This paper examines the concept of münevver, commonly translated as “intellectual,” in the historiography of the late Ottoman Empire and early republican Turkey. Combining quantitative and qualitative approaches in historical sociology, I trace the genealogy of münevver both as a concept and a social category that can be translated as “enlightened,” “luminary,” or “intellectual,” depending on the context. This social category was mobilized first by late Ottoman thinkers and writers such as Fuat [Köprülü] and Ziya [Gökalp] as a quasi-translation of the French intellectuel crystallized during the Dreyfus Affair. It was then adapted and re-defined by the ruling Republican People’s Party (RPP) in the formative years of the Republic of Turkey. The RPP leadership considered its local spokespeople as münevver, the Halk Hatipleri (People’s Preachers), a group of party members chosen to communicate viva voce the “values, principles, and ideas” of the new regime in the provinces. By analyzing a corpus of texts produced by ideologues and officers of the ruling party, I show how the notion of münevver in this post-imperial setting was linked to but varied from that of the “intellectual,” another social category that emerged in Europe, but particularly in France with the Manifesto of the Intellectuals. I contrast the elite conceptualizations of münevver found in canonical texts produced by key intellectual figures of early republican Turkey with a sociographic analysis of People’s Preachers, a group that the state-party regime charged with the responsibility of “enlightening” (tenvir) the “popular masses” (halk kitleleri). My analysis combines canonical (often published, edited, and re-edited) and noncanonical historical sources. It contributes to intellectual and social history by comparing normative and textual sources with historical sociology of circa 3500 party “preachers” selected between 1931 and 1950. In so doing, it demonstrates that münevver of early republican Turkey included a humbler and a larger body of local elites and notables whose distinctive social trait ranged from access to education, partnerships that persisted from empire to republic, and sometimes, simply literacy. Charging them with a kind of “responsibility of the intellectual,” the early republican leadership transformed different types of provincial elites, including civil servants and local notables, into party “intellectuals.”