A Notably Absent Mind

September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd 74 Reviews A NOTABLY ABSENT MIND Michael D. Stevenson Schulich School of Business, York U. / Russell Research Centre, McMaster U. Toronto, on m3j 1p3 / Hamilton, on l8s 4m2, Canada stevenm@mcmaster.ca Stefan Collini. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 2006. Pp. x, 526. isbn 0–19-929105–5. £25.00; us$45.00. Stefan Collini’s Absent Minds provides an intriguing analysis of the question of intellectuals in Britain during the twentieth century, examining “the ways in which the existence, nature, and role of intellectuals have been thought about and argued over” (p. 1) and addressing the popular notion that British intellectuals have been “peculiarly unimportant or even non-existent” (p. 3). For the most part, Collini convincingly demonstrates that this “absence thesis” is without merit and that Britain has enjoyed a distinguished tradition of intellectual activity , even in relation to countries—particularly France—where intellectuals have been viewed to have assumed a more prominent position in a nation’s social and cultural aTairs. Collini divides his book into Wve sections. In the Wrst, he provides a detailed overview of the historical evolution beginning in the early nineteenth century of the term “intellectual” as a noun in the English language; Collini also argues that Absent Mindsz adopts the cultural sense—and not the sociological and subjective senses—of this term and focuses on leading thinkers “who deploy an acknowledged intellectual position or achievement in addressing a broader, nonspecialist public” (p. 47). The second and Wfth sections of Absent Minds document the vigorous debate that occurred during the twentieth century about the role of intellectuals in British society. In this period, Collini examines a number of case studies—from the pre-World War i journal New Agez to the bbc’s Third Programme—to demonstrate how the domestic claims of British exceptionalism became more prominent as the century progressed. Collini devotes the third part of his book to a discussion of the “absence thesis” within an international framework by examining the historical status of intellectuals in Europe and the United States. In many of these countries, Collini identiWes a strikingly similar attitude that viewed intellectuals as “z‘backward’, ‘marginalized’, or simply ‘absent’z” (p. 217). Collini notes that some of these attitudes were also in play even in France, although the role of intellectuals in French society was deWned almost exclusively in political terms after the Dreyfus ATair. The most interesting section of Absent Mindsz is the fourth, in which Collini September 27, 2008 (1:09 pm) G:\WPData\TYPE2801\russell 28,1 048RED.wpd Reviews 75 provides detailed biographical portraits of Wve prominent Britons who commented negatively about intellectuals or who refused to consider themselves members of a distinct intellectual elite. T.yS. Eliot is used as an example of the amateur social critic who viewed British intellectuals as being unworthy of claiming cultural authority. R.yG. Collingwood is characterized as an intellectual manqué whose professorial cackling was largely ineTective in inXuencing contemporaryopinion .Collini saves his sharpest rhetorical barbs for George Orwell, an “antique moralist” (p. 372) whose indiscriminate criticism of the left-wing intelligentsia was primarily responsible for negative public attitudes towards intellectuals in Britain in the middle of the twentieth century. A.yJ.yP. Taylor is portrayed as an intellectual gadXy who largely abandoned his professional historical vocation in favour of pursuing journalistic celebrity. Finally, the career of A.yJ. Ayer is analyzed to illustrate Ayer’s consistent refusal to espouse authoritative truths. Russell scholars will be somewhat surprised that Bertrand Russell is not featured more prominently in Absent Minds. With the exception of some isolated references scattered throughout his text, Collini devotes fewer than Wve pages of sustained analysis (pp. 120–4) to Russell’s often contradictory attitudes towards intellectuals after the First World War. Although Collini explicitly states that he will be “more than usually unmoved by readers or reviewers who complain that this or that important Wgure is absent from its pages” (p. 8), his decision to emphasize other British intellectuals at Russell’s expense is disappointing. Nonetheless , Russellians will Wnd much useful and...

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