The Rise of the public relations man and the decline of the Soviet "intelligentsia" after 1989
ENThe purpose of this article is to expose the radical split between a Public Intellectual and a Public Relations Man, who in this chapter will be abbreviated as pr-Man. The pr-Man is not a result of manipulation and he or she is not an audience person, but a master of manipulation. The pr-Man belongs to the creative class, which (among other things) produces political advertising. Is it possible that the pr-Man is also a Public Intellectual? The ambiguities of the split between a Public Intellectual and a Public Relations Man will be analyzed from the period of the end of the Soviet Union (1985–1991) until today. The main theses of this chapter are: the ambiguous manifestations of Public Intellectuals and pr-Men create various conflicts between the state’s ideologists, critical intellectuals and commercial pr entrepreneurs. the market of political opinions functions differently than that of the marketplace of ideas of Public Intellectuals; when the ideas of a Public Intellectual and of a pr-Man are analyzed in the light of public communicative actions, then we discover that both of them are competitive participants in the same sphere of social reason; pr companies create images, which have to compete with the true intellectuals, thus they experiencing the effect of intellectuals as specters who haunt them (i.e. their pr-companies). [Extract, p. 193].
