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i H istorians and social theorists have written extensively about the modern intellectual’s class origins, political allegiances, and social function.1 Yet, as Charles Kadushin notes, “Despite (or perhaps because of) the many works on intellectuals, there is no adequate sociological theory of intellectuals or intellectual life. . . . Theory-building in this field has been marred by an abundance of opinion and moralization, a dearth of facts, and a plethora of parochial definitions.”2 Much of the scholarship on the sociology of intellectuals is purely descriptive; and even worse, unlike the case in other subfields of the sociology of occupations, as Robert Brym notes, sociologists have tended to accept the self-descriptions (or “professional ideologies”) of intellectuals about their political outlooks at face value.3 Brym calls for a moratorium on general theories about the correlation between social structure and intellectuals’ patterns of mobility, and he instead urges careful study of the relation between partisan affiliation and the intellectual ’s career trajectory through the changing social structure.4 Given the observations of Kadushin and Brym about the theoretical imprecision and “intellectual backwardness” of the political sociology of intellectuals,5 it may prove a modest contribution merely to broach the conceptual issues of the field through the single rich example of a particular intellectual and his intellectual milieu.6 George Orwell and the London intelligentsia of the 1930s and 1940s provide an instructive case. The special historical relation of Orwell to the British intellectuals of his day sheds light on the changing situation of the modern Western intellectual. “When the history of intellectuals of the twentieth century is written ,” William Steinhoff has predicted, “some part of it will be devoted to Orwell’s chapter one “Not One of Us?” Orwell and the London Left of the 1930s and ’40s 10 their orwell, left and right analysis and criticism of his fellow intellectuals.”7 Or, as a disgruntled left-wing journalist derisively remarked of Orwell to the young Alfred Kazin in the wartime London of 1944, “He’s not one of us.”8 The case of Orwell, however, possesses more than merely historical interest, for it represents not just one man’s dispute with his fellow literary intellectuals. Rather, it signals the emergent position of the modern writer-intellectual in Britain , responding to two new, related, historical developments in the 1930s: the birth of a radical intelligentsia and the rise in Europe of totalitarianism. How did English writer-intellectuals react under such conditions? What factors contributed to the rise and decline of widespread intellectual dissidence? What accounts for political rebellion and adaptation occurring variously in political , religious, and aesthetic terms? How do the intellectual’s class origins, education , and mature social experience shape his or her political orientation? Does the writer-intellectual have a special political function to fulfill in society? These broad historical, conceptual, and normative questions cannot, of course, be addressed adequately in a single example. Moreover, to approach them via the filter of the vivid historical personalities and complicated social conditions of the 1930s and 1940s in Britain runs the risk of generalization from skewed or impoverished data. Yet advantages emerge too. The sociologist’s restricted case allows for a combination of observational detail and conceptual delimitation seldom found in cultural history, and the case of Orwell, an unusually rich and suggestive one, is particularly well-suited to a study of the political sociology of intellectuals . His appropriateness arises, perhaps paradoxically, from the adverse stance which he took toward his adopted “class” of fellow intellectuals. By the very fact of his distinctiveness Orwell offers insight into the typicality of his intellectual generation. Because he was never directly affiliated with the left-wing writers of the “Auden generation”—“a generation he was in but never part of,” in Stuart Samuels’s characterization9 —he could stand at once inside and outside the Left. He thereby could both participate in and give witness to his generation’s experience, reflecting its larger dilemma between political detachment and commitment. “To learn what the world then looked like to an English intellectual,” wrote his friend and Tribune colleague T. R. Fyvel in Intellectuals Today (1968), “one can go to George Orwell, who wrote so explicitly and precisely about this, and one can also see how the issues of the time were reflected in his own career.” His diverse engagement with poverty, imperialism, fascism, and socialism established Orwell, in Fyvel’s view, as “the characteristic literary figure of the thirties,” and Fyvel urged readers “to consider...

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