In this paper the author takes up the issue of the social responsibilities of academics, raised in recent articles in this journal, through a discussion of the crises facing contemporary intellectuals. The paper begins with a plea for a reflexive sociology of intellectuals, and after a brief review of early debates on the role of intellectuals, the author concentrates on Gouldner's grand vision of intellectuals as a ‘flawed universal class’. In the next section the forces that have undermined such grand visions in the past few decades, precipitating the current crises, are discussed. The author then categorises a range of positions that have been recently developed to justify some continuing role for intellectuals as a social category in contemporary society. This discussion leads on to a focus on the work of Bourdieu, which seems to the author to offer the most productive framework for thinking about these issues. But in the last section he raises a number of problems that might be tackled through the incorporation of some feminist approaches.
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