Abstract

KWIEK, Marek. Wolf Lepenies: Homo Europaeus Intellectualis revisited. Cad. Hist. Educ. [online]. 2019, vol.18, n.1, pp.146-159.  Epub May 06, 2019. ISSN 1982-7806.  https://doi.org/10.14393/che-v18n1-2019-8.

The author revisits Wolf Lepenies' narratives on the roles played by intellectuals in the history of contemporary Europe, placing them within an opposition that has structured the sociologist’s thinking in the last quarter of the twentieth century or so: that of melancholy and utopia. Such a pair not only allows us to see the past of intellectuals in Western and Eastern Europe after the events of 1989 (the downfall of the Berlin Wall and the extinction of the Soviet state) from a different perspective (from the one that values the political engagement of the intellectual, for instance), but also allows us to look carefully at the intellectual’s place in today’s world, after the downfall of the two great utopias of modernity: the communist utopia of ends and the capitalist utopia of means.

Keywords : Intellectuals; Wolf Lepenies; Melancholy and Utopia.

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