Introduction: Marxism, Intellectuals and Politics

Contemporary social theory is replete with attempts to understand and theorise the location of intellectuals. There are studies of academic intellectuals, public intellectuals, media intellectuals, Marxist intellectuals and postmodern intellectuals to name but a few. In part, the expansion of the literature on intellectuals is a result of the contradictory times in which we live. Technological innovations such as those in the realm of new media have opened up spaces of political intervention in which intellectuals can bring their knowledge to bear. On the other hand, it seems that intellectual labour is increasingly deskilled and, some have insisted, proletarianised. The ideal of the radical intellectual so typified by thinkers such as Sartre often seems a distant memory. This has led one writer on the topic to ask ‘where have all the intellectuals gone?’ (Furedi 2004).