordinary people and the issues of inequality that affect them. This weakens the contemplatives’ ability to stand by and implement direct social reforms to influence root causes of the issues they care about, such as rising inequality, greed, and materialism.

scholarly journals Remembering forgotten heroes and the idealisation of true love: Veteran memorial activism in contemporary China

2021 ◽  
pp. 175069802110179
Author(s):  
Jacqueline Zhenru Lin
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
World War ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
War Of Resistance ◽  
Redress Movement ◽  
Intellectual Elites ◽  
War Commemoration ◽  
Second World ◽  
Veteran Memorial

Recent research on collective memory and war commemoration highlights the ‘conspicuous silence’ of war veterans in Chinese history. Studies of the War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945) typically reflect either a state-centred approach, which emphasises the official history constructed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), or the alternative narratives constructed by intellectual elites in post-socialist China. In response to these top-down narratives, this essay focuses instead on a historical redress movement led by ex-servicemen of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The former PLA members, the participant volunteers of this movement, devote themselves into seeking and supporting a group of forgotten Kuomintang (KMT) veterans who fought against the Japanese invaders in the Second World War but now struggle with impoverished living conditions. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from 2013 to 2015, I will show how the daily interactions between these two groups of veterans embody a more private and internalised sense of commemorative yearning for a lost past, highlighting in the process the value of ethnographic research in breaking through the wall of silence constructed by hegemonic histories around veteran communities and their role in making war history.

„Heutiger Nachbar – gestriger Untertan“

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leyla von Mende
Keyword(s):  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Travel Literature ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Southeast Europe ◽  
Intellectual Elites

How did intellectual elites, who had acquired their position and formed their self-conception within the Ottoman Empire, deal with its loss and change? This question is discussed by looking at their representations of Southeast Europe in Ottoman and Turkish travel literature. The study analyses their attempts to continuously reposition themselves, their homeland and Southeast Europe in times of a shifting international balance of power. It also explores two mechanisms of processing the things observed – wonder and remembering. This approach allows us to reassess the importance of the lost region to the authors’ present and sheds new light on the transition from empire to republic.

Think Tanks and Foreign Policy

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuti Bhatnagar
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Think Tanks ◽  
Think Tank ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Social Actors ◽  
Policy Frames ◽  
Policy Actors ◽  
The Media ◽  
Intellectual Elites

The role of think tanks as policy actors has developed over time and created significant global scholarship. Widely understood as non-state policy actors, think tanks established either with or without the support of government have evolved in various political contexts with varied characteristics. They are avenues for the discussion of new policy ideas as well as used for the consolidation of existing understandings of global and national political issues. As ideational actors think tanks interact with policy frameworks at different levels, either in the framing stage or at the stage of consensus building towards certain policies. Intellectual elites at think tanks allow for the introduction of think tank ideas into the policy frames as well as the creation of public opinion towards foreign policy decisions. Think tank deliberations involve an interaction with policymakers, academic experts, business and social actors, as well as the media to disseminate ideas. Institutionally, think tanks in a wide variety of political contexts play a critical role in the making of foreign policy and bring closer attention to processes of state–society interactions in different political environments.

Conclusion

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vernon Bogdanor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Intellectual Elites

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the history of the British constitution in the twentieth century. The findings reveal that while there was widespread confidence in the virtues of the constitution at the beginning of the twentieth century, that confidence seemed to have evaporated. This loss of confidence coincided with a collapse of national self-confidence that had begun in the 1960s when British political and intellectual elites began to come to terms with the fact that Great Britain was falling economically behind her continental competitors.

Self-Criticism in Post-Communist Times

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 28-53
Author(s):  
Magdalena Nowicka-Franczak
Keyword(s):  
Special Role ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Attribution Of Responsibility ◽  
Western Model ◽  
The People ◽  
Discursive Strategy ◽  
The Right ◽  
Political Weapon ◽  
Democratic Transformation ◽  
Intellectual Elites

This article revisits the category of self-criticism, which, as a speech act, plays a special role in the discourse of the intelligentsia, emerging from the peripheral status of Poland and from the imperative to catch up with the West. In contemporary Poland, self-criticism has revived as a discursive strategy in the context of coming to terms with the democratic transformation. For the right-wing intelligentsia, self-criticism is mainly a postulate that is addressed to political adversaries. For the left-liberal intelligentsia, self-criticism is not only a political weapon but also a strategy of introspective enunciation directed at the post-transformation society. A qualitative discourse analysis of selected acts of self-criticism performed by Polish left-liberal elites between 2013 and 2019 highlights two interconnected conflict-generating fields of debate: (1) reckoning with the neoliberal and pro-Western model of the 1989 democratic transition and (2) retribution on the post-transition intellectual elites that patronized the people and the attribution of responsibility for the Elite-People Division. The distinguished functions of self-criticism point to the political and class conflict as well as to the growing delegitimacy of the dominance of the neoliberal narrative about the Polish model of modernization.

Intellectual Elites

2019 ◽  
pp. 81-101
Author(s):  
Sarah Stroumsa
Keyword(s):  
Religious Community ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Small Minority ◽  
Intellectual Elites

This chapter focuses on Andalusian philosophers. Philosophers, in al-Andalus as elsewhere in the medieval Islamicate world, were committed to what can be called “the philosopher's life,” namely, the unremitting effort to attain human perfection. At the same time, as intellectuals integrated into their own societies, they could significantly shape their communities' cultural, communal, and even political profiles. Philosophers in al-Andalus truly shared a common philosophical tradition. Jews and Muslims alike read scientific and philosophical works translated from Greek into Arabic, as well as books by earlier Muslim and Christian thinkers. Being a small minority within their respective religious communities, and sharing the same education, interests, concerns, and ideals, philosophers constituted, in some ways, a subculture of their own. While they lived fully within their own religious community and adhered to the boundaries between it and other religious groups, they were acutely aware of the commonality of philosophy. The chapter then evaluates the philosophical curriculum which guided the advancement of students to become philosophers, as well as the friendships formed between philosophers. It illustrates the inherently elitist nature of the philosophers' life qua philosophers.

Are There Lessons for Us to Learn?

2020 ◽  
pp. 127-134
Author(s):  
Daniel Chirot
Keyword(s):  
Interest Groups ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The Third ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Essential Change ◽  
Political Alignments ◽  
Intellectual Elites ◽  
Powerful Interest

This chapter draws eight conclusions from previous chapters for contemporary use. The first is that a kind of “blockage” has occurred, whereby powerful interest groups grow stronger and defend their wealth and privileges by blocking essential change and innovation. The second conclusion points out that it is possible to overcome a crisis if there are strong institutions that can be used by a self-aware political elite capable of understanding that change is necessary. The third is that moderate liberals usually emerge in the early stages of revolution, but are apt to be marginalized later on. The fourth adds that people from other political alignments also fall into the same trap. The fifth argues that wars invariably enhance the power of the radicals. The sixth reminds us that we all need to pay attention to what political leaders write and say, and never assume that what sounds like extremism is just opportunistic exaggeration. The seventh remarks on how ideas were also shaped by cultural and intellectual elites who were not identical to political ones. Finally, the eight: if you want a revolution, beware of how it might turn out.

Czech Scholars in Exile, 1948–1989

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonín Kostlán ◽  
Soňa Štrbáňová
Keyword(s):  
Forced Migration ◽  
Scientific Development ◽  
Soviet Power ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
Totalitarian Regimes ◽  
Intellectual Elites ◽  
Suitable Case ◽  
Social Damage

The mobility of scholars is one of the significant social phenomena affecting scientific development. The mass exodus of intellectual elites from countries dominated by totalitarian regimes, however, represents a specific type of unwanted mobility or ‘forced migration’, which generally leads to devastating cultural and social damage over several generations. The historical experience of Czechoslovakia's waves of exile between 1918 and 1989 provides a suitable case for research into scientific exile in its varied forms. This chapter focuses on the escape of scholars from Czechoslovakia in the years between 1948 and 1989, when the country was part of the Soviet power bloc.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document