Even before he witnessed the betrayal of the Republican cause by the Communists in the Spanish Civil War and the blinkered exonerations of the Soviet Union by intellectuals on the Left, Orwell – a self-described member of the “lower-upper-middle-class” – was extraordinarily sensitive to fine nuances of language and the tremendous practical differences they could make in life. His diagnoses of the misleading use of words, the tools of the intellectual’s trade, in “Politics and the English Language”, and his chilling illustration of their abuse by the Thought Police and Newspeak, in Nineteen-Eighty-Four, can be seen as a just indictment of many intellectuals by one who experienced some of the damage that thoughtless thinkers could do. Indeed, Orwell remains an exemplary intellectual today precisely because he recognized the tempting illusions of certainty and self-approbation evoked by the term, and fought against them.
On the whole, Collini’s analysis is convincing and very useful. Nevertheless, there is some ambiguity to his structural definition, as he himself acknowledges. In particular, his definition of the initial achievement that endows an individual with the “cultural authority” to speak out on broader issues is rather vague, and couched in terms reminiscent of Matthew Arnold’s “sweetness and light”. According to Collini, this initial expertise or achievement must be seen “to encourage qualities of reflectiveness, analysis, knowledgeableness, and insight”. He discusses scientists, scholars, critics, journalists, poets and novelists who fall within this capacious rubric. But one wonders how it might apply to someone like Oprah Winfrey, a visible presence in the American media who is not merely a celebrity, “famous for being famous”, but a cultural spokesperson on a variety of issues. She is more (and less) than a pundit; but is she an intellectual? By Collini’s definition she may well be, but she sits uneasily in the company of Eliot, Orwell and Ayer – or even poor Colin Wilson.
Has Collini’s account of the “absence thesis” vanquished the historical bogey of a Blimpish, anti-intellectual Britain? I am not entirely sure, and suspect that Collini isn’t either. He admits that an important element supporting the “absence thesis” is the notion that British (really English) culture has long been “unintellectual”. This charge has usually been supported by a whole list of explanatory factors, among them the heritage of Evangelicalism, Utilitarianism and Empiricism, which encouraged a sceptical attitude towards theories and abstractions; a history of class stratification that encouraged deference to the aristocracy and gentry, themselves more often concerned with the cultivation of a well-rounded “character” than the life of the mind; the existence of a physical gulf – the Channel – that separates England from the Continent, and of the Empire; both of which encouraged an imaginary dissociation from “Europe” and gave rise to intellectual xenophobia and complacency, the reverence for tradition and custom, and so on.
It would take a different book, as Collini says, to deal with native unintellectualism. In this book he expends considerable effort in taking to task those who subscribe to “stereotypes (they were rarely more than that)” and clichés about it. So it is a surprise to find him suddenly acknowledging, towards the end of Absent Minds, the existence of “an always powerful native strain of anti-intellectualism”. And in his conclusion he seems to recognize that clichés are clichés because they contain some element of truth (or so the cliché goes): “It has been no part of my purpose to argue that intellectuals have found British culture a deeply welcoming environment, only that there is exaggeration in the opposite direction in portraying it as uniquely unfavourable”. In the end, one is left agreeing with Collini that Britain was not unique in having an “absence thesis”, but he hasn’t vanquished entirely the ghost of exceptionalism when it comes to British, or at least English, attitudes toward the life of the mind. The “British intellectual” may not be an oxymoron, but it retains its own peculiarities, not all of which are fully addressed in this history.
Collini ends with a spirited defence of the role of the intellectual in the new century. He rejects the notion that an all-conquering celebrity culture augurs another extinction of intellectuals. Print culture remains vibrant, and the internet offers new opportunities. Radio remains another resource for nuanced argument; whereas television never has been one, and its fatuities are easily discernible by the public. While intellectuals will always be caught in the tension between specialism and generalism, the challenge for them today is to “tread the fine line between self-effacing specialism and self-promoting vulgarity”. The real foe may be the Romantic image of the intellectual as vatic legislator, which has coloured the concept since its inception. Collini wants to replace this with the image of the intellectual as an ordinary individual, serving a social function by providing broader perspectives that are both necessary and desired by the public.
An “ordinary intellectual”: are we back to oxymorons again? Justifiably or not, the term has had such a long history of referring to a self-regarding elite that one wonders if it is possible to redefine it in a more egalitarian fashion. But Stefan Collini is surely right to argue that the functions of the intellectual will remain, whether or not the term does. And if anyone can establish what such an “ordinary intellectual” might be like, it is he. Absent Minds brilliantly exemplifies the sort of humane, intelligent and accessible critique he so eloquently advocates.
