Organic Intellectuals in the Dark Ages?

I am going to begin with intellectuals: not a word we are all that comfortable with, or even familiar with, in Britain. Raymond Williams noted that that plural noun from the early nineteenth century when it entered the English language tended to be pejorative, and that 'unfavourable uses were dominant until the mid-twentieth century . . . and still [1976] persist'.¹ And in the early twenty-first century? I'm afraid this is one of those terms and concepts to which there still clings inescapably a whiff of un-Britishness. Intellectuals, like intelligentsia (a rare borrowing from Russian, in the nineteenth century), may have positive connotations in other languages, but not in British English.

Stefan Collini has recently re-examined British intellectuals in modern times. He's sharply criticized the notion that academic professionalization and specialization since the mid-nineteenth century broke the links between scholars and the general reader. Anxiety that the learned have lost contact with any but the learned is, as Collini says, probably as old as learning itself. But the general reader may be a mythical beast. In any case, the eighteenth century's cosy contacts between learned men and other elite men have yielded to a very much more diverse culture that is more democratic, and the gap between the specialist and a wider public, rather than widening to impassability, has been dramatically narrowed by university expansion. Collini argues that 'the sheer size and diversity of the academic world, broadly defined' (that is, to include all institutions of tertiary education) has meant that 'the university is coming to be seen as the arena within which reflection on the cultural and intellectual life of society . . . is largely expected to take place'.² This may still be a lot truer in America than in England but the trend is there. As more and more aspects of culture are taught and studied in universities, so more and more cultural criticism goes on there as well. What we now have in our universities, then, is an 'academic public sphere'. So what some traditionalists deplore as dumbing down is in fact an opening out, a bridging of that old anxiety-provoking gap – not a problem but a whole set of solutions.

In all this, there's a lot of good fresh thinking, and a lot of humanity. But solutions bring new problems. Here are three in Collini's brief analysis. First it's almost wholly Anglo-American – hence Anglophone – in its frame of reference. And when I say Anglo, I mean it – Scotland (which to its honour has refused to charge fees for university education) doesn't get a mention. But how well does this analysis translate to other parts of the world with different intellectual and above all linguistic traditions? It may; but the questions remain to be asked. Second, it's a modernist's view, and so it fails to see what I see as a problem: culture's extension within modernity at the expense of any time-dimension in pre-modernity – as if everything thought and experienced before roughly 1862 is irrelevant.³ Third, it's politics-light. True, Collini quotes an American scholar on the displacement of discussion of politics into 'the academy' because of the waning of other public spheres – but I'm not sure that's true, or so true, of Britain. How might it become true?

Enter organic intellectuals. You meet them in the very first section of Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks. Gramsci was an Italian marxist (in that order). He was born in 1891, suffered from serious ill-health all his life, was active in socialist politics from 1913 and in factory councils and the Communist Party from 1919, spent time in Moscow in 1922–3, fell foul of Mussolini's fascists, was imprisoned in 1926, and died in Rome in 1937.⁴ The decade of imprisonment was one of ever-worsening health, and isolation. He was able to write and up to a point read, but 'I don't know whether you've read the Lives of saints and of hermits', he wrote to his mother on 23...