Crossword clues for intelligentsia
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
intelligentsia \intelligentsia\ n. an educated and intellectual[2] elite; intellectuals, collectively or considered as a class.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
"the intellectual class collectively," 1905, from Russian intelligyentsia, from Latin intelligentia (see intelligence). Perhaps via Italian intelligenzia.
Wiktionary
n. The intellectual élite of a society (especially in nineteenth-century Poland, in Russia and later the Soviet Union).
WordNet
n. an educated and intellectual elite [syn: clerisy]
Wikipedia
The intelligentsia (, , ) is a social class of people engaged in complex mental labor aimed at guiding or critiquing, or otherwise playing a leadership role in shaping a society's culture and politics. This therefore might include everyone from artists to school teachers, as well as academics, writers, journalists, and other hommes de lettres (men of letters) more usually thought of as being the main constituents of the intelligentsia. Intelligentsia is the subject of active polemics concerning its own role in the development of modern society not always positive historically, often contributing to higher degree of progress, but also to its backward movement.
In a social sense, the stratum of intelligentsia arose first in Russian-controlled Poland during the age of Partitions. The term was borrowed from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in around the 1840s, to describe the educated and professionally active segment of patriotic bourgeoisie able to become the spiritual leaders of the country ruled by a foreign power in an authoritarian way. Deprived of socio-political influence in the form of enterprises or any "effective levers of economic development", the educated intelligentsia became a characteristic indicator of the East-European cultural periphery unlike the German Bildungsbürgertum or the British professions for whom leading societal roles were available.
In pre-revolutionary Russia the term was first used to describe people possessing cultural and political initiative. It was commonly used by those individuals themselves to create an apparent distance from the masses, and generally retained that narrow self-definition. More recently the term mass intelligentsia has been popularized to describe the intellectual effect of tertiary education upon a population.
Usage examples of "intelligentsia".
In the summer the left-wing intelligentsia were completely defeatist, far more so than they allowed to appear in print.
Even without such clearly partisan sponsorship, this massive assemblage of the Petersburg intelligentsia in the heavily charged atmosphere created by the massacre at Bezdna, the student demonstrations, the proclamations, the arrests, and the recent sentencing of Mikhailov could hardly have avoided taking on the significance of a public protest.
Given the imperative for war that now suffused even the intelligentsia of the Hegemony, such a comment was tantamount to treason.
Russia, not from Asia but from Europe itself, to infect the radical intelligentsia: the plague of a moral amorality based on egoism and culminating in a form of self-deification.
In his struggle, he had the support of a number of neo-Kantians who, making use of the sudden unpopularity of Nietzschean ideas, had taken control of the wellsprings of power among the intelligentsia, the universities and the press.
Russian intelligentsia of the 1840s, these books could only have been the works of the French Utopian Socialists and the Social Romantics and their Russian disciples on which Dostoevsky himself had battened at this period.
One was the military and imperialist middle class, generally nicknamed the Blimps, and the other the left-wing intelligentsia.
The left-wing intelligentsia wanted to go on and on, sniggering at the Blimps, sapping away at middle-class morale, but still keeping their favoured position as hangers-on of the dividend-drawers.
If there was one thing that the British intelligentsia were committed to, it was the debunking version of war, the theory that war is all corpses and latrines and never leads to any good result.
All the stuff about Fascist atrocities, denunciations of Chamberlain, etc., which it had been completely impossible to get away from in any highbrow magazine in peace time, suddenly came to an end, and far more fuss has been made among the left-wing intelligentsia about the internment of German refugees than about anything done by the enemy.
Previously we all used to assume that Fascism was so self-evidently horrible that no thinking person would have anything to do with it, and also that the Fascists always wiped out the intelligentsia when they had the opportunity.
There is no knowing just how much the Socialist movement has lost by alienating the literary intelligentsia.
The world of the intelligentsia, the acclaimed artists, the misguided altruists.
Moreover, English is the chief lingua franca and nearly the whole of the Indian intelligentsia is deeply anglicized.
But the general weakening of imperialism, and to some extent of the whole British morale, that took place during the nineteen-thirties, was partly the work of the left-wing intelligentsia, itself a kind of growth that had sprouted from the stagnation of the Empire.