has had its scribes … its artists or men of letters … and its experts.… None of these three species belongs strictly to our modern civilisation, but the latter has nonetheless its own special characteristics which affect the numbers and status of the intellectuals. The distribution of manpower among the different professions alters with the progress of economic development: the percentage of manpower employed in industry grows, the proportion employed in agriculture decreases, while the size of the so-called tertiary sector, which includes a multitude of professions of varying degrees of prestige—from the quill-driver in his office to the research worker in his laboratory—is enormously inflated. Modern industrial societies comprise a greater number of non-manual workers, absolutely and relatively, than any society of the past.… The three categories of non-manual workers—scribes, experts, and men of letters—develop simultaneously, if not at the same rate. Bureaucracies offer outlets to scribes with inferior qualifications; the management of labor and the organization of industry require more and more specialized experts; schools, universities, and various mediums of entertainment or communication employ men of letters, artists, or mere technicians of speech and writing, hacks and popularizers.… Though its significance is not always fully recognized, the growth in the number of jobs remains a crucial fact …26
By filling the ranks of the “tertiary sector” of the modern economy, intellectuals turn into a social group with its own interests, the most important of which calls for the increase in the number and prestige of white-collar jobs—an objective best promoted by centralization and bureaucratization. Their interests further require untrammeled freedom of speech, and intellectuals, even while helping put in power regimes which suppress liberties, have always and everywhere opposed restraints on free expression: they often are the first victims of their own triumphs.
Paradoxically, therefore, capitalism and democracy, while enhancing the role of intellectuals, also increase their discontent. Their status in a capitalist society is far beneath that of politicians and businessmen, whom they scorn as amateurs in the art of social management. They envy their wealth, authority, and prestige. In some respects it was easier for intellectuals to accommodate to pre-modern society, in which status was fixed by tradition and law, than to the fluctuating world of capitalism and democracy, in which they feel humiliated by lack of money and status: Ludwig von Mises thought that intellectuals gravitate to anti-capitalist philosophies “in order to render inaudible the inner voice that tells them that their failure is entirely their own fault.”27
As previously pointed out, intellectuals can avoid these humiliations and rise to the top only under one condition: if society becomes “rationalized”—that is, intellectualized—and “reason” replaces the free play of economic and political forces. This means socialism. The main enemy of the socialists, in their peaceful (“Utopian”) as well as violent (revolutionary) guise, has always been “spontaneity,” by which is meant laissez-faire in its economic as well as political manifestations. The call for the abolition of private property in the means of production on behalf of “society,” common to all socialist programs, makes it theoretically possible to rationalize the production of goods and to equalize their distribution. It also happens to place those who claim to know what is “rational”—intellectuals—in a commanding position. As in the case of other class movements, interest and ideology coincide: just as the bourgeoisie’s demands for the abolition of restraints on manufacture and trade in the name of public welfare served its own interests, so the radical intellectuals’ call for the nationalization of manufacture and trade, advanced for the sake of the masses, happens to work to its own advantage.
The anarchist leader, and Marx’s contemporary, Michael Bakunin, was the first to note this coincidence and insist that behind the intellectuals’ yearning for socialism lay ordinary class interests. He opposed Marx’s vision of the socialist state on the grounds that it would result in Communist domination of the masses:
