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Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain
Product Group: Book
Publisher: OUP Oxford (2007-07-26)
ISBN: 0199216657
EAN: 9780199216659
Dewy Decimal #: 941.08208631
Paperback: 544 pages
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Customer Reviews
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Superb study of the question of intellectuals in Britain
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-09-18
This book by Stefan Collini, Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge University, is a superb discussion of the question of intellectuals in Britain.
He questions the idea that intellectuals are uniquely absent or insignificant in Britain. According to this `absence thesis', part of our `national character' is that we are uniquely pragmatic, unintellectual and practical.
In a brilliant chapter on George Orwell, Collini notes that Orwell often adopted the manner of a public-school bully and concludes, "he encouraged an undiscriminating hostility to intellectuals as such, and he was then surely guilty of that most unlovely and least defensible of inner contradictions, the anti-intellectualism of the intellectual."
Collini rightly questions a class analysis which sees the intelligentsia as a separate social stratum. Unfortunately, he fails to see that intellectuals work for a living (writing is work, as Marx observed) and so are members of the working class.
Collini denies that a ruling class exists, but offers no better explanation of how society is run, although he notes `global capitalism's relentless search for profit'. He also observes that the `absence thesis' does express the thought that intelligence, imagination and justice are not Britain's governing principles.
He decries `the posturing and self-importance involved in the post-war French intellectuals' prominence in their society'. He is not deriding those French intellectuals who supported, or kept quiet about, the French state's colonial wars against Vietnam and Algeria, but those, like Jean-Paul Sartre, who opposed these wars. Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (whom Collini never mentions) broke through the censorship to reveal these wars' inevitable crimes. Britain's intellectuals almost all ignored the British state's similar wars against Malaya and Kenya. Collini too ignores all these wars (he only mentions Algeria, just once), which enables him to insult those who worked for peace.
He writes of `the unglamorous obligation to try to be realistic in identifying the lesser evil'. As a description of political duties, this is far too vague. Wasn't Sartre realistic in calling for the French to leave Algeria, as they did in the end? Are we only to identify the `lesser evil' among the parliamentary parties? Isn't this making a choice of paint when the house is crumbling?
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Retail Price: £16.99
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