‘Diminishing returns’ by DAVID HAWKES

In a letter written in 1927, T. S. Eliot described the majority of contributors to the Criterion as men who were “supporting themselves and their families in the Civil Service, or in museums, or in universities, or in banks and commercial houses; and are thus able to think, and read, and write independently of a livelihood”. In his genteel amateurism, Eliot assumed that aesthetic and cultural pursuits should be ends in themselves, and that the sordid necessities of making “a livelihood” should be indulged only as means to those ends. How times have changed. As Stefan Collini points out in this engaging collection of learned essays: “in the early twenty-first century we hardly think of a job in a bank or commercial house . . . as allowing much leisure to ‘think, read and write’ about literary and intellectual matters”.

More to the point perhaps, we now find it hard to imagine a world in which a successful currency trader like Eliot would subordinate his profession to his literary endeavours. A student of mine was recently heard to sigh, with infinite disdain: “I can’t believe Keats gave up being a doctor to become a poet”. In fact 2016 looks like being the year in which the liberal, literary, middle-class intellectuals who form the subject matter of Common Writing: Essays on literary culture and public debate, as well as its likely readership, were finally forced to acknowledge their practical impotence. The Brexit vote and even the distant triumphs of Trump and Erdogan exposed the profound cultural alienation of the metropolitan intelligentsia. The once intimate connection between what Jürgen Habermas called the “bourgeois public sphere” and the exercise of real, serious power has been definitively broken.

The bourgeois public sphere emerged after the English Civil War, to continue by other means the struggle against absolutism, privilege and the tyranny of custom. It provided a space in which the middle classes could discuss, consolidate and advance their cultural influence, which they recognized as an indispensable adjunct to their growing political and economic power. That space was partly physical, in the form of coffee houses, libraries, museums, debating clubs, schools and colleges. It was also ideological, in the form of newspapers such as The Times and the Guardian, magazines such as the Tatler and Spectator, aesthetic genres such as the novel and realist painting, and such academic disciplines as art history and literary criticism. With remarkable continuity, those influences and institutions dominated British cultural life from the beginning of the eighteenth century until the end of the twentieth.

Within this discursive arena, commentators and critics advanced the claims of reason above those of authority. They defended the rights of essence over appearance, and of logic above rhetoric. They swept away the medieval mentality, and constructed an alternative appropriate to the high capitalist era of individual rights and formal equality. But they also nurtured their own gravediggers. By the end of the twentieth century, an economy based on the production and exchange of useful commodities was mutating into a hallucinatory, hyper-real miasma of financial derivatives. Aristotelian, critical reason was trumped by Baconian, instrumental reason. Making money became an end in itself, rather than a means to the higher end of cultivated leisure. Technology consolidated the dominance of the image over the written word, and new breeds of superstition began to crawl from the corpse of the Enlightenment.

It is almost sixty years since Hannah Arendt warned in The Human Condition (1958) that “the public realm” was being “devoured” by “household administration”. Arendt meant that matters pertaining to the oikos, the economy or “household”, had imposed themselves on a venue (the polis) where they had no rightful place. She understood that, being responses to appetite rather than to reason, market-oriented motives and behaviour were antithetical to the rational exchange of ideas. In one of this book’s most intriguing essays, Collini quotes Tony Judt in commendation of Arendt’s “refusal to condemn modernity completely”, but the pieces collected here impart a melancholy awareness of the devastation wrought by the exposure of culture and intellect to commercial influences.

Collini has spent two decades chronicling and memorializing the bourgeois public sphere, while glancing apprehensively at what might replace it. In two earlier collections, English Pasts: Essays in history and culture (reviewed in the TLS, July 30, 1999), and this book’s companion volume Common Reading: Critics, historians, publics (TLS, May 23, 2008), he described the people, ideas and debates that typified rational, liberal humanism at its historical and cultural apogee. The first part of this new volume contains pieces on literary figures including F. R. Leavis, Graham Greene and William Empson, while the second section concerns such public intellectuals as Isaiah Berlin, Ernest Gellner and Hugh Trevor-Roper. An intermediary section on “media”, including theTLS and Radio 4, provides a neat bridge between the book’s two halves, and helps to impose a unity on the disparate subjects covered in the other chapters.

There is an autumnal, elegiac tone to Collini’s work. Successive essays record the demise of comfortably familiar but “old-fashioned” ideas and preoccupations. Although he writes from inside its discursive and chronological confines, Collini views the bourgeois public sphere with the eye of a wistful historian, albeit of the very recent past. He evokes the “lost world” of 1950, when Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination sold 170,000 copies, and asks: “why does it seem unimaginable that any work by a literary critic might have a similar impact now?” Discussing the historians J. L. and Barbara Hammond, Collini notes that “the categories which structured their accounts now appear almost archaic in their uninflected simplicity: selfishness versus concern for others, indifference versus a sense of responsibility, greed versus moderation”. R. H. Tawney’s contempt for capital accu­mulation reveals a sensibility “almost unim­aginably remote” from the “share-owning democracy” of the third millennium.

In fact, almost every figure Collini discusses here seems “old-fashioned” today, which, as he observes, “may be an index of a widespread unease with the very idea of the unembarrassed appeal to non-economic human values in public debate”. Because they draw on a stock of cultural capital that not everyone possesses, such appeals are easily dismissed as “elitist” (and therefore worthless) by the advocates of “market populism”, who evince a “ressentiment . . . of the swaggeringly relativist kind, confident that ‘no-one has the right to say what someone else ought to do or think’”. There remain occasional anachronisms. Christopher Hitchens represented “a species we tend to think of as flourishing in the nineteenth century rather than the twenty-first, the political journalist as man of letters”, but Collini is forced to ask “what kind of cultural authority this type of writing can lay claim to these days”, and the implicit answer is “very little”.

Collini lays the blame for this decline in the influence of literary culture squarely at the door of the marketplace, which effectively belittles and marginalizes intellect and learning, leaving the corpses of would-be philosopher kings such as Michael Ignatieff and Roy Jenkins “strewn on the savage rocks of international finance capitalism”. But what is “finance capitalism” but collective human thought and activity represented in symbolic terms? Is economics the antithesis of aesthetics or just its latest form? The spectre of postmodernism haunts this book, but Collini mostly averts his eyes from its looming horror. His task here, which he performs with admirable aplomb, is to eulogize the passing order.

The breed of public intellectuals discussed here is in no danger of extinction. Its natural habit remains hospitable: most of these essays originally appeared in venues like the TLS, the LRB and the Guardian, which retain a large and loyal readership. But the days when the likes of Eliot and Leavis could extend their influence into wider politics and society are behind us, and it is hard to imagine them returning.

Unlike Tawney or Trilling, Collini does not blame individual selfishness or even an oppressive bourgeoisie for the cultural decline he describes. Instead, the reader of these essays gets the sense that an invisible enemy has been at work, quietly eroding the rational foundations of thought and debate, replacing them with image, spin and perception. The writers and thinkers discussed here imagined that enemy in various figurative terms. As Eliot did in The Waste Land, J. B. Priestley called it “the City”, while Richard Hoggart conceived it as a disease against which he had been “inoculated” by education. The ideological distance that separates us from such figures is immensely greater than the chronological. Hoggart died only in 2014, yet Stefan Collini wonders admiringly: “What could it have been like to inhabit that sensibility with such conviction that dividends or capital gains could figure as forms of infection?” By reminding us of such intelligent, cultivated people who, although they lived quite recently, conceived the ethical status of the marketplace in terms very different from today’s conventional wisdom, this absorbing book helps to answer that salutary question.