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strictly rational criticism, where rational means ‘totally adherent to
facts’. The third reason, the most original one, perhaps unique, at
least within the Italian cultural scene, regards Pasolini’s way of
coping with contingent questions to get to the core issue that is the
function and the role to which intellectuals are always, with no
exceptions or compromises, duty-bound. Part of this function con-
sists of a real and pragmatic interest, or “love” for every single indi-
vidual which tends to refuse the official (sociological or political)
analysis of society’s problems based on general aspects and general
nominalizations. Talking, for instance, about consumeristic hedon -
ism in Italian society Pasolini claims:
It has never been spoken about the Italian problem. […] The
happy nominalization of the sociologists seems to die within their
own circle. I live within the things and I invent the way to name
them as well as I can. Of course if I try to ‘describe’ the terrible
aspect of an entire generation which has been affected by the
imbalance of a stupid and dreadful development, and I try to
‘describe’ it in ‘this’ young man, in ‘this’ worker, I won’t be under-
stood: because neither ‘this’ particular young man nor ‘this’ par-
ticular worker do personally matter at all to professional sociolo-
gists and politicians. On the other hand, this is precisely the only
thing that matters to me.5
As a historian and cultural critic, Christopher Lasch is probably
best known for The Culture of Narcissism, which became a best-seller
in the United States in the late 1970s. The Revolt of the Elites and the
Betrayal of Democracy is a collection of essays which was published
after Lasch’s death, in 1994, and it can be considered the summary
of Lasch’s thought. Divided into three parts and thirteen chapters,
this work mainly deals with the state of American soci ety in the
mid 1990s. Like Pasolini’s Scritti corsari the lucidity and the extent
of the analysis contained in Lasch’s book could easily address the
whole of Western society. Lasch claims that though privileged
classes have always operated throughout history, they have never
been as isolated from the rest of the society as they are at the pre s -
INTELLECTUALS BETWEEN DISSOCIATION AND DISSENTING
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5 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Scritti corsari, p. 74.
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