According to an instantaneous and superficial approach, language and intellectuals seem to be, at the same time, two categories close as well as hardly accessible ¹. Looking at the historiographic approach that until now has considered its importance and centrality, will be clear how different is the set of the elements surfacing in related research lines as peremptory, and the analytic categories used in the heuristic phase. First of all is different the historiographic typecasting: the intellectuals history – one of the most important development vector in historic research of the 20 th century – is essentially brought back to a philosophic setting that often gives a contribute to a non-adequately deepened contextualization in its own formal layout.

In the history the idea results often linked to an auto-referencial referential dimension in which the idea connects to idea in a logical-deductive method in which the structural feature created by that idea doesn't outcrop with the desirable brightness. In Italy – the case study Country in our analysis – this is overall the fruit of an idealistic hegemony that has generated a historic research displacement pro an ethical-political approach; in this way history is history of facts (histoire événementielle , as teaches Fernand Braudel) and characters; history is the unilinear deploying of the idea of freedom; just interrupted by incidental pathologies, just the way happened in fascism, a pathology assaulting the healthy body of a liberal society.

But neither Marxist historiography – that starts from an economic approach of research: the history as classes conflict and social development dialectic – manages in defining the links between society and intellectuals on a methodological plan.

Taking up an inheritance by enlightenment and French revolution, Marxism exasperates intellectual's critical function and his demiurgic connotation: the man of learning has no more a mission but a function conveyed by an organisation. Lenin assigns to a minority organised in political party the function of addressing and driving the revolution thrust asking intellectuals their conversion to that same revolution cause.

In “Geschichte und Klassenbewustein” Lukacs modifies the point of view of totality in a point of partiticity: thus the intellectual becomes an officer. As well know, in Italy Antonio G ramsci is the one who dedicated a wide range of his thought on the intellectual's theme. But once again, “who were” the intellectuals according to Gramsci? Superstructures officers are by one side the clerks of the leading group and by the other side they are considered to be the culture promoters: once unanchored by the leading group they have to make their selves organical to the party in order to conquer the hegemony in civil society: intermediate area between society and State.

The historiographic innovations by the 60's and 70's have introduced some elements of interest creating an important bloom of studies as global interpretation and as the new meaning of some analysis. In England and in Germany the sociologic dimension prevailed creating general studies about the intellectuals professional categories. In France , prosopography has been enriching of useful elements of analysis for the last 20 years starting from the model introduced by Jean François Sirinelli: g é n é ration et lieux de sociabilité.

Looking at the other side of the problem – the language – the importance of self referenciality will be clear. First of all we can observe that language is one of the most interesting field of research for sociology, linguistic, political science, mass-communication a n a l ysis. Just during last 20-30 years historians turned their attention on this kind of subject, with bets regards to history of language and, on the other side, history of propaganda and political communication.

Propaganda has particularly contributed in transferring attention on the dynamic element of language and on the subjective intervention on historic facts and consequentially by investigating their symbolic implications.

Starting from the 60's with the change generated in one side by sociology and Anglo-saxon matrix historic anthropology, and in the other side by the acquisition of the methodological statutes and of the analysis categories defined by the group of scholars of the historical review “Les Annales”, social history pa y ed more attention to the problem of language, of the relationship between language and society, and also – with the “linguistic turn” extreme – to the linguistic representation of society. Last, but of course not least, the approach of Marxist structuralism: language as a representation of power, hierarchy, authority, in particular studying punitive structures and large organizations leadership.

These marks of difference we have indicated until now reveal a lot about the possible directions that could be taken by the research in order to obtain an approach among the categories. The history of intellectuals can be considered in a wide part the history of the languages used by the intellectuals: the language they invent, disseminate; and so – following this direction – it will appear more certain and understandable.

With this intervention we are trying to present a model for a linguistic history of the intellectuals, identifying some main phases corresponding to a significant transformation in word's meaning and in the function that the man of learning should get in the society and so in the intellectual's language. It seems that one of the possible settings of this model should be related to the relationships between tradition and modernity and thus modernization as the passage from one to the other society model. According to classical sociologic theories we define the traditional society as a society characterized by preponderance of communitarian relations, by a bound and often self-consumption production's economy, scarce jobs differentiation, technologic absence on scientific bases, general agreement about some traditions, magic and religious beliefs, agreement about hierarchies and authority. A few social mobility.

According to the model proposed by Talcott Parsons tradition and modernity should connote society upon opposing tendencies: particularism/universalism; diffusion/specificity; affectivity/affective neutrality; enrolment/acquisition. So what's intellectuals' role in the transition process from one to the other stadium or to put it better in the modernization process meant as a society's landing place at an industrial capitalism status, advanced, wide democratic participation, high secularization level?

When the word “intellectual” was introduced for the first time – with the J'accuse by Emile Zola in 1898 – it brought two fundamental meanings: “man of learning” proximity to values funding society, the obligation of undertaking the defence of it.

However according to the enlightenment-like tradition the role of Prince counsellor usually assigned to the intellectual, was assimilated to the one of power's ideologist. In the first phase of its story the intellectual was thus the leading class functionary and the language he contributed to invent and spread was the one of the modernity ordained by the elites. Just the way underlined in the 50's of the 20 th century by Karl Deutch, giving way to a strand of studies destined to a great fortune in the last twenty years, the process of nation building was at the same time a great process of social communication, meant as the way of communicating in the most efficient way, and on a wider range of topics, with the members of a large group of subjects. At the origin of the modern state we can find two fundamental targets: assuring compliance to rules issued by the central power, and surpassing in a mixing direction the existing uses.

By one side, state officers – bureaucrats and teachers – covered a central role in the legislative unification .

By the other side modern intellectuals were engaged in the construction opera of the State symbolic stage that Eric Hobsbawn called “invention of the tradition”. Thus they were the ideology constructors, the dominant ideas divulgers in the civil society. The 19 th century can be considered as an époque characterized by several cultural crusades in order to make real and consolidate national unity, real legitimization element of the modern state. Not only the intellectual took part to the battle for the linguistic unification and the dialects rooting out, but he chime in making substance the symbolic language of the modern state, flawing the flag, singing the people greatness celebrating in rituals, ceremonies, monuments. We should observe the fact that this process used to keep lots of element of continuity: of which the main is the conservation of the sovereign sacredness principle, and of all those elements realizing it, and realizing that transfer, tracing the origin of the middle age, of the sacredness, from the church to the state, that proceeded to its own semi religious consecration.

Thus, just the way K antorowicz sustained in his imposing study about the idea of royalty in middle age the idea of corpus mysticum, defined by the Church, was acquired by the State and used by lawyers, politicians and intellectuals in building a new state's ideology.

Also, military language was a very important one to spread the sense of a national identity, especially in countries – Italy for example – later became united nations. Army, school, and bureaucracy, were the three gymnasiums of the Unitarian army, and of the language apprenticeship of the modern state.

Otherwise the construction process of the national identity has been marked by the propulsion of some subjects inside the State, grown up marginally or against it. This is the case of modern mass political parties, that meant the intellectuals' dedication in an organic function in virtue of a free and subjective choice. For the particular meaning owned by the language of the identity and for the role played by the intellectuals, was the socialist movement the most important example of these movements. Getting rid of the bourgeois origin, and choosing to move the proletarian cause the man of learning became staff of the revolution cause-politician that way, according to Lenin's definition.

Socialist and social democratic parties with a high ideological and programmatic matrix. The language codifying could be defined the one of a totalitarian politics. The “leader–party” set in the middle of the intellectual dialectic as a subject and as a formal layout, and in that language it poured and exemplified the jacobinian prospective of man and new society construction.

It's well worth asking ourselves, first of all, what's the relation that the socialist movement implant with the state and the nation, how it can be considered as laying in an external point and how the two dimension interpenetrate. If that's true that socialist movement has in its own main features the tract of internationalism we must consider that no other political movement had, historically, an equal ability in territorial rooting. Not only the language matter was in the middle of Lenin's reflection about people's self determination; not only Stalin wrote a short pamphlet about the language that became a fundamental work for an époque of communist culture, but the whole movement and the block of parties that took inspiration by the socialism tried to find an intensive and interpenetrate relationship with their native Country.

We just need to remember – to prove it – how all the political parties acquired the “national” adjective in their own denomination, above all in the second after-war; how all of them used to build their headquarters in places and buildings in order to show their attempt to reach the Government; just the way everybody decorated their symbols with national colours: overall the revolution red flag.

The communist party and the Italian socialist one have always presented, after the second world war, the Italian flag in their own iconographic expressions; after Bad Godeseberg the national German flag was risen on the SPD headquarter together with the red one: the local government conquest was fundamental, above all in the big cities,: AUSTRIAN SOCIALDEMOCRACY expressed for the whole second after-war their chancellor in the figure of Vienna's Major.

In facts, according to a second analysis level the language of the socialist parties invests the fragile junction of the relation between modernity and tradition. If that's true that socialism was on of the most powerful revolutionary brake vectors.. is also true that relevant were the elements of continuity acquired by tradition and reversed in the patrimonial code.

Let's think about- for instance- the liberty movement's style arts and crafts by William Morris e Walter Crane and about the remaining, in the socialist iconography between the two centuries of symbols just like the one of entwined hands coming straight from the free mason's simbology . The relation between tradition and modernity declines, in the masons movement, with a singular retrocession and advancing process: the mason movement language was always related to the future construction and to the big vectors of this construction: industrialization, machinism, positivism, scientism, rational organization, enlargement in democratic participation, have always been present in left winged political parties linguistic register.

Left winged language were strongly addressed to the past, and (provocating) not lacking of some conservative element. The opposition to modern rationality, codified in exasperate research of the communitarian spirit, in the construction that German historiography defined socialist arbeitergemeinschaft.

This came to be a particular articulation of the continuity relation with those movements, partied, transformed into regimes, that used the ideology as the conservative reaction arm. The intellectuals were in facts the active subjects in the construction of the modern bourgeois public opinion, according to the definition given by Jurgen Habermas working in places such as café, salons, clubs.

The construction of the Unitarian state found some guides among the intellectuals linked to the socialist movement: according to Antonio Gramsci for instance in Italy the newspaper “AVANTI!” acted worked for a linguistic and cultural unification.

Now as explained by Georg Mosse in his magistral work on the birth of national socialist movement – reaction movement – Nazism and fascism as well – took from the socialism a large component of their own languages and of their identity codes, but they also instituted lieux de sociabilité: magazines, press, universities, cinemas, mass media. A whole generation of men of learning grove in Italy under the fascism, getting widely education, principles and methods, and only after the 30's accruing an antifascist opposition conscience. Also for the language is present the problem, of the continuity among pre-fascism, fascism, post fascism that convenes, now, decline in an interrogatives series pertaining the role and the presence of intellectuals, and at the same time their link to the democratic political organizations. Under this last aspect, in fact, the elements of continuity appear more evident than the elements of a brake that also the risen democratic parties claimed as a constitutive tract. In truth, according to politological construction of models, the main European political parties acted as social integration ones- above all the socialist and catholic ones- and however, due to the binding matrix that the taking part to the party's ideology and to the organization had, such parties reveal relevant analogies just with fascist party, totalitarian integration party: global and capillary organization of the militant life, of the leader's cult, possibility to get struggle of it just with the expulsion.

All the Italian republican political tradition was deeply linked to the political shapes of the nineteenth century, and the same politician that led Italy in the modernity were men born and grown up under an 18 th policy. So the intellectual: in the 50's of the 20 th century he was till conserving a kind of language which was universalistic and hardly ideological.

When did this model of intellectual go to die? Trying to answer this question we would conclude our speech, saying we think universalism and ideology of intellectual life collapsed under the emergence of a new kind of cultural production – a commercial way of production – and a much more spacialistic kind of knowledge. This process generated the “new mandarins”, as Noam Chomsky wrote in the 70's. The traditional intellectual layied on a sort of regret for its lost function and, more generally, for a lost world.