An intellectual has been famously defined as a person with more Latin than property. What was Latin once could be Mandarin, Arabic or Sanskrit today, but the logic remains the same: The intellectual thinks more than he owns.

In another description of the intellectual condition, it has been said that those suffering from it have been chased relentlessly through the ages because they are inevitably ahead of the pack. True. The intellectual is literally ahead of his time. That is why he has managed to survive the chase: He has little property to leave behind and a whole world of ideas to gain ahead.

True, intellectuals have their limitations. Hence the criticism that they "cannot tolerate the chance event, the unintelligible: they have a nostalgia for the absolute" - ironically according to Raymond Aron, who, as a French philosopher, sociologist, political scientist, historian and journalist, was one of France's most prominent thinkers and therefore, by association, much of an intellectual himself.

Anyway, intellectualism for all its faults comes naturally to Bengalis on both sides of the border and elsewhere in Bengal's diasporic world. That is because our temperament is essentially conversational, argumentative, contentious, combative, acerbic and uncompromisingly romantic. We don't give way to the lumpen crowd around us even when we are being chased to our deaths by the barbarians behind. We keep running, if even to our doom.

During the brief moments of peace that intersperse our perpetual quarrel with the world, we prefer the adda, which I have defined elsewhere as an endless intellectual conversation among consenting adults, to silencing critics and killing enemies even if we could have won a lottery or a new country that way. We do not believe in the destination: We believe in the journey.

Bengalis are a race of thinkers: The best among us think the best thoughts, and they are called intellectuals: buddhijibi. They understand instinctively what the great intellectual John Maynard Keynes meant when he wrote: "Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."

What Keynes was signifying was the importance of thinkers - whether they inspire practical men or encourage political despots - in the functioning of a republic of ideas that regulates the lives of mortals who have never read Darwin, Marx or Keynes and never will. Someone has to do the difficult thinking so that others can do the comfortable living.

In that context, the Third World intelligentsia stands in a definite relationship with the masses. Here, the degree of emancipation from the dead hand of history is far less apparent than it is in Europe or North America. In Asia, Africa and Latin America, the intellectual faces a particularly stark choice between being a traditional intellectual such as a philosopher or a member of the clergy - an intellectual who retains social prestige inherited from a receding stage of history but who no longer serves a productive class - and an organic intellectual who has emerged from a contemporary social class and amplifies that class's productive activity in thought and action.

Third World intellectuals have to take up a position within that divide. They can choose to remain addicted to an era that has passed - not just with the overthrow of a government but, with it, of the garbage of the past that had accumulated in the smelly backyards of power - or to commit themselves to the blossoming possibilities of a fledgling unknown. If they choose traditionalism, they will be bounded by the strictures of a reductive religiosity and the structures of power built around it. If they choose organicity, they will be the vehicles of the future in a journey that has just begun. Either way, they will not be state-sponsored. They will inaugurate a new state of affairs.

Intellectuals need to recover the insurgent spirit that marks lasting works of the mind produced in ceaselessly changing time. That spirit unfolds through epistemic radicalism, that is, through the act of challenging not only what is real but how we know that it is real. The challenge is particularly acute in the field of political philosophy.

Here is a concrete example. The idea of a Second Liberation for Bangladesh today is not mere political rhetoric: It signifies a genuine rupture with the accumulated legacy of 1971, when Bangladesh won its first Liberation from Pakistan. So, what form should this Second Liberation take?

There are many answers that range from the rewriting of the Constitution to the adoption of a new National Anthem. Those answers need probing: How may Bangladesh's character as a People's Republic - an act of Constitutional self-determination which rules out a confessional national identity founded on exclusivist, non-democratic and non-secular values - be maintained? Or is that character to be trashed?

If the problem with the existing Anthem is that it was written by a Hindu opposed to the first Partition of Bengal in 1905, what should the new anthem say in the light of Bangladesh's partition from Pakistan in 1971? How would it say anything new, given that Rabindranath Tagore, the poet of "Amar Sonar Bangla", also wrote Gharey Bairey, a novel in which he was clearly sympathetic to the backlash faced by the Muslim underclass in Bengal during the pan-nationalist Swadeshi Movement?

A new Constitution and a new National Anthem are certainly possible, but how should they convey the impulses and aspirations of contemporary Bangladesh as it emerges from the insurgent romanticism of an admirable student-led movement?

Traditional intellectuals would answer these questions by falling back on passing historical arrangements from which they themselves have emerged. Organic intellectuals would answer the questions by adopting a materialist approach that reflects the constellation of economic and ideational forces in Bangladeshi society today. No matter the direction in which the future goes, now is the time to be embedded in the present.

Bangladesh needs its intellectuals. It is time that intellectuals, too, needed Bangladesh.

The writer is Principal Research Fellow of the Cosmos Foundation. He may be contacted at epaaropaar@gmail.com