What is an Intellectual? The Spanish Debate during the First World War

This paper explores the problematic definition of the term intelectual in Spain in the early twentieth century, as shown by the polemic that surrounded attitudes to the First World War. Despite Spain's official neutrality throughout the conflict, its citizens became extremely interested in the European struggle. The country's leading intellectual figures fostered a taking of sides that pitted aliadofilos against germanofilos in a discursive war of their own. But the manifestos published by each of the two sides in 1915 show that, beyond the discussion over which countries should win the war, this polemic contained an important debate over the very definition of the term intelectual. Each side produced its own idea of what was meant by this term, with the end goal of de-legitimizing the other side's claims. This shows us the unstable nature of the term intelectual and the figure it referred to; an instability scholars of twentieth-century Spanish intellectual history need to pay attention to. Rather than this being something particular to Spain, the paper argues that this type of polemic was intrinsic to the appearance of the intellectual as a public figure in early twentieth-century Europe.