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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 April 2008
The subject of Stefan Collini's Absent Minds is a “rich tradition of debate about the question of intellectuals” in twentieth-century Britain, in particular debate about “their absence or comparative insignificance” (1). The debate begins with the Dreyfus Affair and its unpredictable British reception (the queen, for example, was a believer in Dreyfus's innocence), simmers intriguingly through the 1920s and 1930s, and becomes positively effervescent in the 1950s, perhaps because of a new democratization of the public sphere. Collini is less interested in the possible historical causes than in the rhetorical structure that persists, swirling around figures as different as T. S. Eliot, R. G. Collingwood, George Orwell, A. J. P. Taylor, and A. J. Ayer, each of whom gets a full-length profile. Other chapters mix shorter profiles—for example, the devastatingly funny discussion of Colin Wilson and the authorities who briefly and embarrassingly made him a star in their firmament—with synthesis of the debate over intellectuals at different scales (for example, how it was shaped by particular periodicals and by the transition to electronic media) and in different national settings. Coming closer to the present, Collini admires Edward Said for what he did as an intellectual while disputing what he said about intellectuals—a celebration of rigorous exile from all social belonging, which could only leave the category of the intellectual looking almost totally uninhabited. The move turns out to be characteristic: it is as if Collini felt he could win a proper admiration for what intellectuals do only by rejecting most of their self-images, or evasion thereof.
1 Representative examples are Ben Macintyre in The Times (14 April 2006), who proudly reasserts the premise of anti-intellectualism that Collini is questioning, and Kenan Malik in the Sunday Telegraph (14 May 2006), who takes Collini to be threatening the idea that culture is special and important. In these reviews, Britain's practical good sense (reaffirmed by Macintyre) does precisely the same work as its commitment to Arnoldian high culture (reaffirmed by Malik): each is supposed to offer a British alternative and antidote to Continental ideology and thus, of course, a standard against which the present can be condemned for its slide into ideology.
2 English, James, “Hazards of the Higher Debunkery,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68/3 (July 2007)Google Scholar.
3 The adjective “Arnoldian” is mine, not Collini's. In arguing that intellectuals are ordinary, Collini sides with Raymond Williams against Arnold. In arguing that culture is important because it is capable of changing the world, he is on common ground with both Williams and Arnold. The issue of where each stands vis-à-vis culture's multiplicity—not to be confused with culture's ordinariness—is too complex to enter into here.
4 At the same time, this point has to be somewhat qualified if, as Dolan Cummings suggests in Culture Wars (18 April 2006), one looks behind the conceptual contradiction and the repetitious rhetorical structure it generates, inquiring into the historical reasons why people at a given time and place care about intellectuals at all.
5 See Boschetti, Anna, The Intellectual Enterprise: Sartre and Les Temps Modernes, trans. McCleary, Richard C. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988)Google Scholar.
6 See Jeremy Jennings's “The View from Calais” in the Journal of the History of Ideas symposium and Collini's response.
7 Reluctance to see credit given to the university helps explain another characteristic note struck in reviews, as when David Womersley (in Social Affairs) notes a “Cambridge” ring in Collini's prose (though this could as well be an Oxford/Cambridge affair, I suppose) or when Terry Eagleton (in the New Statesman, 3 April 2006) complains that there is “something of the view-from-King's-Parade about this book.”