Decline and Fall of the Public Intellectual‪.‬

HE wrote his people's dictionaries and their first national epics; he composed their protests against injustice and their demands for freedom. A Grub Street hack, a threadbare pamphleteer, a street-corner agitator, he was notorious for biting the hand of everyone who tried to feed him. The professors scorned him as a dilettante; the priests loathed him as a free-thinker; the politicians feared him as a troublemaker. He sided with lost causes and rarely lived to see them win out in the end. Today, his statue is still to be found in public parks, but few remember his name. When Sartre died, sad and disillusioned, in April 1980, a chapter which had begun in Paris in 1733, when Voltaire published his Letters concerning the English Nation, came to an end. There had been thinkers before - clerics and scholars; it was Voltaire who invented the public intellectual: the scourge of the church, the thorn in the side of princes, the acerbic habitue of beautiful women's salons.