The Last 'Interferers': Public Intellectuals and the Courage to Disturb

What does it mean to be an intellectual today? The word survives, but its weight is diminished. Once it evoked figures who interfered in public life with the power of thought: Montaigne writing essays of self-scrutiny, Voltaire lampooning injustice, Raymond Aron dismantling the pieties of his age. To be an intellectual was not simply to know, but to practice liberty: to argue, to disrupt, to think aloud with consequence.

Now the role is confused, perhaps hollowed out. Are today’s intellectuals the recurrent television personalities, booked for cultural debates and always on hand to comment on the scandal of the week? Are they the authors of briskly marketed bestsellers, shepherded through the publicity circuit? Or are they the social-media influencers, fluent in algorithms, commanding followers but rarely dialogue?

We live in an age of abundance—voices everywhere, podcasts, Substacks, conferences, feeds—yet the vocation itself seems absent. Being an intellectual once meant sustaining discussion across differences, grasping contradictions, and synthesizing the spirit of the time. It was not activism or branding, but the attempt to hold thought and public life together.

Russell Jacoby foresaw the danger in The Last Intellectuals (1987), lamenting that thinkers had retreated into universities. “The public intellectual,” he wrote, “once flourished in the little magazines and in general journals,” but by the late twentieth century “they were eclipsed by professors who wrote for one another.” His warning was premature, but not misplaced. Four decades later, the arbiter is no longer the Nouvelle Revue Française or Partisan Review but the algorithm.

What has replaced the intellectual is the influencer. It might be an aging professor or a polished journalist—fluent, visible, algorithmically rewarded—but oriented not to truth or synthesis, only to traction. Never have there been more voices; never has conversation been thinner.

And yet, before we accept this eclipse as final, it is worth recalling what the vocation once meant in the hands of Raymond Aron, Leszek Kołakowski, and Alasdair MacIntyre. Each shows what it meant to interfere responsibly in public life—and what might still be recovered for an age drowning in voices but starving for thought.

Paris in the 1950s was intoxicated by Marxism. Sartre, de Beauvoir, and their circle enthroned revolution as the measure of seriousness. Sartre could even hail Mao’s Cultural Revolution as a dawn of liberty, blind to its massacres. Across the street at the Café de Flore sat Raymond Aron, his friend-turned-contrarian. Where Sartre saw dialectic and destiny, Aron saw cruelty and illusion. He was mocked as bourgeois, tepid, forever “late to the station” of history. Yet it was his unfashionable lucidity that endured.

“The intellectual is not only one who thinks, but one who intervenes” (Spectateur engagé, 1981).

“To speak the truth about the world, without regard to the consequences for one’s career or popularity, is the responsibility of the intellectual” (The Opium of the Intellectuals, 1955). Years later, he sharpened the point: “The intellectual is not only one who thinks, but one who intervenes” (Spectateur engagé, 1981). Aron intervened with stubborn sobriety. During the Algerian war, when his own camp preferred silence, he spoke against torture. He chose clarity over applause, solitude over complicity. In an era when “engagement” meant slogans, he insisted that truth itself was courage.

If Aron’s virtue was clarity, Kołakowski’s was witness. Born in interwar Poland, he endured Nazi occupation and came of age under communism. In the 1950s, he was the Party’s rising star: witty, brilliant, urbane. But in 1966, he gave a lecture denouncing the “priestly monopoly of ideology.” Within months, he was expelled, surveilled, and eventually exiled. He left Poland with one suitcase, students weeping as he departed, smuggling his essays under censorship to keep his words alive. From Oxford he composed Main Currents of Marxism (1976–78), a vast autopsy of ideology. Its verdict was unsparing: “Marxism was the greatest fantasy of our century. It promised liberation and delivered new forms of slavery.”

Its verdict was unsparing: “Marxism was the greatest fantasy of our century. It promised liberation and delivered new forms of slavery.”

For Kołakowski, this was not merely a historian’s judgment but an act of conscience. He believed the intellectual’s first duty was to preserve memory: to ensure that societies did not forget their follies, betrayals, and false dawns. Without such memory, political life collapses into repetition, condemned to re-enact illusions under new slogans. In his ironic essay How to Be a Conservative-Liberal-Socialist? (1978), he argued that only a tension of traditions—conservatism’s respect for institutions, liberalism’s defense of freedom, socialism’s compassion for suffering—could save us from fanaticism. Each tradition carried memories of struggle and insight; to forget them was to risk tyranny anew.

only a tension of traditions—conservatism’s respect for institutions, liberalism’s defense of freedom, socialism’s compassion for suffering—could save us from fanaticism. Each tradition carried memories of struggle and insight; to forget them was to risk tyranny anew.

This witness role is precisely what our digital culture undermines. Yesterday’s outrage dissolves into tomorrow’s meme; the algorithm accelerates oblivion. By contrast, Kołakowski reminds us that to remember against the grain—to carry forward inconvenient truths and uncomfortable lessons—is already to practice intellectual courage. The intellectual does not simply analyze; he interferes with forgetting.

Where Aron unmasked ideology and Kołakowski bore witness to its betrayal, Alasdair MacIntyre diagnosed what remains when meaning itself collapses. He began After Virtue (1981) with a parable. Imagine a world where science has been destroyed, its fragments scattered, and people continue to use scientific vocabulary without comprehension. Such, he argued, is our moral discourse: “We possess simulacra of morality… but we have—very largely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”

The prophecy has come true. Words such as “justice,” “freedom,” “truth” circulate online as hashtags. They are wielded as slogans, not lived as horizons. In MacIntyre’s terms, ours is an age of emotivism: morality reduced to preference. The algorithm thrives on it. Likes and shares have become our new moral grammar. Nor did MacIntyre spare the institutions that once nurtured intellectual life. Universities, he charged, had become “factories for producing and consuming knowledge.” Students were treated as customers, degrees as commodities, professors as piece-workers in the knowledge industry. The academy, once the training ground of public intellectuals, could no longer form them.

His remedy was retrieval: the recovery of moral language through tradition, practice, and argument. Renewal, he insisted, would not come from viral platforms or bureaucratized universities but from small, resilient communities. Hence the haunting close of After Virtue: “We are waiting… for a new—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.” Renewal would be stubborn, local, patient. In this image lies the truest path for the intellectual today: not celebrity but fidelity, not spectacle but conscience.

His remedy was retrieval: the recovery of moral language through tradition, practice, and argument. Renewal, he insisted, would not come from viral platforms or bureaucratized universities but from small, resilient communities.

To be fair, certain podcasts and newsletters still approximate the old function of conversation, sustaining argument across an audience rather than pandering to a following. But the platforms that host them reward velocity over patience, affirmation over contradiction, novelty over depth. As Pierre Manent warned, “We are in danger of confusing conversation with chatter” (A World Beyond Politics?, 2006). The irony is acute: the internet promised a republic of letters open to all, yet it delivered an archipelago of silos. Aron’s clarity, Kołakowski’s witness, and MacIntyre’s retrieval each presuppose the rarest of modern commodities—sustained attention. Without it, the vocation of the intellectual is not merely endangered; it becomes unintelligible.

Leszek Kołakowski once quipped that the intellectual is “a person who interferes in matters which are none of his business”

Leszek Kołakowski once quipped that the intellectual is “a person who interferes in matters which are none of his business” (Is God Happy?, 2012). That meddler is now endangered. The influencer affirms; the intellectual disrupts. The influencer consolidates; the intellectual risks.

And yet the vocation is not dead. It survives wherever clarity is chosen over fashion, memory over oblivion, meaning over metrics. It survives in essays that resist amnesia, in friendships that endure contradiction, in circles that keep argument alive. What threatens it most today is not only the algorithm, but homogeneity. In Western universities and media alike, the intellectual class has become strikingly aligned, recycling the same orthodoxies in slightly varied tones. As Allan Bloom warned in The Closing of the American Mind (1987), “The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity, but the one that removes awareness of other possibilities.” If intellectuals merely echo one another, what purpose do they serve? A chorus cannot substitute for conscience.

If intellectuals merely echo one another, what purpose do they serve? A chorus cannot substitute for conscience.

The task of the intellectual is not to mirror consensus but to challenge it—to interfere, even irritate. Without such interference, liberty atrophies. A society without intellectual pluralism is one in which freedom is performed, not practiced.

The republic of letters will not be rebuilt in salons, nor restored in universities-turned-factories. But it may endure wherever thought and conscience are preserved: in communities that resist homogeneity, in arguments that disrupt comfort, in the courage to speak when silence is easier. There, concordia discors—harmony through discord—remains possible.

The exhortation is clear: practice freedom. Leave the safety of circles, risk dialogue across divides, break with homogeneity.

The exhortation is clear: practice freedom. Leave the safety of circles, risk dialogue across divides, break with homogeneity. If we fail, the intellectual will vanish into the influencer, and with him will go the civic conscience. If we succeed, it will be because we remembered that liberty depends on those who dare to think aloud, to interfere, to be free in public. ◳