John Lloyd on an intellectual in power
Iain McLean on other intellectual prime ministers throughout history
Daniel Johnson on Brown the unsophisticated bookworm
Richard Cockett on the question of Brown's religious faith
Kamran Nazeer on Brown's book Courage
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Intellectuals and politicians are often uncomfortable bedfellows, but it's not surprising that they so often cross-dress, or switch sides, or that so many intellectuals feel like politicians manqué and vice versa. Plato's ideal of the philosopher-king has never quite disappeared, re-emerging in such varied forms as Marcus Aurelius and Kim Il Sung, William Gladstone or Felipe Cardoso. Yet too close an engagement with ideas can be a disadvantage. When Michael Dukakis was seen reading a book on Swedish planning policy on the beach, this was taken as another sign that he was unsuited for high office.
Gordon Brown is not a philosopher-king. But more than any of his recent predecessors, he will be a prime minister who is comfortable with ideas, graced with a PhD, and at home in libraries.
I worked as his adviser in the early 1990s and saw at first hand his appetite for argument and ideas, and his seriousness as a reader. Most politicians scan books for an idea or two; some never get past the back cover. Gordon Brown actually reads them. This first became apparent to me when in 1991 I arranged for him to meet the business guru Michael Porter. Porter had just published a weighty book on the competitiveness of nations; it seemed relevant to Labour's industrial policy, which was taking shape around industry clusters, technology transfer and the potential role of regional development agencies. As Brown commented in detail on the ceramics industries of northern Italy and machine tool industries in Germany, it gradually dawned on me that he knew more about the book's detail than the author. Porter was fine on the broad brush, but vague when the discussion turned to real examples. (The mystery was explained by the book's acknowledgements, which mentioned some 50 researchers who had helped to write it.)
Brown's seriousness as a reader is matched by the seriousness of his attempts to synthesise a consistent political position, including speeches and essays on the role of the state and the changing nature of national identity. Some have tried to portray him as an intellectual magpie and asked why would a man of the left interest himself in James Q Wilson, Roger Scruton or Gertrude Himmelfarb, wife and intellectual soulmate to Irving Kristol, the father of neoconservatism. Brown has certainly ranged widely in his influences, but there are some obvious common themes. More than most of his contemporaries, he has always seen politics through a moral lens, perhaps in part the result of his father's influence, perhaps too the influence of a distinctively Scottish left. For him, politics is about helping society to act as a moral community rather than just as a collection of individuals. This was not a viewpoint shared by most of the centre-left British political intelligentsia during the 1980s and 1990s, for whom morality was a matter of personal taste, and much less important than constitutional reform or novel economic strategies. Brown, by contrast, felt that without an account of what it is in human nature that makes people co-operative, and what it is in human institutions that reinforces those dispositions, the left would always be on the defensive. To fill this gap, he sought out insights wherever he could find them, including many from the centre and right of American intellectual life. James Q Wilson's book The Moral Sense is a good example: a carefully argued antidote to the simplicities of neoliberal individualism, which shows how we are disposed to be sociable and co-operative, but also that we need institutions and laws to reinforce those dispositions.
Here we come to another of the defining characteristics of Brownism. His sources of influence are very American, or to be more precise, northeast American, drawn from an academic culture where rigorous rationalist Enlightenment thought has fused with a vigorous Protestantism. Robert Putnam, Howard Gardner and Francis Fukuyama are all examples, as is Thomas Friedman. Californian thinking has had much less influence, new-age ideas none. Nor is there much evidence of influences from Europe (no Habermas or Bourdieu), or Asia (with the partial exception of Amartya Sen), or Latin America (no Roberto Unger or Paolo Freiere).
This American liberal republican tradition has many virtues, including a strong sense of history and of moral purpose. It is a modern equivalent to the milieu of the 18th-century Edinburgh Enlightenment, and the world of figures like Adam Smith and James Ferguson, and it has continued to innovate. Through figures like Cass Sunstein, the American liberal republican tradition has started to address the subtle questions of behaviour and culture which look set to dominate the politics of the next few decades: how do you persuade people to do the right things, whether in relation to their own health, climate change or simply in behaving considerately to their fellow citizens. Yet this tradition also has its share of blind spots. It's been slow to engage with the environment or gender. It's not much interested in science, except as a problem; and it's oddly parochial (you can look in vain for any suggestion that the nine tenths of the world's population outside Europe and north America have ever had any original insights).
Britain will find itself led by a very intelligent, curious and intellectually grounded politician, who will continue to read widely and engage with ideas. Yet Brown probably shouldn't be described as an intellectual in any strong sense of the word. He will be there to serve the public, to make difficult decisions and to handle the ambiguities that always accompany democratic power. Too strong an attachment to any one set of ideas could impede him. His predecessor, after all, began his time in office under attack for an excessive flexibility, yet left office criticised for becoming too fixed on an abstract idea where Iraq was concerned, and not showing the flexible pragmatism we want of our leaders. I suspect that the message will not have been lost on Brown.
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