Does this bother Lévy, who is, for a writer or intellectual, used to a fairly high level of power in the outside world?
It's not hard to read Charles' journey in The Edge as analogous to its author's: the library-dwelling intellectual using his wits to brave rougher elements.
In many ways, Darnielle is a public intellectual, using the platform that his skill set's provided him to speak on a whole range of subjects, many of which have to do with North Carolina itself.
But more fundamentally, he offers the earth-shattering conclusion that perhaps investors are not always rational, that Homo economicus is just another model-building exercise that may have its intellectual uses but that founders occasionally in the real world.
Nationalist intellectuals use the language of the 1930s to rail against foreign capital and "cosmopolitan" influences.
Intellectuals used to play a big role in organizing labor.
Where Vaclav Havel and fellow intellectuals used to meet, but more like a railway buffet than a radical powerhouse.
"Cuban intellectuals used to read with great interest the materials that would come from Russia about reform," said Elizardo Sanchez, a leading dissident.
Brazilian intellectuals used to argue that the country's role as a commodity producer permanently consigned it to the periphery of the world economy.
I had lunch in Café Riche, just off the Square, where journalists and intellectuals used to gather in the old days, when the fight was against the British and the monarchy.
Nevertheless, for the first part of the 20th century, the term rarely made it outside the rarefied air of academia, where intellectuals used it to study what others were studying (in fields like metamathematics or metapsychology).
