![]() Names like those of the Romanians Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran would eventually become internationally famous, and one would be at pains to demonstrate that their intellectual skills or talents were absent when they had been acting as "socializers" into the values of the Romanian radical right. More important, one would have understood precious little of what right-wing radicalism was all about, had one dismissed its intellectual roots and some of its intellectual proponents under established proto-fascist and fascist regimes. First, there is no "definition" of the intellectual, just as there is not one, universally accepted definition of "fascism." There were over 200 such "definitions" by the time I was coming up with one of my own in my Ph.D. It is, I believe, counterproductive to understanding the function played by such intellectuals in inculcating radical values (of left, right, or a combination of them) on their societies, to dismiss them, as my friend Sabrina Ramet does, when she writes "I would deny that anyone worthy of being called an intellectual could be identified with anti-intellectualism" because "part of the very definition of intellectual is the honoring of the life of the mind if a person does not do that, no matter how clever s/he may be, s/he cannot be considered an intellectual (Ramet, 1999b, p. ![]() It is not the quality of their intellectual product that concerns us, though some of that product can be of a very high caliber, regardless of how we judge it from the perspective of our own belief system. What is, I believe, important, is to emphasize that these (and many other) radical intellectuals play an important role as "socializers" into ethnocentric values and belief systems. And his countryman Sandor Csoori, a poet and essayist belonging to the "populist" stream, in 1990 sounded the trumpet of what would eventually become rather commonplace reference among the adversaries of the Free Democratic Party (a formation where Jews had prominent leadership positions), writing that contemporary Hungary witnesses a "reverse assimilationist trend" in that it is "no longer the Hungarian nation that wishes to assimilate Jews, but liberal Jewry who wishes to assimilate the Hungarian nation," a purpose for which it employs "a more powerful weapon than it has ever possessed, namely, the parliamentary system" Deak, 1994, pp. Csurka is a rather gifted playwright, for example. Some intellectuals turn themselves into ethnocrats. In an impressive article recently published in Romania, Vladimir Tismaneanu mentions the former "Praxis" philosophers Mihajlo Markovic and Svetozar Stojanovic, who became Milosevic's faithful servants, and in his book he mentions writer Dobrica Cosic, who briefly served as federal president (Tismaneanu, 1999a, p. Other power-obliging intellectuals do nothing but what they always did-serve the "party line." The list is far too long to exhaust here. ![]() It then briefly dwells on the centrality of the "palingenetic" salvation discourse in both interwar and contemporary radical political thought and political practice, and on the revival of corporatist models of hierarchically-structured societies.Īs I have already shown, loss of status goes a long way in explaining, if not all, then a great number of cases of formerly critical intellectuals who turn ready to serve existing or would-be ethnocrats. 3 focuses on the role of intellectuals as "socializers" into radical values. ![]() Part III B: Radical Politics In Post Communist East Central EuropeĬontinuing the "radiography" of post-communist "radical minds," this second section of the rather lengthy sub-chapter whose first part was published in "East European Perspectives" No.
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