Intelligentsia:. Singular or Plural

A healthy society is lead by thinking people. Positive leadership can never be exercised by individuals or institutions alone. It requires a cadre of intellectually acute and orally unified persons to direct the evolution of the social unit. This is the role of the intelligentsia. Leadership in this sense is distinct from governance. Presidents, legislators and jurists administer a bureaucracy, but it is writers, artists and scholars who collaborate in pointing the way to the future. Thus it is that the vigor of the intelligentsia is critical to the life of each individual sovereign unit and of the international community at large.