the ‘mass intelligentsia’.87 The mass intelligentsia had a difficult birth, as the baby-boomer generation went through the academic system in the 1960s, and demanded its reform from the inside. Students and post-graduates around the world insisted that academia should “look beyond the campus” and connect with wider social issues in society.88 In the US, the student intelligentsia felt empowered by its involvement in the civil rights movement, which gave them a sense that middle class students could transform mass society, and act as a political vanguard in the way traditional Marxists had conceived of the Proletariat. In 1962, a handful of American students calling themselves The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) released a manifesto for the mass intelligentsia, called the Port Huron Statement89 . The Port Huron Statement called for a new ‘participatory democracy’, one which revitalised the public space, transforming the passive and apathetic public into what John Dewey hoped for: a Great Society in which well-informed citizens met in their neighbourhood for face-to-face discussions about the pressing social issues and ethical questions of their time. The revolution, it was hoped, would make philosophers of us all.90
A student sit-in, 1968
Similar clusters of student radicalism and participatory democracy appeared in other countries. In France and Belgium in the 1950s and 1960s, a group of student bohemians calling themselves the Situationists challenged bourgeois conventionality through anarchist pranks, manifestoes, street-art, and libertarian experiments in living. In Holland in the early 1960s, a Situatonist-influenced anarchist group called the Provos created 87
In Richard Flacks, ‘Young Intelligentsia In Revolt;, Society, Vol. 7, 8, (1970) pp. 46-55: ‘the anti-bourgeois intellectuals of [Marx’s] day were the first representatives of what has become in our time a mass intelligentsia...By intelligentsia I mean those engaged vocationally in the production, distribution, interpretation, criticism and inculcation of cultural values.’
88
Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement (Chicago: CH Kerr, 1990)
89
One of the authors of the Port Huron statement was Richard Flacks, who as mentioned earlier used the term ‘mass intelligentsia’ to describe the wave of student agitation sweeping through higher education. 90
Miller 1987