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called “American-like hedonistic ideology of consumerism”.2 Third -
ly, their engagement was not just theoretical, since they were polit-
ically and socially involved and actively participating in their soci-
eties. In his article on Christopher Lasch, James Seaton claims that
“his [Lasch’s] career reveals the moral and spiritual depth that
becomes possible when an intellectual disdains the consolations
offered by the intellectuals’ view of themselves as morally and men-
tally superior to the rest of humanity.”3 On the other hand, Pasolini
himself, addressing Italo Calvino, gives a description of his person-
al way to be an intellectual:
I know well, dear Calvino, how intellectuals’ life goes over. I know
it because, partly, it is also my life. Readings, solitude […], circles
of a few friends and many acquaintances, all intellectuals and bour-
geoisies. A life of work and substantially good behavior. But I have
another life, like Mr. Hyde. In order to live this life, I have to
break the natural and innocent class barriers, break down the walls
of little, good provincial Italy, and drive myself then, to another
world: the rural world, the sub-proletarian world, the world of
labor. The order in which I list these worlds does not concern their
objective importance, it concerns the importance of my personal
experience.4
Pasolini’s sociological survey involves him not only through analy-
sis and study, but also through those aspects of Pasolini’s private
life which his detractors endlessly reminded him of as a maudite ver-
sion of his personality, for Pasolini himself constituted a funda-
mental part of his cognitive research.
For the purposes of this article, I will discuss, in particular, two
works by these authors: Pasolini’s Scritti corsari (1975) and Lasch’s
The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1995).
INTELLECTUALS BETWEEN DISSOCIATION AND DISSENTING
252
2 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Scritti corsari (“Corsair Writings”), Milano: Garzanti Novecento, 2008 [first
edition, 1975], p. 40. The translation from Italian of all the excerpts from Pasolini’s Scritti cor-
sari in this article is mine.
3 James Seaton, “The Gift of Christopher Lasch”, First Things 45/1994, www.leaderu.com/ftissues/
ft9408/seaton.html (accessed May 7, 2009).
4 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Scritti corsari, p. 52.
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