Intelligentsia

The intelligentsia (from Russian интеллигенция, ; from Latin: intelligentia) is a social class of people engaged in complex mental labour aimed at disseminating culture. This therefore might include everyone from artists to school teachers and book readers. The term was first used in pre-revolutionary Russia to describe people possessing cultural and political initiative. But it was commonly used by those individuals themselves to create an apparent distance from the masses, and generally retained that narrow self-definition. More recently the term mass intelligentsia has been popularized to describe the intellectual effect of tertiary education upon a population. See the mass intelligentsia section below.