An intellectual is a person who engages in critical study, thought, and reflection about the reality of society, proposes solutions for the normative problems of society, and by such discourse in the public sphere gains authority from public opinion. Coming from the world of culture, either as a creator or as a mediator, the intellectual participates in politics, either to defend a concrete proposition or to denounce an injustice, usually by producing or by extending an ideology, and by defending one or another system of values. In a society, the intellectuals constitute the intelligentsia, which is a status class organised either by ideology (the conservative, fascist, progressive, reactionary, revolutionary, democratic, communist intellectuals, et al.) or by nationality (the “American intellectuals”, the “French intellectuals”, the “Ibero–American intellectuals”). As a status class, the intellectuals originated from the intelligentsiya of Tsarist Russia (ca. 1860s–70s), the social stratum of men and women who possessed intellectual formation (education or Enlightenment or both), and so were the social counterpart to the German Bildungsbürgertum and to the French bourgeoisie éclairée, the “enlightened middle class” of those countries. In the late 19th century, during the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906), an identity crisis of anti–Semitic nationalism for the French Third Republic (1870–1940), the reactionary anti–Dreyfusards (Maurice Barrès, Ferdinand Brunetière, and others) used the terms “intellectual” and “the intellectuals” to deride the liberal Dreyfusards (Émile Zola, Octave Mirbeau, Anatole France, and others) as political busy-bodies, from the realms of culture, art, and science, who had become involved in what was none of their business, by their public advocacy for the exoneration and liberation of the Jewish Artillery Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who had been falsely condemned of betraying France to Germany. In the 20th century, the term “intellectual” acquired positive connotations of social prestige derived from him or her possessing intellect and superior intelligence, especially when the intellectual’s activities in the public sphere exerted positive consequences upon the common good, by means of moral responsibility, altruism, and solidarity, in effort to elevate the intellectual understanding of the public at large, without resorting to the manipulations of populism, paternalism, and condescension. Hence, for the educated man and woman, participating in politics (the public sphere) is a social function that dates from the Græco–Latin Classical era: The determining factor for a thinker (historian, philosopher, scientist, writer, artist, et al.) to be considered “an Intellectual” is the degree to which he or she is implicated and engaged with the vital reality of contemporary times; that is to say, participation in the public affairs of society. Consequently, being designated as “an Intellectual” is determined by the degree of influence of the designator’s motivations, opinions, and options of action (social, political, ideological), and by his or her affinity with the given thinker; therefore: Analogously, the application and the conceptual value of the terms “intellectual” and “the intellectuals” are socially negative when the practice of intellectuality is exclusively in service to The Establishment who wield power in a society, as such: Hence, Noam Chomky’s negative criticism of the Establishment Intellectual, logically postulates the existence of an intellectual Other, the public intellectual: