intellectuals

Séb Krier @sebkrier · 19h "Many such cases!" [embedded image of printed text] "Michael Polanyi has described this "dynamic coupling" of a romantic moral passion with a ruthlessly "scientific" conception of man, his world, and his history, as a case of "moral inversion." That is to say, it is the moral passion that legitimates the claims of "scientific" socialism to absolute truth, while it is the "scientific" necessities that legitimate every possible form of political immorality. Such a "dynamic coupling" characterised, in the past, only certain religious movements. In the 19th and 20th centuries, it became the property of secular political movements that sought the universal regeneration of mankind in the here and now. THE APPEAL OF ANY SUCH MOVEMENT to intellectuals is clear enough. As intellectuals, they are qualified candidates for membership in the élite that leads such movements, and they can thus give free expression to their natural impulse for authority and power. They can do so, moreover, within an ideological context, which reassures them that, any superficial evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, they are disinterestedly serving the "true" interests of the people."