Literati versus intelligentsia

In emphasizing two contrasing aspects of the functions and roles of the literate in the early and later civilisations, Childe and Toynbee point to a difference that might deserve the distinguishing terms that these writers give to the two kinds of literate people. Childe is impressed with the separation between craftsmanship and literacy in the early civilizations and with the "scholastic attitude" developed by those clerks who used writing to set down traditional lore and knowledge and who came to develop the exact sciences and philosophy. Some of these became custodians and interpreters of sacred books. In this aspect of their functions, internal to the developing civilisation, we might speak of the new type of men as literati. The literate elite of China illustrate this type. These persons are enclosed within the culture that has become civilisation. They carry it forward into a more systematic and reflective phase....

Toynbee, on the other hand, writes of the functions of those literate persons who mediate between the society out of which they arose and some other and alien civilisation which is impinging upon it. These people have learned something alien to the culture of their native community; they "have learnt the tricks of the intrusive civilisaton's trade so far as may be necessary to enable their own community, through their agency, just to hold its own in a social environment in which life is ceasing to be lived in accordance with the local tradition and is coming more and more to be lived in the style imposed by the intrusive civilisation upon the aliens who fall under its domination"....These people Toynbee calls by a word which developed for them in Russia, the intelligentsia. In contrast to the literati, the member of the intelligentsia "is born to be unhappy". He belongs to two worlds, not one; he is a "marginal man".

Robert Redfield