On Stefan Collini: Absent Minds

Absent Minds

One of the impressive aspects of Collini's growing contribution to our understanding of the history of thinking in the British Isles is the fruitful continuity in his work, one book arising out of and going further than its predecessor, while the whole body of work forms an increasingly fertile and flourishing tree of knowledge. From his work on Hobhouse to his most recent book his account of how thinking is carried on, in what ways and by whom, has been a slow progression towards locating intellectuals in the vernacular soil, in a perception parallel to Michael Freeden's rooting of political theory in ideology. Collini has already had important things to say about the character and role of intellectuals, in particular in 1991 in Public Moralists, and it is a development of a growing interest which has produced his most recent book. He has therefore gone for the Spencer rather than the Carlyle view of outstanding individuals, arguing that: the conventional explanatory relation tends to suggest that the political attitudes widely encountered in the records left by the educated class should be seen as evidence of the ‘influence’ of the most prominent theories of the period, such as Utilitarianism or Social Darwinism or philosophical Idealism. My initial assumption has been, rather, that those theories acquired their prominence partly because they gave a coherent form and foundation to attitudes and beliefs already widely, if unselfconsciously, entertained (Collini, 2006, p. 4).

There is a further development in the new book. Having written extensively about intellectuals as a relatively unproblematic category, Collini has now taken a step back to ask what it was thought an intellectual was, and having used the label profitably himself, now considers how and to what effect is has been applied by others. This next level of consideration was strongly implied in his earlier work. Public Moralists treated the word ‘intellectual’ not as something which indicated a universal and unchanging role, but rather as a label of flexible usage, the referent of which was equally shifting and historically contingent. Even within the chronological boundaries of Public Moralists, the character of the range of individuals to whom the term was meaningfully applied was shifting. It was becoming more fragmented occupationally, though no less homogeneous geographically. ‘Intellectuals’ described a category of people in London, who knew each other and shared the same social space. At the same time, Collini risked a rather wider usage of the word, suggesting that ‘most complex literate societies have their intellectuals, who are marked out by their involvement in the business of articulating reflections on human activities and exercising some kind of cultural authority acknowledged by the attentions of the wider society’ (p. 28). This double perspective, of the contingent particular and the categorically general, runs throughout the most recent book.

Absent Minds is composed of five sections. The first sets out the various uses of the term ‘intellectual’ and the tension inherent in Collini's preferred usage. The second scans the history of the term in the British Isles. The third looks elsewhere, in North America and continental Europe. The fourth considers a select group of those in the British Isles to whom the term might be applied. The fifth approaches an open-ended conclusion.

Collini is at his best when, while centred by a theme, he is not constrained by a theory, formula or exclusive parcel of data. This is clearest in his chapter in the fourth section on A. J. P. Taylor, which is more about Taylor as an intellectual than about Taylor on intellectuals or the concept of the intellectual. The discussion of Ayer is similar, and is part of the delta character of a book whose arguments bifurcate as they approach nearer and nearer to their conclusion and destination. As befits the study of a group who are not a group, and an examination of an idea about variety rather than coherence, the book is a series of variations around a theme, rather than a disciplined march along one straight highway.

Collini is leisured and minutely precise in his ambulatory (but in no way pedestrian) progress. He spends over a page dissecting a 24–word entry in the 1900 precursor of the the Oxford English Dictionary which, he meticulously demonstrates, mistakenly presents the after-dinner jibe of a French general against the Dreyfusards as a scholarly analysis of a Byzantine theological debate. It is a representative example of the detective scholarship he can carry out with a very fine forensic comb. Sometimes the comb can entirely take over, as when he estimates how many times, if at all, the word ‘intellectual’ appears in Benda's La Trahison des clercs, or how accurate or inaccurate the various translations of the title and the summaries of the argument of that book have been. The book is in this respect a glorious representation of the diverse historical reality on which it reflects, and to which it contributes. If history is neither parsimonious nor rigidly thematic, nor should its narrative be.

Two Paradoxes and Three Definitions

But while the book is free of methodological or theoretical straitjackets, it is not conceptually naked. Collini presents three ideal-typical definitions of ‘intellectual’, and two paradoxes. The first of the three definitions is a sociological category, the workers not by hand but by brain; the second the Cassius category, people who think and read books; the third, which Collini calls the cultural use, is of someone who has a recognised insight or expertise, on the basis of which a more popular audience is addressed in terms which go beyond but do not abandon the authority which special skills confer. Collini chooses, as he did in his earlier work, the third usage, of intellectuals as a class for themselves rather than by themselves. But he presents that usage as constantly on the move, ‘five syllables in search of an owner’ (p. 119). This raises the question of whether intellectuals are inside or outside the tent? Is the vernacular thinking out of which they grow the basis of a homogeneous culture so that they are part of an elite which sustains dominant traditions and employs them to cultivate social solidarity, or is it subversive or at least alternative, so that intellectuals are prophets questioning or denouncing dominant practices and persons, rather than priests sanctifying them?

The first of the two paradoxes is that of denial, ‘Dreyfus envy’ as Collini calls it. This is the complaint that other countries, or other times, or both, had intellectuals, but the time and country of the complainant is deficient in this desirable class of persons. The paradox is of course that to complain in this way is to engage in exactly the kind of activity which earns one the title of ‘intellectual’. The paradox of Dreyfus envy is like the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, who bemoans with great prolixity his absence of a brain. It is a familiar phenomenon, from the ever-receding lost countryside, through the golden age of parliament, to the days when there was a real childhood, and as Collini points out, each country is likely to regard itself as exceptional in its intellectual deficiency. But the belief in uniqueness is ubiquitous, so while the bulk of the book is about the British Isles, there are a hundred pages or so in the middle on Dreyfus envy on each side of the Atlantic.

The denial, or complaint about the absence of intellectuals, is a central part of thinking about intellectuals in the first place. Indeed, given his insistence that the characteristic thinkers of an age or a society are characteristic not because they lead or shape thinking, but because they distil and express concerns or conceptions which are already there albeit in less articulate form, without the complaints about absence a good chunk of Collini's subject matter would have vanished. Yet Collini is fiercely dismissive of the vernacular hacks who articulate this absence: ‘Intellectuals are to high culture what hem-lines are to haute couture: they are, potentially, always news’ (p. 8); ‘The topic seems to lend itself to eight hundred words of confident opinionatedness with fatal facility’ (pp. 8–9).

The second paradox is a tension within Collini's third and preferred use of the term ‘intellectual’. A devotion of time and energy to the special skills or arts which provide intellectuals with authority may prevent them addressing the public in a way that makes them more than just a specialist or a professional. On the other hand, too great an involvement with public presentation can lead to the charge that one is not sufficiently serious, intellectually rigorous, scientific or scholarly. A parallel or subordinate version of this is the tension (pp. 126–7) between theory which can never get beyond cliché, and experience which can never get beyond the particular and the contingent.

National Identity

The breadth of argument in Absent Minds touches many issues beyond its central theme. One of these is the nature of national identity, with the problems which arise in trying to capture it and the difficulty over the two terms ‘British’ and ‘English’. In Public Moralists, Collini used the subtitle Public Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain which hints at his subtle response to this difficulty. He follows what he considers historical usage, that is the usage of his subject, not of other commentators, writing that he will use the term ‘“English” not “British”, since the national stereotypes in question were specifically English even though the political entity of which they were supposed to be the animating force was in practice the British state’ (p. 69). The dominant views and arguments which he discusses were in this sense English views dominant within the United Kingdom of Great Britain and (Northern) Ireland. This is despite differences in the meanings attached to words and the character of intellectual life between the four constituent nations. In delineating this difference, and making clear that his use of ‘English’ is intended to identify a contingent historical phenomenon, not a cultural essence, Collini presents a narrative in which, even if other, less ‘English’, dimensions are not considered, they are, by the very logic of the structure, acknowledged. If English is a dominant element, and not to be equated with ‘Britain’, other elements are acknowledged and the relation between the different cultural elements are, while not being the subject of the narrative, implied by and essential to it.

Despite Collini's argument that Britain (England?) is not all that devoid of intellectuals or, specifically, the discussion of what intellectuals are, the question remains (and is by implication answered by the very existence of the book) of what if anything is specific about the British version. What is going on is a better question than why isn't x going on, as Collini rightly argues. But the solution Collini has adopted is the most convincing one: to follow the conventions of a body of thinking which took place in the United Kingdom but had a predominantly English rather than Welsh or Irish or Scottish character, despite the origins of those who contributed to it. It involves in effect saying that British thinking was the thinking that happened in Britain, the equivalent of saying that human nature means the ways in which humans actually behave. This is a way of doing things that is thoroughly empirical, and involves denying any essence so that objections to ‘foreign’ words are dismissed by the observation that if they are used here, they are part of what we say and how we say it. But this does not prevent and can fruitfully entwine with the formulation of more general definitions and descriptions.

But does the apology for conventional usage remove rather than answer the question of whether, apart from this predominantly English culture, there were also ways of thinking which could usefully be described as Scottish, Welsh or Irish? Or is the question itself unhelpful, since all that was ‘English’ about what went on was that most of it went on south, and east, of the border, and that even when it did not, it did not have a character which distinguished it from what was happening in and around London?

Explanation and Interpretation

Absent Minds is a work of both explanation and interpretation, the first in Collini's general idea of the two intellectual paradoxes, the second in his historical account of contingent thinking. Collini's own manner of thinking is in this way not bounded by either deduction or allegiance to any particular theory or method. He employs both close textual dissection and broad sociological categorisation, and while there is a good deal of precise analysis, it contributes to an integrated understanding. When his closeness to the text does restrict his wider speculation, the illumination of the instance more than compensates. So while Collini does some horticultural science and research on agricultural machinery, he is first and foremost a farmer. There is plenty of methodological and theoretical scene setting and scythe sharpening but once this has been dutifully performed, Collini moves on to the concrete narrative in characteristic style using, as he puts it, ‘different pieces of equipment’ (p. 64) as the task demands. It is a manner of proceeding which he himself describes as ‘varied and discrepant, even at times frankly opportunistic’ (p. 9).

But though it moves in each of the two dimensions, the book is principally a work of interpretation rather than of explanation. Even so, Collini can be sharp with those whose undue attention to one dimension is associated with inadequate attention to the other. Speaking of Tom Nairn, he says: For all the genuine impulse to wide-ranging comparative analysis which this body of literature provided, it can be profoundly inattentive to the actual details of British intellectual life, content to trade in characterizations that are so broad-brush as to be almost indistinguishable from cliché (p. 182).

But this is to hit on a wider problem than the critical appraisal of the work of Nairn and his colleagues. For an account to be explanatory in a scientific sense, it must have a dimension which is sufficiently general to be presented as an instance of a universal rule. But the more explanatory, the more it runs the danger of falling under Collini's condemnation of ‘cliché’. Conversely, the more historically precise the account, the less it can in this sense be explanatory, and the less it may have to say about anything except itself.

This means that the book is open to the critical question whether, once the account becomes specific, it has any longer any wider contribution to make. That Collini is aware of the potential attack from this direction is illustrated by his occasionally throwing a swaying rope bridge over the boggy ditch between the variety and specificity of historical narrative and the explanatory generality of theory, as when he refers to ‘the mistake of cultural pessimists in each generation to confound mutation in the transient, local features with the disappearance or terminal contraction of the space itself’ (p. 188). Transient and local do not mean either unimportant or ephemeral.

Interpretation as Part of the Interpreted Narrative

A theme which runs throughout the book is that the terms used to describe a thing are part of the thing described. In defining, one adds to and becomes a part of what one is describing or interpreting. The account given of the existence, character and role of intellectuals in Britain may from one vantage be incorrect or mythical, but it is itself a part of what it purports to describe. So the ‘Dreyfus envy’ which is part of the subject of this book is not an error about British thought so much as an aspect of it. This is one instance only of the unending process which Collini not only identifies but also necessarily contributes to, something he pinpoints at the very start of the book when he comments of the frequent denial that there are such things as English intellectuals that ‘it follows that this tradition of denial must itself then become an object of historical and critical attention’ (p. 2). As he neatly observes (p. 183), ‘One of the most characteristic activities of intellectuals is to engage in debate with each other over the status and role of intellectuals’. But this species conformity does not protect at least some intellectuals from Collini's dismissive commentary, as when he remarks on ‘contemporary Right-wing intellectuals such as Roger Scruton and Paul Johnson, whose doctrinaire denunciations of intellectuals as a virus in the British body politics reveal ever more desperate attempts to disguise the contradictory logic of their own position’ (p. 194).

Collini can be kinder, as in the case for instance of New Left narratives (p. 163), which are portrayed as undermining their own account by being part of what is being accounted for: The view that British culture in the 1950s was principally characterised by apathy, political apathy above all, was most insisted upon by those on the Left, even though the very increase in the volume of such insisting after 1956 went some way to belying the charge (p. 183).

What Collini is identifying here is perhaps an unavoidable and inherent feature of any non-pluralist way of thinking, for which there is a culture or intellectual tradition of terrain, against or from outside of which any comment which differs from it must speak, and from which it is excluded. If, on the other hand, a culture is the sum total of everything that goes on, then the critical voice is less easily able to present itself as outside of the environment on which it comments and to which it contributes.

There is a difficulty in determining the relation between what is said about a culture by those within that culture, and what appears to be the character of that culture, since the statements are an element in that character, whatever their truth status as descriptions of other of its elements. Collini's account stands on this recognition, yet at the same time is obstructed by it. He writes that stereotypes such as that of the un-intellectual English are continually invoked ‘even though these images may remain quite markedly at variance with the reality of behaviour in the society being described’. They do not, he argues, ‘form part of anyone's intellectual life’ (p. 72). But illusions about a society are at the same time part of that society's character, and this recognition is, in most of the book, one of the strengths of Collini's account.

The inclusion of those who write about intellectuals within the subject matter which they seek to describe does not stop at the door frame of the academic commentator. To speak about the role of intellectuals is to enter the circle oneself, and it is the fate to which such an account commits those who engage in it, that they must go in circles forever, so that by the end of the book Collini has entered the dance himself, thus expressing what he interprets. His nominalist narrative has become a part of the activity which, at the same time, it seeks to interpret. It is impossible to stand nowhere, and in the final section of the book Collini openly joins the contest he has, at least formally, up until then merely presented and asks ‘where is “outside society”?’. And once that move is made, the author becomes a part of his own subject matter. Any statement made becomes instantly a part of the reality to be explained. That may be bewildering, but it also gives hope, not because any explanation provides occasion for further explanation, but because any explanation adds further to what is to be explained. Collini would have been entirely justified in devoting a fair amount of attention to himself, or to his own previous writings.

But nominalism creates problems as well as avoiding them. If ‘intellectual’ is merely a word, whose use is as much a part of the bustle and rush of history as are the persons to which it is attached, what authority can an author's use of the term possess other than an appeal to dominant usage? And the problem with that is that it immediately creates a trap for anyone who tries to assess the validity of any particular usage, as in Collini's comment on ‘the (artificial) prominence enjoyed by “the Auden gang” in accounts of the 1930s’ (p. 139). If they were thought to be prominent, what other criterion of prominence is there? If any statement about a culture is also part of that culture, then while judgements may be made about its truthfulness, a critical conclusion will not remove the obligation to include it in the narrative. There is a difficulty therefore when Collini dismisses myths about British culture, since those myths are themselves a part of what they purport to describe.

Identity and Political Science

For political scientists, Absent Minds raises the question of their own identity, or of self-identification, and engages with the various preferred self-descriptions of those who teach and carry out research and scholarship in universities. Philippe Schmitter has distinguished between those who teach politics in Europe and those who do so in the United States, saying that in Europe they would describe themselves as intellectuals, and in the USA as professionals. But in so doing, the Europeans cross two of Collini's categories, or possibly all three: occupational, reflective and popular. Among Collini's many sharp observations is that those who talk of the death of intellectuals, or their absence, are themselves ‘auditioning for the vacant role’. So it will be no surprise if the application of the word and the concept to those working in higher education is of special interest to social scientists who do precisely that.

Absent Minds and Present Judgements

Absent Minds is characterised throughout by an impressive and easy breadth of reference, an indication of an intellectual authority which Collini has no reservations about using with dismissive force: ‘one cannot help but wonder at the extraordinary, seemingly impregnable, self-confidence manifested by some of those who have most prominently and successfully played the role of intellectual, and indeed wonder at the willingness of certain publics to listen to such noisily self-advertising characters’ (p. 53). Some of Collini's judgements are so harsh that their role as a part of the very history they are addressing upstages the thinkers on whom they are crushingly placed. Noel Annan's account of an ‘intellectual aristocracy’ is characteristically flayed: ‘the clichés of the intellectual equivalent of the tourist industry. This is post-prandial England, rocking gently in the warm complacency of the mid-1950s, appreciatively sniffing the familiar bouquet of Whig history’ (p. 145). Well, not very much warm complacency in that intervention. Anyone finding themselves in the index of this book would be well advised to check the page and read the text before telling their friends.

The cover illustration is well chosen. Two (male) figures with their backs to us gaze uncertainly down a hillside into the rural middle distance, apparently getting little help from their Ordnance Survey map. The picture is entitled ‘On the Map’ but they are pretty clearly off it. It is a neat illustration both of the uncertainty about identity and direction which Collini so well describes and of his own method of not revealing identities or solutions too soon. In the manner of the best detective story, the authors of the epithets which head each chapter are in each case revealed only later in the text. But the text is full not only of small surprises, but of large intellectual treks, so that the walkers with their ambivalent map are even more appropriate. Reading Absent Minds is an intellectual journey, and one part of its many delights is to watch the way in which Collini both traverses unfamiliar paths through relatively well-known territories and at the same time reveals completely new landscapes. The maps can always follow.