Indeed it is a common intellectual conceit to see all professions as, at heart, welfare.
Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of Oxford Stage Company, which is producing the new West End revival, calls it "a dazzling intellectual fantasia, a technically brilliant circus act that flings around heavyweight intellectual conceit as if it were light as air".
Now maybe the whole idea of a civilizational identity is just a silly intellectual conceit for Victorian nostalgists, and we're all actually historical free agents, with no reason to feel any identification (whether proud, guilty, or somewhere in between) with any particular figures or cultures from the past.
This grand intellectual conceit was recklessly applied to a loose grouping of megalomaniacs, fanatics, delinquents and misfits, most of whom had thrived in the ecosystem of extremism (schools, mosques, newspapers, satellite channels) originally set up by citizens of a stalwart western ally and theocracy, Saudi Arabia.
They are gripped by an intellectual conceit which defies all inconvenient facts, one that either believes the British working class is finally ready to overthrow the old order or that "compromising with the electorate" is a mug's game for a vanguard party.
Like "The Agonized Face," which attempts to define a female (as opposed to male) truth, an essence usually denied for its "disgrace and violence, dark orgasm, rape, with feeling so strong that it obviates the one who feels it," "Mirror Ball" relies on an intellectual conceit that cannot ultimately save the story from its length or disorganization.
Alienation, intellectual conceits and theater games abound.
Strauss wanted flesh-and-blood characters, while Hofmannsthal leaned toward effete intellectual conceits.
Big ideas, or at least earnest intellectual conceits, crowd the screen along with suave digital effects and gaudy costumes.
Such intellectual conceits, invigorating as they are on paper, tend to dissolve in the heat of live performance.
They were fundamentalisms built on the very weak intellectual conceits of a master race and a Communist revolution.
