Take the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas — perhaps one of the few who truly deserve the label "public intellectual", precisely because he's not a "publicity intellectual". If Habermas epitomises the dry and serious German sage, the suave and glib Bernard-Henri Lévy does it for the French to an almost comical extent. While Habermas blames the rise of euroscepticism on politicians who fail to explain the EU's achievements in ways that people can relate to, Lévy argues that Europe's identity resembles America's, whose main achievement is the symbolic unifying of all its disparate parts: "Europeans need something that we can point to and call ours." 

But Lévy is wrong on both counts: the United States is much more than just a symbol, and anyway the last thing we Europeans need are more lofty symbols. Isn't it high time to get on with the job of lifting the Continent out of its seemingly endless crisis? What use is a republic of letters if it doesn't get down to business with the messy world of politics, what the classical world knew as the res publica?

This is a question one would be hard pressed to find debated among intellectuals on the Continent — no matter how enthusiastic some are about realpolitik, intellectualism is always in part utopianism, a move away from reality rather than a way of exploring it. No one knew this better than Bertrand Russell — who, as one of the founding fathers of analytical philosophy, couldn't be further from a metaphysical schmoozer. "Intellectuals appear to have had more influence in former periods than in our own," Russell wrote in 1939. However, he continued, "This influence today has been exaggerated. Intellectuals may influence people's talk more than their actions. They are thought to have caused changes when they merely have been foreseeing them a little sooner than the rest." 

Russell's insight takes intellectuals down a peg or two, but it also highlights the importance of talk over action, and the ability to "scout" ideas. Isn't this the role an intellectual ought to play? After all, it's the duty of a thinker to be something of an outsider, and to stir up opinion rather than to soothe it.