Public Intellectuals At Dusk

Truth, Ignorance, and Betrayal

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, former Security Prison 21 (S-21) used by the Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979 and where 18,133 have been killed. Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Picture: Nicolas Tenzer, November 4, 2025

On October 12, 2025, at Forum 2000 in Prague, my friend and co-author Ramin Jahanbegloo moderated a panel on the role of public intellectuals, where I spoke alongside Larry Diamond, among others. Ramin gave me the floor first, and I set the tone for the discussion with an uncompromising statement aimed at demystifying their role, both past and present. Contrary to all expectations, but perhaps a sign of the times, I was not really contradicted. My harsh criticism of certain intellectuals who are complacent towards Russia, China, and other criminal regimes, both present and past, elicited no reaction in defense of those I specifically named. This essay aims to expand on my remarks much more than I was able to do during a discussion where brevity is the rule.

To paraphrase Georg Lichtenberg, what distinguishes classic criminals from intellectuals is that the former do not need to theorize about their crimes. The latter often seek to conceal them and, when caught by the police and summoned to answer for them in court, may seek mitigating circumstances. Intellectuals are more inclined to construct complicated rhetorical and ideological devices to, at best, gloss over them and, at worst, give them a convoluted blessing. The history of the 20^th century and the first quarter of the 21^st century is full of intellectuals who have either justified mass crimes or attempted to drown them in a jumble of arguments to minimize them, relativize them, and, in any case, make them disappear from the collective consciousness. Many have, at the very least, shown indifference to mass crimes and have even, at times, considered that they could be, in certain cases, lawful or necessary. This was too often the case for those of Soviet or Chinese communism, sometimes Nazism, or those perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 and the Iranian regime established in 1979. This remains the case today for those committed by Putin.

One could, in a way, apply to intellectuals the Jewish witticism that my grandfather, it seems, liked to repeat: “The proof that we Jews are a normal people is that there are as many bandits among us as among other peoples.” We could add that those who believe there are fewer are presumptuous and those who believe there are more are anti-Semitic. Intellectuals, in short, are like all other categories of the population: they are neither better nor worse. We cannot put them on a pedestal; they have no a priori position of authority that would allow us to consider their words more valid than anyone else’s. The intelligence that we attribute to them, rightly or wrongly, which sometimes stems mainly from rhetorical skill, is certainly no guarantee of morality.

However, this position as such remains problematic, because anti-intellectualism is also poisonous to public consciousness and even to historical consciousness. We can therefore consider that the rejection of intellectuals is a worrying sign of the denigration of thought itself, and note the misguidedness of many intellectuals. By seeking to erect a statue to themselves while undermining all authority, they have contributed to destroying what could legitimately be considered their primary ethos. However, it would be wrong to assume that the discrediting of intellectuals is linked to the dubious causes they have sometimes espoused: specifically, the widespread contempt for them does not stem from the murky game they played in the face of totalitarianism, but rather from the resistance to these tendencies that they demonstrated. When intellectuals have gone astray, it is because they themselves have succumbed to the siren song of anti-intellectualism characteristic of these illiberal movements. When they embraced communism, fascism, Nazism, Maoism, or Putinism, some intellectuals gained in popularity as much as they lost in dignity and credibility, because in rationality—and, to sum it all up, in truth.

The role of intellectuals has been defined at certain specific moments in history—think of the Dreyfus affair in France and, later, the struggle against communist oppression in the USSR and its satellite countries—and it was linked to a form of normativity that became established as a reference point. But in reality, the fragility of their role was already there, even during the “great moments” when they distinguished themselves most. Today, they seem to be burning their last lights, but for reasons that also have to do, as I will try to demonstrate, with the very definition of “public intellectuals,” they have lost their specificity. Perhaps behind what appears to be a twilight period lies a misunderstanding about an impossible role.

Fragile truth: revolutionary oppression

There is a historical constant in the role of intellectuals, long before they were designated as such: the fight for truth. This was exemplified in France during the Dreyfus affair: the struggle, particularly that of the writer and journalist Émile Zola, brought this demand to bear against those who defended state secrecy and a conception of the supposed defense of the nation against this truth, which was to be embodied in justice. This fight also drew inspiration from older struggles, notably that of Voltaire in the Calas affair. It was also that of Giordano Bruno, Copernicus, and Galileo for scientific truth against a Church that rejected it when it contradicted dogma. Finally, without the list being exhaustive, it was that of many dissidents in Central and Eastern Europe, indissolubly in favor of freedom and truth.

In fact, the tradition of truth could not be separated from the freedom of research, investigation, and struggle against authoritarian powers, whether the state, the Church, or the Party, depending on the era, to confine thought within a restrictive framework. Step by step, the fight of intellectuals was directed against oppression, but also against crime and the destruction of critical thinking. It was a combat to promote a certain conception of law and, on the political level, to defend fundamental freedoms and affirm the sovereignty of peoples in choosing their own destiny.

It can certainly be argued that intellectuals were part of what could be called the “progressive” camp at the outset, in that they opposed the old “conservative” regimes—imperial, monarchist, religious, reactionary, and then “fascist,” to use this generic term. Julien Benda’s 1927 book, La trahison des clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals), primarily attacked nationalism, the abandonment of all rationality, and the promotion of race, all ideas that are found today mainly on the far right. Nothing was more logical, and this remains true today: one can postulate an inherent incompatibility between the intelligence of truth and the prioritization of the whole—that of the nation, the community, a cultural group, what is scientifically and falsely referred to as “race” or “ethnicity”—over the part, that is, the individual person capable of judging and thinking for themselves. Totalitarian regimes of all stripes have always been holistic.

However, it was at that moment, about a hundred years ago, that a great deal of confusion arose, created by the emergence of the USSR and the creation of communist parties in several countries, which many intellectuals joined or sympathized with. One can undoubtedly understand the initial enthusiasm, however singularly naive, of the early days. But very quickly, there was a refusal to consider the reality of the USSR, its system of mass oppression, the suppression of all freedom, the bringing into line of all individuals, its mass crimes, and in 1939 its de facto alliance with Nazi totalitarianism. Many subsequently refused, as if under the influence of psychotropic drugs, what Raymond Aron described in L’opium des intellectuels (The Opium of the Intellectuals) in 1955, to condemn this oppression while denouncing that of capitalist society. They subsequently developed a fascination with Maoism, the Khmer Rouge regime, and sometimes the ultra-religious Iranian revolution, and adopted a romantic view of figures such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Some, such as the French philosopher Alain Badiou, found excuses for the Pol Pot regime, which exterminated about a quarter of the Cambodian population between 1975 and 1979—he has only half-heartedly backtracked on his most radical positions, but without ever explicitly condemning mass crimes as such and as a consequence of the application of an ideology.

It was as if a large number of intellectuals, both in Europe and the United States (notably Noam Chomsky), had adopted a conception of what they continue to call emancipation, but one that is completely detached from the freedom and integrity of the human person. They were poor supporters of intellectuals in Central and Eastern Europe during the communist era and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The same people were not very involved in denouncing the abuses during the war in the former Yugoslavia, and today they are reluctant to defend Ukraine when they do not support Russia, turning a blind eye to its mass crimes. One of the few intellectuals from this movement to have taken an uncompromising stance on Ukraine is undoubtedly Slavoj Žižek. Even an intellectual generally classified as a moderate social democrat, such as Jürgen Habermas, has made ambiguous statements about Ukraine, inspired by a doctrinal pacifism, which has been rightly criticized by Timothy Snyder.

There are reasons for these missteps that go back a long way, well before a Marxist vulgate gave them their ideological apparatus. I cannot explore them all here. One of the most notable is indifference to violence, if not its glorification. Of course, this does not mean naively considering that violent insurrection is never an option: it can be when a violent power represses, murders, and uses internal military force to murder, torture, and rape. But there is also another kind of violence used by certain self-proclaimed revolutionaries to destroy all opposition and enforce a police state of thought through extreme force. For many of them, the reference point remains the second phase of the French Revolution, when terror, imposed in particular by Robespierre and Saint-Just, succeeded the “bourgeois revolution.” The law on suspects at the time and the bloodthirsty madness in the widespread use of the guillotine against “counter-revolutionaries” or those suspected of being such heralded the imprisonment, summary trials, executions, and large-scale purges that contemporary regimes have used without restraint. The perpetual “movement” of the Revolution had buried emancipation and freedom.

Bunk’Art 2 Museum (dedicated to the communist oppression that claimed more than 6,000 victims), Tirana, Albania. Picture: Nicolas Tenzer, August 15, 2025

Do public intellectuals exist?

This renunciation of emancipation, freedom, and, ultimately, truth itself, there are also structural reasons that lie in the very nature of “public intellectuals,” as the English language refers to them, to differentiate them from “intellectuals” without an adjective, in other words, people who, in their professional activities, use reflective thinking to apply it to specific fields of study. Public intellectuals are therefore those who, not only relying on their knowledge, but also granting themselves legitimacy in the name of that knowledge, intervene in the political arena, both domestically and internationally, by taking a stand. This is certainly not an usurpation, because intellectuals are, in principle, entirely justified in using their knowledge to shed light on issues of public debate, and they have no reason not to assert their own principles as citizens. In a liberal democracy, they are equally justified in asserting opposing opinions among themselves. It cannot be considered that there should be any unanimity among them.

However, once truth is distinguished from opinion, the question of the possible limitation of debate arises in terms of principles, since the discussion pits people who have made truth their profession of faith against each other. More precisely, what is at stake is what I once called the separation of orders of discourse. No less difficult is the question of the method of argumentation that underpins this very separation.

At a basic level, public intellectuals would betray their raison d’être if they allowed themselves to take liberties with the truth of the facts. They are obliged, at the very least, to describe reality. They cannot lie, even by omission. However, the facts themselves are not inseparable from values. Thus, talking about crimes, assault, torture, or oppression is not anecdotal: these terms do not refer to morally and legally neutral facts. Nor is it anecdotal to remain silent about them. Yet, by definition, a moral judgment appears, at first glance, to be orthogonal to the statement of a truth. Except that, if we consider that intellectuals have a duty to truth, they cannot act as if what underlies truth were independent of the conditions that make it possible. Accepting to defend a regime which, through its crimes and police methods against opponents, obstructs all truth remains contradictory.

In theory, intellectuals, like any citizen, can promote racist, negationist, and deeply criminal theories; they can defend the most oppressive regimes on the planet—and the “traitors” Benda referred to did so yesterday and continue to do so today. They may have no empathy for victims and human beings who are systematically dehumanized. They may prefer a theory that not only lacks any scientific basis, but also has no impact on reality other than the outright destruction of each individual person. Never will the pretext of fighting another system of oppression, however real it may be—think of the military juntas or extreme right-wing dictatorships in Latin America or Asia—justify the extreme forms of oppression of the communist-inspired regimes already mentioned, whose leaders had no ambition to emancipate the people.

So while in theory an intellectual can support any position, they cannot lie about its implications. They can, as some do today, express opposition to any aid to Ukraine and suggest a future “entente” with Russia, but they cannot at the same time declare themselves to be anti-fascist, progressive, concerned with the defense of human rights, and a supporter of a regulated international legal order. In other words, they must then assume responsibility for supporting a criminal regime and say that mass crimes are not their concern. People like Jeffrey Sachs and others should at least acknowledge the implications of their positions. As for those who, like some in France, minimize Putin’s abuses today, as they did yesterday those of Mao, Pol Pot, Enver Hoxha, and others, they are simply betraying the truth. The problem is not only that they are morally reprehensible, but that they oppose thought itself—the link between the two is, moreover, a close one.

Thus, returning to the separation of orders and the method of argumentation that it implies, most public intellectuals free themselves from the discipline it requires, because that would destroy the appeal of the overall position they seek to promote. They should then, with each proposal put forward, state what is factual truth, what is hermeneutic hypothesis—for example, regarding the logic of a regime’s actions—a hypothesis based on rigorous and documented observations, debatable by definition but not arbitrary, but which cannot have the same status as factual truth, and what is mere opinion. For example, saying that regime X is committing crimes is a truth; characterizing it as totalitarian, revealing its logic of war and, on that basis, making assumptions about the future of the conflict and its nature, discussing its strengths and weaknesses, is an analysis that must be well-founded and cannot be supported by fanciful facts, but it leaves room for reasoned discussion, because it is not pure factual truth. Condemning such a regime or not doing so is a matter of preference linked to our value system.

A public intellectual, professor, or journalist, whether or not they are a specialist in international relations, but who has taken the trouble to research the subject, can therefore express their choices, get involved, and campaign. However, on the one hand, they do not do so from scratch—from an opinion that refers only to itself—because one cannot be both an intellectual and a relativist; on the other hand, they must explain their values. An intellectual makes political choices, and their essential contribution to public debate is not to assert that their choices are the right ones, but to show what they imply and what the opposite choices would lead to. In a way, they have to set the terms of the discussion, which becomes impossible if they are guilty of playing games with reality.

I fear, however, that in the international arena in the broadest sense, such intellectuals are ultimately quite rare. Provocatively, while my friend Ramin had referred to the “great simplifiers” that certain intellectuals of the past had been, for better (reminding us of a few essential rules underpinning freedom of thought) and for worse (exalting vague values to mobilize the masses in the manner of those we now call “populists”), I had mentioned a lazy drift among certain intellectuals—they are not the only ones affected by this disease. Many, for example, enjoy discussing the state of the world without bothering to study, work in depth on a subject, and build, based on solid knowledge, an adequate understanding of international reality. There are few figures who, like Raymond Aron in his day, have traveled the path from political philosophy to the study of foreign policy, with each discipline enriching the other. The reverse is also true of certain international analysts who, as I have already mentioned, do not consider it useful to take a detour via philosophy. This is not unrelated to a form of marginalization in the ephemeral. This could undoubtedly be applied to economics as well, but it seems to me that the axiological stakes are lower there than in the international arena, where it is primarily a matter of life and death.

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Picture: Nicolas Tenzer, November 4, 2025

Public marginalization and limited engagement

I am not going to rejoice at this apparent disappearance of public intellectuals, the extent to which it is real remains unclear to me. I also believe that nothing will truly be able to combat the emergence of false glories in the years to come, which will cause the image of intellectuals to sink into infamy, dishonor, and misconduct. As a former practitioner of political philosophy, I think I am in a relatively good position to say that a real knowledge of philosophy has in no way prevented philosophers from defending the most despicable causes by freeing themselves from any requirement for truth.

Among the usual expressions relating to intellectuals, one used to come up often: that of the committed intellectual. This seemed almost redundant in light of the description of the public intellectual. The intellectual’s commitment involved defending a cause, in particular, in traditional doxa, that of freedom against oppression, democracy against dictatorship, truth against lies, science against superstition, etc. Of course, as I have already pointed out, many intellectuals were committed to causes that were diametrically opposed and often within political parties that did not espouse these ideals. They sometimes became what are known as the “organic intellectuals” of these parties, taking up the official slogans and giving them “scientific” credibility, sometimes giving them a supposed label of truth by embellishing them with a whole theoretical apparatus.

Today, the erosion of the role of political parties, the weakening not so much of their ideology, particularly on the extremes, as of a cumbersome structure, and increased competition from a range of other producers of narratives, images, and slogans, make this role less obvious, even if some intellectuals enjoy transforming themselves into spin doctors. Within the so-called moderate parties, on both the left and the right, which have essentially become candidate selection machines rather than parties of ideas, intellectuals have little place. Even think tanks, for the most part, have become increasingly specialized bodies, sometimes more concerned with producing rigorous analyses in each field than with providing a global vision and direction. Many of them, for reasons of funding but also because of a choice—which is hardly reprehensible—of neutrality or partisan pluralism, are reluctant to do so. Here too, those who do engage in this are mostly located on the extreme fringes of the political spectrum. I will not dwell on this again, but the inability of moderate parties to produce a structuring narrative, particularly with regard to the rule of law, remains a major political issue.

In the international arena, intellectuals have either placed themselves at the service of the most despicable causes, sometimes out of self-interest, or they hinder governments which, particularly in the cases of Russia and China, refuse to listen to those who point out the radical nature of the threat. Technicians, who are supposedly reasonable and measured, are also sometimes more reassuring to heads of state and government than those who are capable of analyzing radical evil. No doubt, intellectuals have not done everything necessary to assert themselves in relation to a senior administration that has become increasingly “managerial” and less and less strategic—although this may not be so new, only more visible today.

If we absolutely must reassure ourselves, perhaps we should nevertheless point out that the mission traditionally assigned to intellectuals is ultimately also performed by others: activists committed to defending human rights, investigative journalists, lawyers specializing in cases of torture or war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide, but also combatants, often intellectuals themselves or who have become so by articulating the basis of their struggle, as in Ukraine. Listening to and observing many of them, I immediately thought of the greatest intellectual figures of the Resistance, notably the French philosopher and epistemologist Jean Cavaillès, who was assassinated by the Nazis on April 4, 1944. For him, as for them, the very act of thinking and the logic that guides all true reflection are inseparable from total commitment—as if they were meant to define together the unity of a life.

For many intellectuals today, for better or for worse, except in countries ravaged by war and oppression, the supreme value of commitment conceals something unreal. This explains why many of them, particularly in Western Europe and North America, do not see the war. What is a thought worth when it ceases to draw its source from the essential?