Ben Rogers, "Prospect"

Gli intellettuali e la politica: Gran Bretagna

(versione non rivista dall'autore)

Prospect was founded 6 years ago. We are a young magazine both in the sense that we are new, and in the sense that our editors and many of our writers are in their twenties, thirties and forties. We publish eleven issues a year and have a circulation of about 20,000 copies. Many of our readers are teachers and academics or journalists and others who work in the media. Roughly half work in the public sector, half in the private. We aim to be self-financing, and for that reason are probably a little more commercial – a little less uncompromisingly highbrow - than many of the other reviews represented here this weekend. We market ourselves as Britain’s ‘intelligent conversation’ but aim to be controversial, irreverential and funny as well as serious. We like upending the wisdom of the day.

The magazine is very largely the creation of its editor David Goodhart, previously a journalist on the Financial Times. Goodhart has said that he thinks of Prospect as a ‘cross between the Economist and the New Yorker’. The magazine has certain counterparts in the U.S., like the Atlantic Monthly, but no obvious British rival. We lean to the centre-left, and are generally pro-European, but we do not include an editorial and try to avoid pursuing any one agenda. We sometimes buy articles from foreign journals - usually American. We hope to have at least one article from every issue bought by one of our national newspapers, often more.

Naturally Prospect aims to cover just about every issue under the sun. (And perhaps beyond it – we recently ran a debate on whether the colonisation of outer-space was desirable or inevitable). But there are certain issues to which we find ourselves returning again and again. These include, in no particular order: the claims of socio-biology and artificial intelligence: Europe and Britain’s role in Europe; globalisation; ‘the Third Way’; England after the decline of Britain; social justice after socialism; currents in modern art and the merits of conceptual art; issues surrounding global warming; multi-culturalism.

I would be lying if I pretended that Prospect has had an easy birth or childhood. I would distinguish between at least two rather different challenges we have had to face.

The first comes from the political context. For most of the time that we have been publishing, Tony Blair’s New Labour government has been in power, and by studiously pursuing a non-ideological, middle of the road, politics, Blair has taken much of the controversy out of government. Indeed, the chief characteristic of the ‘Third Way’ philosophy he sometimes champions seems to be the proposition that all desirable goals and values – freedom and liberty, prosperity and community, growth and sustainability, Left and Right, are reconcilable. As you can imagine, this makes him a hard character for journalists and intellectuals to pin down. Despite important reforms, the principles behind the New Labour government remain strangely elusive. Hence no doubt, New Labour’s very great success.

But we also face another challenge. For, Britain has a very vibrant press. Readers can choose, for instance, from four national broadsheets, the Guardian, Independendent, Times and Telegraph (all of which have great thick sister papers that appear on Sundays), several weekly political magazines – the New Statesmen, the Spectator, the Economist - and several literary weeklies or bi-monthlies including the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. And that is to mention only the better known titles. While none of these journals occupy exactly the same space as we do, they over-lap with us in many ways. Prospect, then, has to work very hard to make its voice heard - to win the interest of the reader.

That said, these challenges are also opportunities. Few other British papers or magazines will carry long political or critical essays, and we have succeeded in carving out a fair sized niche for ourselves, providing writers, critics and intellectuals – Ernest Gellner, Michael Ignatieff, David Marquand, Linda Colley, A.S. Byatt, Robert Skildesky, Timothy Garton Ash - with a space that they would not easily have found elsewhere. In particular, we have devoted a lot of space trying to pin-down Blairism - to making sense of New Labour’s strength and weaknesses.

The European Connection

It is a cliché to say that the British, or at least the English (the case of Scotland is a little different) are insular. We are poor linguists and look warily on European integration. Even our more intellectual magazines do not always cover foreign debates in the way that they should. Moreover insofar as newspapers and magazines do cover European debate, the coverage tends to be negative. So Alan Sokal’s book attacking French post-modern or post-structuralist theorists, Intellectual Imposters, did receive a great deal of press attention. But most of it agreed with Sokal in heaping scorn of French intellectual life. It is simply impossible to imagine a British politician engaging with Habermas in the way that French and German politicians have been known to do.

I am not saying anything here that is new. But it might be worth trying to identify some of the behind our insularity vis a vis Europe. I distinguish two.

First, at the political level, national identity does not have quite the same source or character in Britain/England as it does in the rest of Europe. Thus in Europe national identity tends to be defined largely by reference, first and most importantly, to language and literature - taken to encompass, theatre, and film and song, as well as the printed word - and, secondly, by cuisine. Much of the purpose, as I understand it, of the EU is to protect Europe’s linguistic, literary and gastronomic traditions from globalisation – a euphemism, of course, for ‘Americanisation’. The English, however, share their language with the U.S. and much of the rest of the world besides, while Britain, as every foreign tourist discovers only too quickly, scarcely has a culinary tradition worth preserving. Instead, British identity resides largely in long enduring political institutions and traditions. We can trace our form of government back a good deal further than most (than any?) other European nation. Hence our worries about transferring sovereignty to the EU.

At the intellectual level, I think it true to say that European social theory is very largely the creation of the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment very largely passed England by. (Again, I am not talking about Scotland here – Scotland had its own, very great, Enlightenment). By the 18th century, England already had a fairly developed commercial economy and moderately free political institutions, as a result of which there was little incentive to think hard, as there was in France, Scotland and to some extent in Naples (the Naples of Vico) about the means by which commerce and freedom could be promoted. In contrast to the rest of Europe, the English have been shy of large-scale social theorising ever since. Our philosophers and intellectuals tend to come from Ireland (Burke), Scotland (Hume, Smith, J.S Mill) or, in the last century, from Europe (Wittgenstein, Ayer, Popper, Berlin, Gombrich, and others).

Anyway, whatever the causes of English insularity, we at Prospect have attempted to keep up with and contribute to European debates. David Goodhart, our editor, worked as a journalist in Germany, and the magazine’s first and long-standing deputy editor, Valerie Monchi, was French. We have taken articles by major European thinkers and politicians – Joscar Fisher, Jean-Pierre Chevenment, Regis Debray – that, here, on the Continent, were published by dailies or weeklies – Die Zeit, Le Monde, La Republica, but would not have appeared in English if it were not for Prospect. Similarly, we try to keep up with European intellectual debates. So we ran a profile of Habermas recently, and are planning to run another on Bordieu in the near future. But yes, of course we could – and should – do more.

Intellectuals and Politics

You will probably guess, from all that I have said, that political debate in Britain does not tend to have a very intellectual character and that politicians do not take intellectuals very seriously.

There is a lot of truth in this, although there are some important qualifications.

On the left, intellectuals have played a considerable part in Labour Party history. Writers and thinkers like George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, helped found the new party, while the Labour Party of post war years was dominated by academic and intellectual heavy-weights, including Gaitskell, Crosland, Crossman and Roy Jenkins. More recently, the historian Eric Hobsbawn is said to have been instrumental in persuading Neil Kinnock in the 1980s that the Labour party had to distance itself from its traditional identification with trade unionism and an old style, inflexible welfare state. And still more recently the Marxist historian Tom Nairn has an important influence on the Scottish National Party, while Roy Jenkins, Anthony Giddens, David Marquand have, at one time or another, captured Blair’s attention – although not always, I fear, to much practical effect. Although Blair has intellectual aspirations – he has said that he wishes he had studied political philosophy at university (he studied law) – but he is in no sense an intellectual himself.

Nevertheless, by far the most striking instance of intellectuals influencing politics is provided by the right. For although British conservatives professes suspicion of abstract ideas, Thatcherism was deeply indebted to libertarian philosophers and theorists, like Hayek, von Mises and Milton Friedman – theorists who, had, through most of their careers, been treated as outcasts. We can still feel their influence today in New Labour’s continuing obeisance to privatisation and the free-market.

As far as cultural and literary reviews go, they have, of course exercised some influence over politics, but it is difficult to gauge how much – my sense is that there role has not been as important as it has been in the rest of Europe. On the left, The New Statesman was, for the middle two quarters of the 20th century, a widely read and prestigious forum, edited by a succession of distinguished thinkers and writers. I think that I am right in saying that the Labour politician, Richard Crossman, seriously considered resigning from government to take over editorship of the magazine in the 1960s - a thing that would be unthinkable today. And during the Thatcher years, The Spectator played the role of house Tory Magazine – gossipy, ideological and irreverent. Yet both magazines have been left high and dry as a result of shifts in British political tidal currents. They are marginal voices in politics today.

That brings me to my final point. I am, of course, in favour of greater interaction between intellectuals and politicians – I am, I suppose, an intellectual myself. Yet I also strongly believe that intellectuals have to earn the attention of politicians and the general public. The days when ‘ordinary people’ put their faith blindly in specialists, or professionals of any kind – not just intellectuals but clerics, scientists, politicians - are behind us. (And a very good thing too). Intellectuals will only be taken seriously where they are clear, profound and true to everyday political concerns. How many intellectuals meet these standards? In the case of Britain, the answer, I regret to say, is very very few indeed.

copyright 2001 by Società editrice il Mulino

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