Stefan Collini
ABSENT MINDS
Intellectuals in Britain
526pp. Oxford University Press. £25 (US $45).
0 19 929105 5
When J. R. Seeley claimed that the British acquired their Empire “in a fit of absence of mind”, he coined a memorable phrase. But might he have meant it literally? The thought arises because one of the most pervasive stereotypes about Britain is that it is historically an anti-intellectual sort of place, “a nation of shopkeepers” more concerned with practical matters than with ideas. Since the early nineteenth century a torrent of related accusations, from the British themselves no less than from outsiders, has done nothing to improve the damp and chilly welcome intellectuals allegedly receive there. Even in neighbouring Holland, the intellectual climate can appear warmer; the Dutch historian G. J. Renier was so perplexed by the rampant philistinism he encountered in England that in 1931 he was moved to write a book whose title says it all: The English: Are they human?. Gilbert Adair expressed it no less trenchantly in 1993: “What is it with this country and the brain?”. “British intellectual” can sound like an oxymoron (even the word can produce discomfort in the English, who are happier with the term “thinker”), and the absence of “real” intellectuals seems to be as recognizably a part of national life as warm beer, long queues, public transport and the stoic attitude that makes it possible to put up with them.
Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, Stefan Collini’s clever and entertaining revisionist history, sets out to puncture claims of “British exceptionalism”. (He acknowledges the frequent resort to the royal we of “Britain” in what is predominantly an English discourse, and an English problem.) The claim that Britain lacks “real” intellectuals is usually based on a normative model derived primarily from France, where the term “intellectuels” was applied to the members of a group of writers who supported Alfred Dreyfus in 1898. Since at least the eighteenth century, the British have constructed their national identity by contrasting themselves with the French. When the image of intellectuals as a dissident and cohesive group intimately involved in politics began to emerge in France, in the early twentieth century, it was only natural that the British should define themselves in opposing terms, as being more concerned with the pragmatic application of practical principles than with the unrealistic implementation of abstract systems of thought. In the early to mid-twentieth century, Britain clearly had intellectuals, but they were often depicted as being foreign to the native temper. They flourished nonetheless, as Collini shows in fascinating detail. British intellectuals may not have manned the barricades, but they weren’t quite locked away with the madwoman in the attic either. (The BBC, he notes, once broadcast live, for an hour and a half, A. J. Ayer’s graduate seminar in philosophy.)
Collini argues that the “absence thesis” did not emerge in its characteristic form in Britain until the 1950s, again largely in response to France. The all-too-visible example of Jean-Paul Sartre as representative intellectual evoked two reactions in Britain. Politically moderate writers, such as Noel Annan and Edward Shils, stressed the integrative rather than alienated disposition of British intellectuals, whereas radical writers, such as Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn, articulated what was to become the orthodoxy in the 1960s and 70s, the notion that Britain lacked a politically dissident and organized intellectual class. The “absence thesis”, so stated, once again made the French example the norm, and Britain the lacklustre exception. Things could only get worse. In the 1980s, intellectuals, “like ‘single mothers’ or ‘male ballet-dancers’”, became the target of political attacks by the New Right, and they were also subject to disappointed dirges from the New Left. In the 1990s, the prevalence of sociologically inspired definitions rendered intellectuals just one more socio-professional group among others.
It turns out, though, that the British are not at all exceptional in suffering from what Collini calls “Dreyfus-envy”. Looking at what is said about intellectuals in other European countries and the United States, he finds similar complaints: that intellectuals in those countries never measure up to the French paradigm of a coherent, dissident group engaged in embattled political critique. It turns out that it is the French who are the exception rather than the rule. The British ambivalence towards intellectuals is the norm nearly everywhere else.
Invidious comparisons with France might, though, have finally had their day. The idea of a separate caste with the cultural authority to dispense wisdom now appears dubious to many in the West – a consequence of increasingly egalitarian attitudes, wider access to higher education, the decline in deference accorded to academics (and the educated in general), and the prominence of “celebrity culture”. Collini finds that when pundits aren’t busily decrying the absence of intellectuals, they are just as busily writing epitaphs for them – even in France. But the notion of the “death of intellectuals”, like the notion that there weren’t any in the first place, is a perennial one, and, Collini claims, equally false. The cultural role played by intellectuals will remain necessary to society “whether or not that particular word continues to be used to identify it”. His book is as much a polemical defence of that role in modern life as it is a history of Britain’s “tradition of denial” – where what is denied is the robust existence of intellectuals in the nation during the past century.
Absent Minds is simultaneously broader and narrower than its subtitle implies. It is not a comprehensive survey of intellectuals in twentieth-century Britain, of the sort provided by Noel Annan’s chatty Our Age (1990). Collini, too, can be chatty; his relaxed, amiable style makes this book a pleasure to read, and his humour enlivens a topic that often takes itself too seriously. “Intellectuals” can connote the portentous and pretentious, and a little bathos is always bracing, as when we read that “‘Oxford’ was to philosophy what ‘Harrods’ was to department stores”. He can also be catty. Of Colin Wilson, for example:
before May 1956, no one had ever heard of Wilson, and by the end of 1957 it was almost true that no one wanted to hear of him again. If he was, briefly, British “philosophy’s” greatest star, he was, in a longer perspective, one of British culture’s greatest mistakes.
Collini’s wit is lacerating on the subject of journalists and their thoughtless perpetuation of “slacker clichés and stereotypes”. But whether Fleet Street’s finest respond to his provocations or (more likely) not, it is certainly worth asking why the British have been so eager to claim that theirs is an unintellectual culture; and why the special role of the intellectual is worth retaining, in an “information age” when many have access to knowledge and public platforms once restricted to a narrow elite. While Collini does discuss many prominent thinkers – he devotes chapters to T. S. Eliot, R. G. Collingwood, George Orwell, A. J. P. Taylor, A. J. Ayer and Edward Said, as well as the unfortunate Colin Wilson – he is really concerned with the concept of the intellectual at an analytical as well as a historical level. The book should appeal widely for this reason, since it clarifies what is certainly, from the abundance of evidence presented here, a very muddled concept. Collini observes that one writer’s “usage of the term ‘intellectuals’ wobbled among the various senses like a tipsy host at a party trying to find a few words of welcome for everyone”. Absent Minds sets the term on a firmer footing than it has heretofore enjoyed.
Collini distinguishes three definitions of the intellectual that have informed discussions in the West since the early twentieth century (and exposes the frequent conceptual slippages to which such discussions have been prone). The first sense is the subjective one: to be an “intellectual” is to gravitate towards ideas, books, the life of the mind; it is a self-appraisal or informal understanding of others. The second sense, which became prominent in the 1950s, is sociological in that it identifies intellectuals as a distinct occupational category, consisting of academics, journalists, teachers, etc. The final sense is cultural: this is the understanding of “intellectuals” that has been the most widespread, and the most confused, during the course of the past century, and it is Collini’s central concern. He finds that the cultural understanding of the intellectual is widely shared across nations and historical eras; while it is inevitably influenced by historical circumstances and national traditions, it nevertheless exhibits “a shared structural logic rather than a uniquely national condition”.
According to this logic, the intellectual is someone who starts from a position of acknowledged expertise or achievement in some non-instrumental endeavour that gives him or her a modicum of cultural authority: a claim to be recognized. The individual is then in a position to capitalize on this degree of deference by speaking to a broader, non-specialist public eager for general guidance. In this capacity, therefore, the intellectual is someone who unavoidably oscillates between different poles: that of specialist and generalist, insider and outsider, functionary and hero. Being an intellectual is also a cultural role, one governed not only by this binary structural logic but also by a set of relations with one’s specialism, the wider media, multiple publics, and other factors.
Playing the role is always a delicate matter. R. G. Collingwood, for example, “came out”, as Collini puts it, rather late in life as an intellectual in the cultural sense. The decision of this quiet philosopher to address the political crises of the late 1930s, notably in An Autobiography (1939), surprised many of his contemporaries; one of them surmised that he must have converted to Marxism, citing his newly grown beard as evidence. But the Oxford don didn’t understand how to reach a wider public: many of his essays appeared in the Oxford Magazine rather than larger-circulation journals, because for Collingwood Oxford was “the public”. Another Oxford don, A. J. P. Taylor, went to the opposite extreme, overplaying the public role so shamelessly that in the end he vitiated his intellectual credibility and standing. Taylor was perhaps the most famous academic in Britain in the 1950s and early 60s, visible on a weekly basis as a reviewer, radio pundit and “tele-don”; his improvised lecture performances entertained an audience far larger than might have been expected to tune in for another account of recent British history. But he became addicted to the role, the celebrity and the money, to the extent that appearing in or on the media became his raison d’être, over and above whatever message he might have had to impart. Collini states the moral in terms that even the allegedly “philistine English” can appreciate: “Intellectual capital needs to be constantly reinvested; a strategy of pure expenditure soon exhausts one’s credit”.
T. S. Eliot, on the other hand, may have been the most feline or nimble player of the role. He was prominent not only as a poet but as a “man of letters”, his preferred (and by now archaic) term for his own position as an intellectual. He was pre-eminent in creating the literary taste of several generations; under his Editorship The Criterion became a notable journal of ideas, and he was one of the most famous conservative thinkers of the inter-war period. Collini finds, however, that Eliot proved to be “Mr Facing-Both-Ways”. The ambivalent evasions of Prufrock, or the trickster persona of Old Possum, underlay much of Eliot’s manoeuvring as an intellectual. “Eliot made much of the invocation of principles in general, and rather less of the content of any actual principles.”
Collini demonstrates that many of the confusing claims and disappointed evaluations pertaining to intellectuals stem from the instabilities inherent in the role. For example, recent claims that there are no longer any “real” (that is, generalist) intellectuals, because they have retreated to the Ivory Tower, mistakes one half of the intellectual’s structural role for the whole. While it is true that in the past half-century many intellectuals have sought refuge in academe (or started out there), that is because of a contingent historical fact: many academic disciplines have undergone enormous expansion in this period, and opportunities for employment multiplied accordingly. This does not mean that intellectuals in recent decades have become more specialized, or more beholden to the Establishment: intellectuals have always started out with some recognized expertise, and they have usually been beholden to some form of patronage, be it an individual, a profession, a journal, or a publisher.
It is because of these structural tensions that intellectuals are so frequently accused of betraying their calling when they act too narrowly as experts, and of “selling-out” when they become too well known. They are invariably assumed to be “outsiders” whose role it is to be critical of the status quo, but no intellectual is ever outside society, and many intellectuals, through education and professional formation, are no less “insiders” than those they criticize. (Colin Wilson was quick to identify himself with his most famous book, The Outsider, in his entry in Who’s Who.) Collini maintains that when the tensions inherent in the role are ignored, the more simplistic, romantic image of the intellectual as an embattled, critical, disinterested outsider becomes an ideal that is impossible to fulfil. So, inevitably, it is projected as existing “elsewhere”. Hence the ubiquity of the “anti-intellectual intellectual” who disparages those who fail to live up to unattainable standards, and the repeated laments in so many nations (except France) about the lack of “genuine” intellectuals.
For Collini, Orwell is the representative example of this kind of anti-intellectual intellectual. Although Orwell frequently criticized “intellectuals” for their “inauthenticity”, his “writing was shot through with a systematic inauthenticity of its own” for castigating a group of which he was himself obviously a member. Certainly Orwell constructed a romantic identity as a plain-speaking individualist, who enjoyed exposing the self-righteous, insincere and unrealistic posturing of those he baited as “cranks” and “the pansy Left”. By Collini’s structural definition, Orwell was somewhat hypocritical in loudly refusing to be a member of a club he had, in fact, never left. Yet the numerous examples of self-righteous, insincere and unrealistic intellectuals in Absent Minds lead one to sympathize with Orwell’s position. Collini’s analytical definition alerts us to the ambivalence inherent in the concept; nevertheless there are plenty of instances to explain why certain intellectuals might be dismissed as cranks – or worse – for turning a blind eye to concrete injustices, in the name of lofty abstractions.
