Film: William Davies and James Butler · On Politics: What happened to the intellectual?

William Davies and James explore what's actually changed about intellectuals in public life, starting with a basic problem: intellectuals used to mean something specific, but now the term gets thrown around to cover technocrats, academics, experts, polemicists, thought leaders, gurus, and utopians. The distinction matters because these groups operate differently. Weber and Gramsci both insisted that real intellectuals needed autonomy—the ability to think and speak independently—paired with a sense of responsibility to the public. That combination separated them from mere specialists or opinion-makers working within existing power structures. Hayek's anti-intellectualism fundamentally reshaped how we talk about ideas and expertise. His skepticism toward intellectuals as a class fed into a broader distrust of independent thought and public intellectualism that persists today. This created a strange inversion: we simultaneously dismiss intellectuals while desperately seeking guidance on complex problems. The conversation touches on where politicians actually source their ideas now, which suggests the old pathways have fractured. The algorithmic video platforms pose a genuine structural challenge to the kind of thinking intellectuals traditionally did. These systems reward engagement and speed over depth or independence. They're built to amplify certain voices while burying others, not based on merit or rigor but on what algorithms predict will keep users scrolling. That environment makes sustained, autonomous thought harder to maintain and harder to reach an audience—which gets at whether there's even space left for intellectuals to operate as Davies and Gramsci understood them.