The intelligentsia (Latin: intellegentia, Polish: inteligencja, Russian: интеллигенция; IPA: [ɪntʲɪlʲɪˈɡʲentsɨjə]) is a status class of people engaged in complex mental labors meant to guide and critique and to assume leadership in shaping the culture and politics of their society. As such, the intelligentsia might include artists, school teachers, academics, writers, journalists, and other hommes de lettres (men of letters). Politically, the intelligentsia are the subject of active polemics about their historical role as a progressive influence and as a regressive influence upon the development of a modern society. As a status class, the intelligentsia arose in the late 18th century, first in Russian-controlled Poland during the age of Partitions (1772–95). During the 1840s, Polish society borrowed the term intelligentsia from the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, to identify and describe the educated and professionally active social strata of the patriotic bourgeoisie, who were capable of acting as the spiritual leaders of a country ruled by an authoritarian foreign power, Tsarist Russia (1721–1917). Moreover, in the early 20th century, before the Russian Revolution (1917) the term intelligentsiya described the status class of educated people whose cultural capital (schooling, education, enlightenment) allowed them to assume political leadership. Deprived of the socio-political influence derived from the “effective levers of economic development”, the intelligentsia occupied the cultural periphery of society in Eastern Europe, unlike in Germany and Great Britain, where the Bildungsbürgertum (the “Illustrated bourgeoisie”) and the British professions had defined roles within their societies.

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