To speak on intellectuals in a distinguished gathering of academics, I am afraid, is not a very pleasant exercise. It gives me a somewhat troubled feeling for more than one reason. First, by intellectual I mean the public intellectual, a figure who is not immune from public gaze and scrutiny, as distinct from the speculative philosophers of the ancient world. Second, the role of the public intellectual ultimately involves an ethics of responsibility towards society, more specifically, towards the so-called unenlightened, uneducated, subaltern masses. In other words, this refers to the mediational role of the public intellectual in the transmission of knowledge to the people, the aim, however, being not simply transmission but sharing of wisdom. Thus, I find myself more comfortable with figures like Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir rather than with Max Weber or Raymond Aron. Consequently, I intend to distinguish these two categories of intellectuals and examine the implications thereof, which might provide clues to a larger question: why is it that intellectuals of the first variety are increasingly becoming a vanishing tribe? To be more precise, what is the explanation of the growing mismatch between the intellectuals' scholarly pursuits and the ethics of responsibility, whereby they are increasingly turning out to be more professional than public? When intellectuals differ in their understanding of responsibility towards society and the masses, is it to be explained ultimately by the philosophical underpinnings of their social existence?