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.He called the latter organic intellectuals because they emergeddirectly connected to the dominant classes of each historical period.Thus, organic intellectuals were actively involved in society whereas tradi-tional ones, whose survival ultimately depended on past historical classattachments, claimed to hold a position independent of worldly matters(Gramsci, 1971a).Since the key characteristic of the New Left s vision ofintellectuals was one of commitment and involvement in the wider polit-ical affairs of the time, only Gramsci s notion of organic intellectual waspossibly deemed to act as a model.In the 1960s, any reference to the role of the intellectual by the NewLeft had a special emphasis on the type of intellectual that correspondedto a Marxist reading of history.Accordingly, the Gramscian notion ofintellectual that acted as a model for the New Left was based on the ideathat the working class was fertile ground for a new generation of organicintellectuals.Gramsci s schema therefore seems to have similarities withSartre s on a number of issues.The first is that Sartre s technician of prac-tical knowledge, from which intellectuals were normally recruited,included most of the social groupings that Gramsci saw as either the tra-ditional intellectuals or intellectuals organic to the bourgeoisie the fundamental social group of capitalism.10 The second is that the organicintellectuals Gramsci understood to be intrinsically linked to a classformation and who were called to play an involved role in society wereequivalent to Sartre s traditional or classical intellectual.Key to theseintellectuals beyond the fact that they had risen from within the newdominant class, the proletariat was that they could not possibly repre-sent a simple orator but had to be directive, specialized and politicallyinvolved (Gramsci, 1971a: 10).With reference to the debate over thecorrect combination of theory and practice, Gramsci argued against theidea that purely abstract, deductive mental processes entertained by The New Left 159what he called pure intellectuals could lead the way forward(Gramsci, 1971b).The New Left understood this position in such a waythat offered a valid definition of the committed intellectual, one who wasboth a scholar and a man of action (Kiernan, 1972).Although Sartre s lack of rigor in terms of the constituency on whosebehalf the intellectual spoke ranging from the working class to theoppressed makes it difficult to compare to the model proposed byGramsci, the need to make contact and maintain a clear connectionbetween the intellectual and the collective remained.The major differ-ence between the two models, however, rested in the ties that linked theintellectual to his/her constituency.Sartre never considered this issueuntil after the May 1968 events prompted a rapid and wholesale reconsid-eration of his theses and produced the criticism that the idea of intellec-tual he created spoke to the universal class but was not necessarily part ofit.In other words, Sartre s model of intellectual was either an elitist one,or it ceased to represent an intellectual.With Gramsci, this problem wasremoved by virtue of his belief that all social groups, including the intel-lectuals, were dependent on a class.Thus, in his view the working class,like the bourgeoisie before it, was capable of developing from its ranks itsown organic intellectuals (Gramsci, 1971a).Regardless of the democratizing effect of a notion of intellectual thatdemands a link with the masses, it could be argued that Gramsci s modeldoesn t go beyond Sartre s as it still depends on the input of intellectualsjoining the party from the outside.Yet, part of the success enjoyed byGramsci in the New Left was due to the ways in which his ideas fit withina period of Marxist revival.This made Leninism a natural contributor toideas on the role of the intellectual.Lenin s Revolutionary Intellectual Doubts about Stalinism created by Khrushchev s 1956 speech at theTwentieth Party Congress in February 1956 led to a reappraisal of theMarxist legacy that included the issue of the intellectual.In France,the Communist Party and its prestige remained powerful and creativeelements in the rescue of a role for the intellectual who worked within theParty s control and authority.In the 1960s, Louis Althusser provided justthat.He searched for an intellectual role that was, as in the case of Sartre,politically committed, yet independent of interference from the Party.His own circumstances as a Communist Party member throughout theperiod as well as lecturer at Paris-based, prestigious École NormaleSupérieure ENS radically differ from those of Sartre who refused to belinked to any structure of power.These different circumstances explain 160 Cuba and Western Intellectuals since 1959partly the process by which Althusser s Leninism flourished in a youngstudent generation among whom Régis Debray, future author of Revolution in the revolution? , was the obvious reference.11 However,where Sartre sought personal freedom from the structures of power,Althusser arguably maintained a philosophical type of freedom, and wasthus able to propose a model of disciplined revolutionary and committedintellectual that could maintain a distance from the questions of the timeas described by Sartre
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