PUBLIC INTELLECTUALS AND CULTURAL POLICY IN FRANCE.

The notion of the public intellectual in France represents a form of extra‐governmental cultural politics in its own right. This article begins, however, by exploring three sets of reasons that can account for the aversion of French intellectuals under the Fifth Republic to involvement in State cultural policy processes. These are: the historical counter‐examples represented by intellectuals’ involvement in the policy apparatuses of the Vichy regime and the French Communist Party; the positive tradition of laicity, or of a realm of free inquiry politically set off from the political field; and the often detrimental effects on academic prestige of involvement in policy processes. It then traces the incentives and institutional channels through which some public intellectuals have nonetheless been brought into the processes of cultural and educational policy development over recent decades. It concludes by suggesting how intellectuals may be conceived not simply as architects or critics, but also as objects of cultural policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]