His eloquent defense of the Protestant merchant Jean Calas, broken on the wheel in 1762 for the supposed murder of his suicidal son, made him the model of the engaged intellectual, rallying public opinion against injustice.
Daniel Bell, the writer, editor, sociologist and teacher who over seven decades came to epitomize the engaged intellectual as he struggled to reveal the past, comprehend the present and anticipate the future, died on Tuesday at his home in Cambridge, Mass.
As Earth remembers it, a turning point came when one of their close friends argued that without having tried a psychedelic "you could not be taken seriously as an engaged intellectual who was interested in topics of spirituality and metaphysics".
Mr. Judt (pronounced Jutt), who was British by birth and education but who taught at American universities for most of his career, began as a specialist in postwar French intellectual history, and for much of his life he embodied the idea of the French-style engaged intellectual.
Gordon Conway, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation (he is an agricultural ecologist), said that as the world became smaller the disparity between the haves and the have-nots was getting bigger, and that an engaged intellectual was a citizen of the world and had to think globally.
Its very title stressed how much of a politically engaged intellectual Bourdieu was, taking on the mantle of Emile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre in French public life, and slugging it out with politicians because he thought that was what people like him should do.
On a recent Manhattan morning, with a cold wind slashing off New York Harbor, Lou Marinoff took the granite steps of the federal courthouse two at a time -- brown eyes fierce, ivory white skin offsetting his dark beard, a Russian fur hat making him the very picture of the engaged intellectual.
Bunge has always been a socially engaged intellectual, a trend already present in his efforts as founder and secretary general of a college for workers, Universidad Obrera Argentina, from 1938 until 1943.
This is not the work of a man who rejected politics as a matter of principle, but points instead to an engaged intellectual who would stop at nothing to make known the truth as he saw it.
