An intellectual (from the adjective meaning "involving thought and reason") is a person who uses his or her intelligence and analytical thinking, either in a profession capacity, or for personal reasons.

Terminology and basic issues

"Intellectual" can be used to mean, broadly, one of three classifications of human beings:

1. An individual who is deeply involved in abstract erudite ideas and theories.
2. An individual whose profession solely involves the dissemination and/or production of ideas, as opposed to producing products (e.g. a steel worker) or services (e.g. an electrician). For example, lawyers, professors, politicians, and scientists.
3. An individual of notable expertise in culture and the arts, expertise which allows them some cultural authority, which they then use to speak in public on other matters.

Historical perspectives

The English term "intellectual" conveys the general notion of a literate thinker. In its earlier uses, such as John Middleton Murry's The Evolution of an Intellectual (1920), there was little in the way of connotation of public rather than literary activity.

Men of letters

The expression "man of letters", has been used in some Western cultures to describe contemporary male intellectuals. The term is rarely used to denote "scholars": it is not synonymous with "academic".

The term "man of letters" implied a distinction between those who could read and write, and those who could not. The distinction had great weight when literacy was not widespread. "Men of letters" were also termed literati (from the Latin), as a group; this phrase may also refer to 'citizens' of the Republic of Letters. Literati survives as a term of abuse and is used in journalism. Literatus, in the singular, is rarely found in English - the English term is litterateur (from the French littérateur). The Republic of Letters grew during the late 1700s in France in salons (gathering), many of which were run by women.

19th-century English usage

By the late eighteenth century, literacy was becoming more widespread in countries such as the United Kingdom. The concept of a "man of letters" shifted to a more specialised meaning, as a man who made his living by writing about literature - usually not creative writers as such, but rather essayists, journalists and critics. This kind of activity was gradually replaced in the twentieth century by a more academic approach, and the term "man of letters" fell into disuse, to be replaced by the more generic and gender-neutral term "intellectual." This term first came into common use at the end of the nineteenth century, when it was used as a term for the defenders of Alfred Dreyfus; see below. The rise and fall of the term "man of letters", and indeed of the literary activity it described, has been charted.

Modes of 'intellectual class' in nineteenth-century Europe