Do Contemporary Intellectuals Still Have a Responsibility to Participate in Public Governance?

I sometimes sense a pervasive silence among intellectual communities, myself included. People stay within their respective specialized domains, exhibiting an almost tacit detachment from public affairs. This detachment does not stem from ignorance, but rather resembles a deliberate retreat. A while back, I wrote an essay on the public responsibilities of technical leaders, but in its wake, a deeper, meta-level question has continued to linger in my mind: why, after all, should we—especially intellectuals—think about and intervene in public governance? Does the unease I feel originate from some outdated moral fixation, or from a genuine responsibility that has not yet been entirely extinguished?

At first, I thought the answer lay in ancient Greece. In my common imagination, the Athenian polis appeared to be a golden age of civic participation, where intellectuals seemed to possess an innate consciousness of intervening in polis life. Yet, when I actually went to verify the historical evidence, this romantic presumption swiftly collapsed.

Pericles’ famous assertion in his Funeral Oration—that someone who takes no part in public affairs is regarded not merely as minding their own business, but as “useless”—was never directed at an elite class endowed with specialized knowledge, but at the citizenry as a whole. The core mechanisms of Athenian democracy were sortition and rotation; governance was designed as an everyday experience accessible to anyone. Even in Protagoras’ mythical allegory, Zeus distributes justice and shame equally to everyone, precisely because the governance of the polis must never be monopolized by a handful of experts. More ironically, the most luminous thinkers of the classical era stood precisely on the opposite side of direct political participation: Socrates maintained his private citizen status in the assembly throughout his life, claiming divine admonition to stay away from politics; Plato harbored deep antipathy toward democracy, and his several political ventures in Syracuse ended in complete failure; Aristotle elevated the contemplative life above the political life, not to mention that as a resident alien, he had no legal right to participate in Athenian governance to begin with. What ancient Greece offers is not a paradigm where “intellectuals ought to govern,” but one where governance refuses to be monopolized by knowledge.

Having dismantled the Greek illusion, I realized that what I initially yearned for was not the institutional obligations of Western classical citizenship at all. Where, then, did my inexplicable nostalgia come from? I suddenly thought of the “Four Sentences of Hengqu,” that self-claimed commitment in the Chinese literati tradition—namely Zhang Zai’s declaration: “To establish a mind for Heaven and Earth, to institute a livelihood for the people, to inherit the perished teachings of past sages, and to inaugurate lasting peace for all generations.” The captivating power of this posture lies in its lack of need for external institutional authorization; it was a mandate that scholars conferred upon themselves, viewing the rise and fall of all under heaven as their personal responsibility.

Yet the demise of this strong identity in modern society also follows clear historical traces. It was not some moral decline, but a structural rupture spanning more than a century. Beginning in the late Qing dynasty with the abolition of the imperial civil examinations, which severed the institutional convergence between the literati and political authority, the aspiration of scholars shifted fundamentally from “seeking the Dao” to “acquiring knowledge.” The subsequent disciplinary specialization and the industrialization of modern education further transformed universities into assembly lines mass-producing personnel equipped with narrow, subdivided skills. When the ultimate purpose of education is to produce specialized screws that can seamlessly plug and play into the social apparatus, knowledge itself inevitably sheds its original public concern and political centripetal force. For young people today, knowledge is simply knowledge—a tool for earning a living.

A more brutal historical reality, as Professor Yu Ying-shih once pointed out, is that the Chinese tradition of the “Orthodoxy of the Dao” resisting imperial political power never had the institutional backing of a concrete, corporate organization like the Western Church. It was suspended entirely in midair, sustained across generations solely through the personal integrity and moral spine of individual scholars. Once the institutional fixtures—the civil examinations, the academies, and the local gentry structures—crumbled, this self-conferred sense of nobility lost its social foundation entirely. In recent years, the stigmatization of the term “public intellectual” in the Chinese discourse has served as a grim footnote to how this self-authorization lost its public acceptance. When society begins to challenge: “On what grounds do you occupy the moral high ground to represent us?”, the grandiose ambition of Hengqu’s Four Sentences degenerates into a suspicious presumption.

Having deduced this far, the conceptual slide did not stop; instead, it plunged me into a deeper postmodern nihilism. If metaphysical orthodoxies have long shattered and the grand narratives of modernity have been thoroughly dismantled by the likes of Lyotard, then is the very commitment I am appealing for merely an unreflected narcissism? Under the discourse of anti-foundationalism and anti-essentialism, why must intellectuals assume the duties of the public sphere? And if not even intellectuals should assume this duty, should anyone else? Stepping back to the ultimate bottom line: in a depoliticized era replete with deconstruction and audience fragmentation, are deliberation, friction, and action in the public sphere still necessary at all?

At that moment, the validity of the entire question seemed completely dissolved. But I soon realized that while the blade of postmodernism can easily sever all metaphysical authorizations, it cannot slice away the stubborn realities of lived existence. Even if we declare in theory that public deliberation is meaningless, tangible crises of public governance do not grind to a halt. Algorithmic ethics and accountability, the predation of foundational data, and global climate change—these public affairs that heavily rely on specialized knowledge—do not evaporate simply because intellectuals make a postmodern exit. On the contrary, when reflective thinkers fall silent for lack of foundational ground, the governance vacuum is instantly seized by unfeeling technocrats, commercial platforms, and political leviathans. Retreat does not deliver freedom; it merely cedes the totalizing power that shapes human destiny to forces that never doubt themselves.

We must find a third path amidst the ruins of postmodernism—a posture of engagement that demands no absolute foundation and acknowledges its own contingency, yet still chooses commitment.

Richard Rorty provided me with immense inspiration. He pointed out that solidarity requires no metaphysical truth as a guarantee; language and beliefs are contingent historical products, yet human aversion to cruelty and sensitivity to the suffering of others can be expanded through imagination. Hannah Arendt, meanwhile, depicted the public realm as a secular space of appearance: public space comes into being wherever people gather together in speech and action. It is not naturally given, nor does it require divine sanction; it is continuously constructed in the actions through which people appear to one another. Viewed from their perspective, intellectuals are no longer legislators wielding absolute truth; they become guardians of the space of appearance, companions who use narrative to draw the plights of more strangers into the fold of “we.”

This dictates that the “engagement” we speak of today is by no means the reconstruction of a discursive hierarchy where experts condescend to enlighten the public. Genuine engagement is precisely an egalitarian willingness and attempt. This endeavor is fundamentally distinct from the deluge of unburdening rhetoric that floods social media. Most online expressions merely consume the public sphere, confirming allegiances, venting emotions, and chasing traffic at near-zero cost. Responsible engagement, by contrast, sustains the public sphere. It means a willingness to lay bare your own process of thought—including intermediate hesitations, overturned assumptions, and revised viewpoints—rather than propping up an unshakeable ideological banner. It means that you enter deliberation not for self-defense, but genuinely prepared to be changed by the very questions you explore.

We must recognize that the public sphere itself is not the ultimate end; it is a workshop, a set of instruments. We fiercely safeguard the possibility of debate in order to address the public realities that tangibly oppress and affect human lives. As to what scale this intention to reshape society should occupy, I have no desire to lay down rigid prescriptions. It might be voicing a piercing warning during the formulation of AI technical standards; it might be refusing to comply with deceit within a professional community; or it might simply be honest writing that restores the human face to a concrete individual crushed by grand narratives. The scale of the action does not alter its nature; what matters is whether one’s thinking maintains an orientation toward the public.

Through this shifting current of reflections, I was once pulled back and forth between virtue ethics and consequentialism. I yearned for an inward, unrewarded moral self-discipline, yet knew all too well that self-indulgent sentimentality decoupled from practical efficacy is meaningless. Ultimately, however, I realized that this tension may not require complete reconciliation at all.

In private life, I remain willing to uphold a self-demand akin to virtue, choosing to live in a posture of caring for the world and refusing numbness. But once stepping into the public domain, I must strip away every metaphysical halo of sanctity and become an honest actor, looking solely at the concrete consequences and real change brought about by action. I have no right whatever to demand that others around me possess elevated virtues, but I have the agency to decide whether I will stand up on specific issues myself.

Without divine mandates, without the authority of an orthodoxy, we are no longer scholar-officials patrolling in the name of Heaven. Yet this battered and bruised world still needs people to tend to it. If I happen to understand something, if I happen to have the conditions to speak the truth, and if I happen to sit in a place where I can be heard—then I will do what I can and say what I can. Nothing more.

Citation

If you need to cite this article, please refer to:

@article{zou2026intellectualspublicgovernance,
  title={当代知识分子是否仍有责任参与公共治理},
  author={Zou, Jiaxuan},
  journal={Jiaxuan's Blog},
  year={2026},
  url={https://jiaxuanzou0714.github.io/blog/2026/intellectuals-public-governance-responsibility/}
}