The intelligentsia impulse is all about power. It's about a small faction of academics, intellectuals, and arrogant eggheads who think they know better than everyone else
Intellectuals are a fairly modern invention for our society
One study I read labeled the prophets in the Old Testament one type of intellectual. I disagree, since they operated as revelators to a nation which had rejected the laws of God and rejected His precepts. The philosophers of Ancient Greece and Rome fall into this "intellectual" category more accurately, since they praised their reasoning, research, and logo ahead of revelation and physical effort
The common denominator among them? They were spectacularly wrong on a number of issues, whether in science or sociology