Two Cultures? The Significance of CP Snow
by FR Leavis (Cambridge University Press, £12.99)
“It is a bad tone, an impermissible tone.” So wrote Lionel Trilling of FR Leavis’s 1962 lecture on CP Snow, reissued this month in a new edition, with an introduction by the historian Stefan Collini. Leavis’s attack on Snow’s celebrated philippic against the ignorance of science displayed by “literary intellectuals” is unsparing. The Two Cultures, Leavis writes, “exhibits an embarrassing vulgarity of style.” And although he protested that his response to Snow contained “no personal animus,” it is undeniably ad hominem—lavishly so.
Two Cultures? is more than just a study in sustained vituperation, however (though it’s worth reading for the gravity of Leavis’s rage alone). As Collini points out, Leavis has important and enduring things to say about the mechanics of intellectual celebrity (Snow was what today we’d call a “public intellectual”) and the relationship between disinterested academic research and economic growth. The lecture anticipated the publication the following year of the Robbins report on higher education, which appeared to make meeting the “needs of the economy” a priority for universities.
Leavis’s anxieties about the cultural consequences of the technological change for which Snow was a cheerleader caused him to be lampooned as a “Luddite.” But whilst we may no longer find the the work of DH Lawrence as compelling as he did, his insistence that “individual lives cannot be aggregated or equated or dealt with qualitatively in any way” will surely still strike a chord.
“It is a bad tone, an impermissible tone.” So wrote Lionel Trilling of FR Leavis’s 1962 lecture on CP Snow, reissued this month in a new edition, with an introduction by the historian Stefan Collini. Leavis’s attack on Snow’s celebrated philippic against the ignorance of science displayed by “literary intellectuals” is unsparing. The Two Cultures, Leavis writes, “exhibits an embarrassing vulgarity of style.” And although he protested that his response to Snow contained “no personal animus,” it is undeniably ad hominem—lavishly so.
Two Cultures? is more than just a study in sustained vituperation, however (though it’s worth reading for the gravity of Leavis’s rage alone). As Collini points out, Leavis has important and enduring things to say about the mechanics of intellectual celebrity (Snow was what today we’d call a “public intellectual”) and the relationship between disinterested academic research and economic growth. The lecture anticipated the publication the following year of the Robbins report on higher education, which appeared to make meeting the “needs of the economy” a priority for universities.
Leavis’s anxieties about the cultural consequences of the technological change for which Snow was a cheerleader caused him to be lampooned as a “Luddite.” But whilst we may no longer find the the work of DH Lawrence as compelling as he did, his insistence that “individual lives cannot be aggregated or equated or dealt with qualitatively in any way” will surely still strike a chord.
