Intellectuals once held a strategic role legitimating the capitalist status quo.

Evidence

That classical ideology once did so, in the earlier stages of capitalism, can be measured by the significance of the intellectuals themselves — professors and journalists, ideologues of all kinds — who were assigned a strategic role in inventing forms of legitimation and legitimacy for the status quo and its tendencies. Then, ideology was something a little more significant than mere discourse, and ideas, although they determined nothing in the mode of the various idealistic theories of history, still furnished the principle “forms in which people became conscious of class conflict and fought it out” (Marx). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 853

Categorization

• XREF: Maps to Gramsci’s organic intellectuals and to the specific case of 19th-century ideologues discussed elsewhere in the reader’s corpus. — connects to: The modern cult of creative genius was invented to legitimize bourgeois distinction — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 436