Ignatieff: Proud to be an elitist

Michael Ignatieff is entitled to his entitlements. As a Liberal elitist, it would be in his political best interest to pander to the unwashed Canadian masses. That just goes against the very fibre of Iggy’s being. He doesn’t want to apologize for his elitism. He wants to be proud of it. He has “earned the right to speak,” unlike some, because it “isn’t a social priviledge.”

Full article is here.

When Michael Ignatieff was an historian at Harvard, and before he returned to his native Canada to go into politics, he described the intellectual in a 2000 CBC radio interview:

“An intellectual is not an academic. An intellectual is not a specialist. And an intellectual is not a journalist. We’ve got plenty of academics, plenty of specialists, plenty of journalists. What we don’t have enough of are people who ask questions of principle, fundamental principles about political and moral issues and who put together general propositions from a host of different sources.

““An intellectual is a generalist, an intellectual is someone who is not an expert in a particular field but who takes propositions that are lying around the tables of many different places; journalism, academics, specialisms of various kinds of science and puts together general frameworks, general theories, general accounts, whose ultimate audience is the man in the street and whose ultimate purpose is to mold and shape the conversation of a country or a nation or a people. Intellectuals do that. It’s a frankly elitist function in the sense that it presumes that an intellectual does know more than other people. And we become, I think, much too apologetic about that elitism.”

He attacks outright the belief that elitism is wrong.

“Some people do know more than other people. Some people have earned the right to speak. Some people have earned the right to know things. They paid for it in hard labour. It’s not a social privilege. It’s not a financial privilege. It’s just the privilege of having read all the books you see around [me]. And it’s not something to be proud of. You put in the years.

“That’s an intellectual’s legitimacy. He’s put in the years and also the test of legitimacy is intellectual honesty. Not being in hock to some ideology, not being in hock to some institution. Being independent. Being able to stand up and say what the hell you please.”