Excuse me, officer, could you direct me to the nearest public intellectual?
prospect magazine has cleverly won itself sonic publicity with a list in its July issue of 'the top 100 British public intellectuals'. It being alphabetical, Tariq Ali's name, I was pleased to see, was at its head.
As a Tory, I am an opponent of American neoconservatism. British Toryism should always oppose internationalist ideologies, of which American neoconservatism is the latest. Mr Ah, as a Marxist, is also an internationalist. But for whatever reason, he was more right about the biggest subject of the late 20th century — the Soviet Union — than the neoconservatives were. The latter said it was a mighty and frightening power. The 1960s New Left, out of which Mr All emerged, said it was a ramshackle polity whose might and power people like the neoconservatives exaggerated for their own purposes. By the late 1980s — not a long time after the 1960s by the standards of history — the Soviet Union collapsed without firing a shot westwards. The New Left was more right than the New Right. More Old Tories thought like Mr Ali than cared to admit it. They included, if Mr Ali will forgive the expression, Enoch Powell. But most kept quiet. Mr Ali, then, deserves his place.
So, doubtless, does the last name on the 100, James Wood, the literary critic. A few Rightish names creep in: Noel Malcolm, Roger Scniton, David Green of the freemarket think tank Civitas, and, rather daringly, Melanie Phillips. There is also David Starkey, the Macaulay of our day, for we may be sure that Macaulay in our day, as well as writing books, would also have been a television historian.
Another name is that of 'Julian Le Grand, social policy theorist'. Some us are intellectually self-confident enough to admit that we have never heard of him. It sounds like an invented name. Julian Le Grand could be a social policy theorist in a television thriller, found dead in the Sorbonne library. Did he kill himself because a rival academic had discovered that he had falsified his degree in social policy theory and that, in any case, his name was not Julian Le Grand, but Julian Le Petit? But of course it turns out to be more complicated than that.
Another explanation for this name's inclusion occurs: Prospect made the name up to expose its more pretentious contributors and readers; luring them into exclaiming to one another that Julian Le Grand was 'the only social policy theorist one read these days; the rest being so dumbed down'. But we do not associate Prospect with practical jokes.
An especially welcome name on the list is that of Lord Skidelsky: the historian Robert Skidelsloj. Welcome not just because of his books, but because of a story! heard about him only the other day which I hope is true, and which, if it is, reflects vast credit on him. My informant said that Lord Skidelsky bet David Dimbleby a case of champagne that in his interview with ex-President Clinton, he would not ask Mr Clinton about the oral sex. But Mr Dimbleby did, and it was Lord Skidelsky who sent the case of champagne. For once, a public intellectual has justified himself.
But what exactly is a public intellectual? Is it the same principle as a public convenience? Excuse me, officer, I've been caught short conceptually. Could you direct me to the nearest public intellectual? Intellectuals can be touchy about whether they are spoken to with enough deference. Perhaps public intellectuals wear a sign: 'Kindly adjust your address before leaving.' The Guardian seems to subscribe to the public convenience analog. Annoyed at so few women being on Prospect's list, it apparently published a list of female public intellectuals. It would help if male and female public intellectuals could each wear those little signs, so vital to public conveniences, indicating respectively gents and ladies.
The term 'public intellectual' comes from the United States. Or at least it was in American publications that I first saw it used. A public intellectual seems to be an intellectual who earns a living by making his or her opinions public, or is an intellectual of whom a public of a reasonable size has heard. Not just the public as a whole, as in the case of Dr Starkey, but the many small publics which would have heard of, say, Julian Le Grand. Believers in the importance of intellectuals would put it higher. Public intellectuals, they might say, are intellectuals who are especially wise, and to whom we should listen or in whom we should believe. That raises problems. For some of us, reading and listening to them is one of life's pleasures. But should we act on their advice? We may be sure that some of the compilers of Prospect's list, being intellectuals themselves, believe that we should go further than reading and listening to them: we should somehow give them political power. The world would be better governed if intellectuals, rather than people like President Bush, governed it. Thus Gordon Brown is on Prospect's list.
But Mr Brown's success as Chancellor is the result of something he did, at the outset, which the more intellectual economists opposed. That was handing over monetary policy to the Bank of England — something which the pronouncements of Keynes, the economist of the past who today would most likely be described as a public intellectual, suggest that he would have opposed. Handing monetary policy to the Bank was a cause of non-intellectual businessmen and unfashionable right-wing economists.
Likewise, Mr Bush blundered into Iraq not because he was non-intellectual but because intellectuals influenced him. That is, the neoconservatives. However much left-liberal intellectuals disapprove of them, the neoconservatives are typical intellectuals. Their magazine, Commentaty, irrespective of whether one agrees with it, is one of the most intellectually distinguished magazines in the language. Lenin and Trotsky were intellectuals. To them is owed the 20th century's most disastrous political invention, Previously, radicals assumed that it would be enough to capture the state, and rule through it. Lenin and Trotsky proved that a better instrument was the omnipotent party. First Mussolini, then more terribly Hitler, copied them.
But perhaps our intelligentsia will only abandon its excessive regard for intellectuals once it is convinced that intellectuals can also be right-wing. Plenty have been. The term bien pensants — now used only about left-liberals — was invented to describe the royalist and absolutist intellectuals of Third Republic France, such as Charles Maurras. But, as already mentioned, the neoconservatives tend to be intellectuals. So there is some hope that 'intellectual' may eventually become a bad word even among Prospect's writers and readers. A remark attributed to Stanley Baldwin should be the last word: 'The intelligent are to the intelligentsia what a gentleman is to a gent.'
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