In 1955, the American sociologist Edward Shils wrote an essay in Encounter on British intellectuals. What struck him was the "evaporation of ideology." Everywhere, conservatism and apathy reigned. "Never," wrote Shils, "has an intellectual class found its society and culture so much to its satisfaction." A year later came Suez, the angry young men and the new left. Assessing the state of British intellectual life can be a tricky business.
Nevertheless, there are some striking features in Prospect's list of the 100 top British public intellectuals which are more revealing than individual omissions here or there. We will all miss particular names, but the biggest surprises come from larger absences. First, there is the almost total disappearance of the new left and its successors grouped around Marxism Today, which was so influential during the 1980s. EP Thompson, Ralph Miliband and Raymond Williams are dead, Stuart Hall has been battling ill health. Perry Anderson, Tariq Ali, Terry Eagleton and Eric Hobsbawm are the only ones left on this list. Significantly, they have not been replaced by an equivalent younger generation. The new right has gone the same way. Judging from this list, the energy of the intellectual right in the 1970s and 1980s has no counterpart today.
Perhaps even more spectacular is the demise of literary and cultural theory from its high point in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Eagleton (again) is the sole survivor on this list. Otherwise, theory remains isolated in its academic tower, cut off from the general culture by jargon and obscurantism. Literature is well represented, but many of the key critics are over 60. Among the next generations, the centrality once assumed by Leavis has gone.
Most dramatic of all is the final eclipse of the émigré intellectual after half a century. During the mid-20th century, more important British intellectuals had been born in Vienna and Berlin than in Manchester and Birmingham. Isaiah Berlin from Riga, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ernst Gombrich from Vienna, Melanie Klein, Thomas Balogh and Arthur Koestler from Hungary, Jacob Bronowski and Lewis Namier from Poland. George Steiner, Hobsbawm and Tom Stoppard, all child refugees, are the last intellectual survivors of that great exodus.
With them has gone the polymath. Who today can match the breadth of Bronowski and Ernst Schumacher? Ernest Gellner was a professor of philosophy at the LSE and then of anthropology at Cambridge and was one of the great social theorists of his generation. Michael Polanyi had chairs in both social studies and physical chemistry. Jonathan Miller and Steiner, both over 70, are the nearest to that range.
The other near-vanished species is the intellectual politician. David Willetts and Gordon Brown (an inclusion many would query on the basis of his public utterances) are the sole heirs to a tradition that only a generation ago included Richard Crossman, Tony Crosland and Denis Healey, Keith Joseph, Enoch Powell and Harold Wilson. Crossman and Wilson were both Oxford dons; Powell taught classics. Does this reflect a more constrained, soundbite-driven political culture or the larger decline of ideology? Is there a connection to the small number of economists and sociologists, suggesting that the great questions of economic management and society are largely settled, with a corresponding loss of interest in grand narratives and big, alternative solutions? Even the socially and economically ambitious but politically moderate world of Beveridge and Keynes has few heirs here.
Less surprising is the number of scientists on the list. There has been a dramatic rise in popular science books since the late 1980s and in the media profile of scientists like Robert Winston, Susan Greenfield and Richard Dawkins. There have also been huge developments in science and technology - in cosmology and genetics, in artificial intelligence and computer technology. Forty-five years after CP Snow's famous "two cultures" lecture, debates about science are back at the centre of our intellectual culture.
It is worth recalling the number of philosophers involved in the "two cultures" debate, including Bertrand Russell, Richard Wollheim and Bernard Williams. It was the heyday of British philosophy and Russell, Berlin and Freddie Ayer were all major figures in the national culture. The contrast with today is, again, revealing. There is hardly a shortage of important issues: the nature of mind and artificial intelligence, urgent debates about genetics, euthanasia and the environment. And yet there are barely half a dozen philosophers on the list, and none under 50. Together with the deaths last year of Williams and Wollheim, this suggests a real change in the place of philosophy in the national culture. Writing in Prospect in 1996, Jay Bernstein wondered whether philosophers "have abandoned the 'big questions' which once gave their discipline its point and meaning." Nearly a decade on, that concern has not gone away. Ayer might be consoled that two of his old adversaries have fared even less well. Adam Phillips is the sole representative of psychoanalysis, and there are only a handful of religious writers and thinkers. Are we as secular as this list suggests? Or are religious thinkers failing to reach out beyond their congregations or faiths?
If theory, the left, émigré economists, philosophers and theologians have declined, who has emerged to take their place? One group that stands out are the historians. They are hardly a new force in intellectual life, but many of these names are in their 40s and 50s, and they are interestingly varied: from left (Hobsbawm and Anderson) to right (Ferguson and Malcolm), from the history of ideas (Skinner and Malcolm) to social history (Hobsbawm), from the French revolution (Schama) to Henry VIII (Starkey). More important than the range is the impact. History has stormed peak-time television with recent series presented by Schama, Starkey and Ferguson. At the same time, historians have made major intellectual contributions: rethinking British historical identity, transforming our sense of Europe - eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in particular - and showing a new sensitivity to cruelty and barbarity in the past.
Another strong group are the social and political essayists. Again, the variety is noticeable. Instead of "isms" or Orwell's "smelly little orthodoxies," we have diverse styles and approaches. The personal voice stands out - Michael Ignatieff, Timothy Garton Ash, John Gray, AC Grayling, Christopher Hitchens, Ian Buruma, Noel Malcom. They have other features in common: a strong sense of political morality, internationalism and most of them are first-class writers. They are Orwell's children, taking on big issues in good prose. The last few years have not been kind to the old left, new left or right. Perhaps the dominant political voice in this list is a mix of liberal, social democrat and new Labour, the true voice of Prospect. It is a language of the fine detail of policy rather than big rhetoric, piecemeal social reform rather than big theory, aware of the human consequences of revolution and war. There is little room for utopias or big fixes on this list.
The list may also seem curiously old-fashioned. It offers little room for the new "isms" that have broken through in recent decades: feminism, multiculturalism, postmodernism. There aren't many young voices: few under 45, hardly anyone under 40. It is very middle-aged, and also very male and very white. A few voices of Asian origin - Salman Rushdie, Tariq Ali, Bhikhu Parekh, Amartya Sen, Zia Sardar - and two intellectuals of Caribbean origin, Paul Gilroy and VS Naipaul. Over 50 years after Windrush, 30 years after the expulsions of Asians from Uganda, this list offers little sign of a significant black or Asian intelligentsia. Where are the heirs of CLR James and Stuart Hall, or the counterparts to Cornel West and Henry Gates in America? Similarly, there are very few women. Is this the result of institutional racism and sexism in the media and universities? Or is it rather an acknowledgement that the big battles have been won, that sexism and race are no longer key fault-lines in our intellectual culture?
The absence of new cultural forms and the media may surprise some. Why does this list smack of the common room and the think tank and not Britart and cool Britannia? Two names from television, none from advertising and no film directors. Of these, film is perhaps the most striking absence. There are some first-rate British film critics (David Thompson, Mark Cousins and Anthony Lane among them), and major British directors (Mike Leigh and Ken Loach among an older generation, Roger Michell and Michael Winterbottom among the next). But it is the filmwriters - Hare, Stoppard and McEwan - who have made it on to the list, and more for their work on stage or in print than screen.
Youth culture is another striking absence. Instead, we have the traditional intellectual: scientists and historians, social theorists and policy advisers. It feels very grown-up and sane, maybe even dull. Perhaps the problem lies in the definition of "public intellectual." Are the criteria which inform this list now out of date, part of a vanishing intellectual culture that disappeared with Noel Annan's dons and the Third Programme? Is that why there are so few representatives from popular culture?
On the other hand, let's recall the strong definitions of "intellectual" in the writings of Noam Chomsky and in Edward Said's 1993 Reith lectures ("Representations of the Intellectual"). Both speak of criticism, conscience, speaking truth to power. This radical tradition is represented here by George Monbiot, Tom Nairn, Tariq Ali, Germaine Greer and a few others, but it has few echoes in today's popular or youth culture.
Television is increasingly dominated by that popular and youth culture and has largely lost interest in ideas. Melvyn Bragg is on this list not because he is a television executive but because, through his work on Start the Week, In Our Time and several major television series he has tried to change the place of science and religion in our intellectual culture. He is not simply an intellectual impresario (they are excluded by the Prospect criteria). He has had a consistent agenda and set of passions. What has Mark Thompson, say, done that is comparable? Or Jana Bennett? Television executives have the power to promote thinkers and create exciting new forums for ideas. But how have they used that power?
Just because someone has influence in the media does not make them a public intellectual - even if they are clever, well read and outspoken. Nor, equally, are rigour and erudition sufficient in themselves. The criteria for inclusion (see page 22) stress originality but also the representation of important strands of British cultural life. The two can evidently conflict.
For all its flaws, this list is more than a parlour game. It tells us something interesting about intellectual life in Britain. Like all such lists it is the beginning of a debate, not the end. Lists are not border guards, setting up fences and "keep out" notices. They are signs of the times, and, as Edward Shils found out, the times can change more quickly than we think.
