Are you trying to describe a virtue/foible or a sociological category that takes the good with the bad?
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I feel like any suitable definition will also comprehend the phenomenon of the “rock star intellectual”.
For instance, Jordan Peterson is an intellectual. Of a funny American televangelist type. But I think he has to count. Otherwise you’ll just end up defining philosophy etc.
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I agree that Peterson is an intellectual, albeit a crappy one: his current public persona mainly performs a popular image of intellectualism, “a non-intellectual’s idea of a intellectual” (to paraphrase the old saw about how 😡 is a poor person’s idea of a rich person)
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One aspect of what I'm getting at (though not a key one) is to turn that particular kind of insult around. To the extent there is wisdom in a crowd, the crowd's judgment of intellectualism is a valid variable to consider.
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I think any definition which does not explicitly contemplate the intellectual’s audience isn’t apt.
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This is Corey Robin's definition of an intellectual: as someone who creates a "public". I think it's a good one. The difference between a mob and a public is the presence of legitimated spokespersons who turn crowd sentiment into arguments suitable for institutional contention
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The problem with Corey’s definition is that either it displaces the debate to some hoity-toity definition of the “public”; or it means that any entertainer with an audience counts as an intellectual. Is the Honey Boo-Boo child an intellectual? Ron Jeremy? s-usih.org/2013/02/what-i
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I think you're missing a nuance...Any spectacle can attract a crowd. I think he gets at a real sort of transformation of the crowd into a useful distributed computer through an act akin to programming. Though I get where you're coming from re: Robin from our private convos :D
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Corey’s definition also suffers from presentism. Is someone who writes “for the drawer” (4ex, in a dictatorship) not an intellectual because she creates no public? If she goes unappreciated in her lifetime, is she not an intellectual—but then becomes one once she’s “discovered”?
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Corey’s definition also definitely doesn’t work your Robinson Crusoe case
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that it doesn't, but it gets at the orthogonal institutions <--> crowd dimension.
There's a 2x2 there. Y-axis = insider_of versus outsider_of. On the outsider side, it would be Excommunicated Institutionalist versus Cut-Off from Herd from varieties of individualism


