Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The intellectual elite of a society.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun an educated and intellectual{2} elite; intellectuals, collectively or considered as a class.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The
intellectual élite of asociety (especially in nineteenth-century Poland, in Russia and later the Soviet Union).
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun an educated and intellectual elite
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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The word intelligentsia derives from the Latin word intelligentia, meaning a group of people engaged in complex mental and creative labor directed to the development and dissemination of culture.
Boing Boing 2008
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GINGRICH: No. The intellectuals around me would -- if you wanted to use the term intelligentsia -- I mean, there's a self-identified, elite intellectual group in America who see themselves as the guardians of this alternative to traditional American civilization, and these are folks who write what I think is largely gibberish and explain deconstructionism and all sorts of ideas that I, frankly, don't pay much attention to, but that are somehow mystically going to be better than American civilization: multiculturalism, the counterculture, etc.
To Renew America 1995
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I find the choice of words interesting - 'intelligentsia' is from the Russian I believe.
Are You A Communitarian ? Newmania 2008
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The idea that "the worldview of the intelligentsia is necessarily in tension with a religious worldview, is plainly wrong."
Amarnath Amarasingam: Are American College Professors Religious? Amarnath Amarasingam 2010
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The idea that "the worldview of the intelligentsia is necessarily in tension with a religious worldview, is plainly wrong."
Amarnath Amarasingam: Are American College Professors Religious? Amarnath Amarasingam 2010
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The idea that "the worldview of the intelligentsia is necessarily in tension with a religious worldview, is plainly wrong."
Amarnath Amarasingam: Are American College Professors Religious? Amarnath Amarasingam 2010
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The idea that "the worldview of the intelligentsia is necessarily in tension with a religious worldview, is plainly wrong."
Amarnath Amarasingam: Are American College Professors Religious? Amarnath Amarasingam 2010
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The idea that "the worldview of the intelligentsia is necessarily in tension with a religious worldview, is plainly wrong."
Amarnath Amarasingam: Are American College Professors Religious? Amarnath Amarasingam 2010
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The key motive for self-replicating propaganda amongst the Western intelligentsia is status-seeking — what in this context is labelled moral vanity ….
Think Progress » Sen. Edward Kennedy says voting against the Iraq war 2006
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The word intelligentsia was coined to describe the class of revolutionary thinkers who are at the center of Part II, Shipwreck.
kingrat47 commented on the word intelligentsia
There's an connotation to this word of futile oppositionism; I'm not entirely sure I'd use it for most groupings of intellectuals.
December 10, 2006