AN INTELLECTUAL IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL SPACE

The author analyzes an intellectual’s social role and significance. In particular, he addresses the difference, including social difference, between intellectuals and intelligentsia. The author shows the social history of how the category ‘intellectual’ emerged within both European and Russian/Belarusian traditions. The article analyzes the category of intellectual as it is viewed by representatives of European science. Then the author identifies the characteristics and social functions of an intellectual and of intellectuals as a social group. After that, he displays a scheme of mobilizing a society by an intellectual. The author concludes that an intellectual is a kind of social agent in a social space who solves or attempts to cope with those socially significant problems which other social agents or institutions are unable to cope with, in particular, due to the lack of sufficient symbolic capital or for other reasons related to issues of political nature (struggle for power or its implementation). It is the intellectual who, due to his special social status, is capable to reveal certain social problems and conflicts and make them relevant, and it is the intellectual who, due to his having necessary resources, in particular, his symbolic capital, is capable to have pretensions to solving these problems through social mobilization. 

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