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It was after the end of World War II that the awakening of this first generation came in, which acted on the pendulum of ideologies. Intellectualism was almost a public duty, not only political but also social, a means of socialization even for the younger generation. In those years, ideas became dangerous as they enjoyed popularity and could shape policies, and intellectuals—from the lecture halls of Paris to the debates at MIT—were not marginal, but rather, one might say, acted at the center of society.

It was the “age of ideologies” — when Marxism, existentialism, and liberalism still clashed in the cafés of the Latin Quarter and the studios of the BBC, and public discourse still had the naivety to believe that thought could change the world. A typical example is Noam Chomsky’s text from that period, in which he wrote in “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” (1967) “it is the responsibility of intellectuals to tell the truth and expose lies.” This was his moral and political credo: that intellectuals, having access to knowledge, resources, and freedom of speech, have a special duty—not just to comment, but to expose. A phrase almost emblematic of an era when public reflection was not an academic sport but an act of resistance.

That was once the case; today, intellectuals are viewed with suspicion. Of course, even earlier, intellectuals had acquired a status that was rather detached from social reality; they had a heavy and completely theoretical outlook. In Kundera’s book, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Mirek learns from his girlfriend that she is disappointed with the way he makes love to her, telling him that he does it like an “intellectual,” a heavy insult, as Kundera points out below, because it implied that he was detached from the “human experience”.

The word “expert,” let alone intellectuals, sounds like an exaggeration today, with documentation resembling a web of lies, and scientists being treated like bureaucrats. From tabloid headlines to political talk show screens, the ease of ignorance has become the new language of “candor.” The politician who “speaks simply,” who laughs at academics and promises to “take the country back from the intellectuals,” does not seem so dangerous because he seems familiar. Of course, some responsibility for this outcome lies with those who, in the effort to define what Europe is, in the battle of identities in general, while the citizens talked about rent and supermarket prices. Somewhere along the way, a rift was created between intellectual discourse and lived experience, a comparison that Kundera makes quite well, if one thinks about it.

 

Thus, even “organic” intellectuals (intellectuals who express and organize the consciousness of a social class, linking thought with action) become victims of anti-intellectualism. For those who embrace the latter view, this functions as the new symbol that says” I do not belong to the detached theorists, I am one of you.” And it is precisely this “popular (populist) self” that claims power. A typical example comes from the political laboratory of the West, the United States, with the dismantling of the US Department of Education, an idea that keeps coming back to conservative governments, not as the product of a technical plan but as a deep need to delegitimize education itself, to present knowledge as a conspiracy of the “educated.”

Trump, he says, did not need a political program; he already had a phrase, “I love the poorly educated,” among those who voted for him, emphasizing this social group. The irony is that anti-intellectualism always dresses itself in the clothes of freedom, because it rejects authority not through critical thinking but through a type of mistrust where emotion replaces argument. Irony, of course, because it is completely contrary to the principles of the European Enlightenment on which Europe was founded, considering the writings of Nicolas de Condorcet in Rapport et projet de décret sur l’organisation générale de l’instruction publique, where he says “As long as there are men who do not obey their reason alone, who receive their opinions from a foreign opinion, in vain would all chains have been broken; the human race would remain divided into two classes: that of men who reason, and that of men who believe.” 

Thus, even “organic” intellectuals (intellectuals who express and organize the consciousness of a social class, linking thought with action) become victims of anti-intellectualism. For those who embrace the latter view, this functions as the new symbol that says” I do not belong to the detached theorists, I am one of you.” And it is precisely this “popular (populist) self” that claims power. A typical example comes from the political laboratory of the West, the United States, with the dismantling of the US Department of Education, an idea that keeps coming back to conservative governments, not as the product of a technical plan but as a deep need to delegitimize education itself, to present knowledge as a conspiracy of the “educated.”

Trump, he says, did not need a political program; he already had a phrase, “I love the poorly educated,” among those who voted for him, emphasizing this social group. The irony is that anti-intellectualism always dresses itself in the clothes of freedom, because it rejects authority not through critical thinking but through a type of mistrust where emotion replaces argument. Irony, of course, because it is completely contrary to the principles of the European Enlightenment on which Europe was founded, considering the writings of Nicolas de Condorcet in Rapport et projet de décret sur l’organisation générale de l’instruction publique, where he says “As long as there are men who do not obey their reason alone, who receive their opinions from a foreign opinion, in vain would all chains have been broken; the human race would remain divided into two classes: that of men who reason, and that of men who believe.” 

 

So what does all this mean? Perhaps it ties in with the findings of the Centre for European Policy Analysis study, which showed that young people aged 18–24 in countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary, and Slovakia express a preference for “strong leaders” who do not need a parliament, a sign that dialectical and ideological relations are being undermined in favor of practical supremacy. However, the crisis is cognitive in nature: young Europeans do not reject democracy because they necessarily hate it, but because they do not understand it as an intellectual endeavour. The issue seems more like a complex logistical system than an everyday act of thinking, and this disconnection from the intellectual dimension of public life is fueled by a broader environment of mistrust. 

And this is when the right-wing populist imagination in Europe portrays universities as “places of moral corruption and elitism,” something that exists as a pattern and is noted with the same, if not greater, intensity in America. The above is reiterated in the European Commission’s EU Strategy to Face Narratives Against Democracy study, warning that this web of ideas, this narrative, “intellectuals are out of touch,” “the elite do not understand ordinary people” is the foundation for the deconstruction of democratic consensus.

Anti-intellectualism in this context is not expressed through attacks on universities but through a more insidious social narrative, that complexity is the enemy and simplicity is a virtue, a blunt razor of Occam. On top of this, another narrative is being constructed, as it seems, in Romania—far-right politicians consider intellectuals to be “national traitors” who undermine national values, of course, this view is rather exportable and not exclusive to Romania.

Across Europe, the erosion of trust in intellectual authority has evolved into a defining feature of political life. What once manifested as skepticism toward academia or bureaucracy has now taken the shape of open hostility toward knowledge itself — a populist valorization of instinct, emotion over evidence. Anti-intellectualism has become a symbolic language of authenticity, a way for leaders to frame themselves as “of the people” and for citizens to resist what they perceive as distant, moralizing elites. From Rome to Warsaw to Athens, attacks on independent institutions, universities, and figures of rational accountability reveal a shared anxiety toward intellect as power. The rhetoric varies,  sometimes defiant, sometimes cynical, but the impulse is to turn ignorance into “virtue” and criticism into “betrayal” of the nation and its identity.

In October 2018, Matteo Salvini openly questioned expertise during a live broadcast on Facebook, saying: “Io sono ignorante, ma voi dove eravate?” (“I am ignorant, but where were you?”) in response to the “professoroni,” a derogatory term he used for economists and lawyers who had criticized his government’s budget plans. Salvini named Tito Boeri and Ugo De Siervo, dismissing their economic arguments as the grumbling of detached elites who had let Italy down. He went on to say, “I am a humble, ignorant minister,” arguing that common sense is more important than academic knowledge. He was directly following Italy’s long populist tradition of presenting scholars and institutions as obstacles to “true Italians,” breaking down the divide between demagoguery and authenticity.

In Poland, since 2015, the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party has been repeatedly accused of interfering with university autonomy and targeting critical intellectuals. The case of constitutionalist Wojciech Sadowski is a prime example: after publicly speaking out in favor of the rule of law, he faced lawsuits and legal proceedings organized by government circles and pro-government media. This case does not only concern an academic, but reflects a systematic effort to restrict freedom of expression and delegitimize critical thinking in universities as an indirect expression of anti-intellectualism.

The case of Christos Rammos in Greece once again accurately encapsulates the conflict between the institutional logic of transparency and a political culture that often treats knowledge and control as a threat. The former president of the Hellenic Data Protection Authority, who found himself at the center of the wiretapping scandal, spoke openly of “character assassination,” denouncing a hostile environment toward independent authorities and documented accountability. A few months earlier, the New Left party had nominated him for the position of President of the Republic, a move that highlighted his institutional credibility; but he declined, denouncing “petty political calculations” and “partisan strategies.” This episode showed exactly how an attack on the independent, rational voice of a public official can serve as a mirror of contemporary anti-intellectualism, an intolerance of knowledge and criticism.

To conclude, the rejection of intellectualism, either in a more brutal format or a more subdural; both in the form of public and non-public intellectuals, journalistic dialogue, even as an act of individual progression through structures such as universities, has roots that are nourished by political populism, elitism, and information fatigue. Instead of theory being translated into lived experience, in terms of justice and prosperity, reflection on these issues begins to seem arrogant when the problems of everyday life are pressing, and citizens forget that democracies do not run on autopilot.

This tension is actively exploited by politicians, particularly on the far right, who present “intellectuals” as out-of-touch relics trapped in their ivory towers — or worse, as traitors to the nation when they dare to speak. The fear of being heard becomes, paradoxically, another form of silencing, a mechanism through which independent thought is delegitimized, and the intellectual’s heterotopia — their space of distance and reflection — is reframed as deviance from the social order.

Yet this rhetoric, while feeding the anti-democratic arc, has been indirectly sustained by the liberal mainstream itself — by decades of market-driven policies and technocratic governance that failed to deliver more democracy to those below. The result is a double alienation: intellectuals mistrusted for their distance, and citizens disillusioned by a democracy that no longer feels participatory. When crises multiply and inequalities deepen, the people are not merely excluded; they are made to feel politically bankrupt, trapped in a system that both demands their faith and denies them agency.

The Europe of our time is not threatened by ignorance, but by its acceptance as organic. Thought fatigue is the new status quo, a mild, polite nihilism wearing the mask of realism. And within it, democracy is eroding under a grimace of indifference.

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