Opinion - News Analysis   

There are no British intellectuals

Agnes Poirier

They are cut off from global debate by the obtuse imperialism of the English language.

LET US be clear: there may be intellectuals in Britain, but there are no British intellectuals. The concept emerged from the Dreyfus affair; J'Accuse, Emile Zola's letter to the French President published in L'Aurore on January 13, 1898, chiselled the notion once and for all. Writers and artists now understood it was their duty to question the established order. They were not part of an intelligentsia or elite per se, but for the sake of objectivity they remained a part.

Intellectuals, born in every milieu, are society's conscience. They do not belong to a particular class. They can only flourish in an environment in which the pursuit of ideas, public debate, and cultural matters is paramount. In that world, all citizens are potential intellectuals, only of different calibre.

In Britain, this notion triggers sneers. People feel they must apologise if they want to say something intelligent. When foreign journalists like me look for intellectuals in the U.K. to comment on an event or socio-cultural trend, to offer a synthesis and bridge domains of knowledge, we hit a wall. All we find are self-confessed specialists, reluctant to engage in a larger debate and, above all, averse to dissent.

But there are intellectuals in Britain. They get honours everywhere but their home country. The French exulted when British playwright Harold Pinter received the Nobel; Tony Blair did not even grab his phone to offer congratulations — perhaps precisely because Pinter is an intellectual, who speaks the truth and never bows.

You will recognise these intellectuals easily; like Pinter, they never apologise before opening their mouth, they are not afraid of abstraction, they do not refuse to dissent and, lastly, they do not naively think that all intellectuals speak one language: namely, English.

To say, for instance, Paris has not bred any worthy intellectuals since Camus and that Bernard-Henri Levy epitomises the intellectual poseur is at best terribly short-sighted, at worst profoundly ill-informed. Why? Because since Sartre's time, a pernicious revolution has transformed Anglophone publishing.

Think Europe has no more intellectuals simply because you cannot find their books? Think again. Guess how many books in British bookshops are translations? Just 3 per cent — meaning the bulk of the world's intellectual output never gets read or discussed in Britain.

The rampant imperialism of the English language contributes to the building of an ivory tower invisible to its inhabitants. They are so convinced that no serious thoughts can be conceived outside their culture they deem it unnecessary to learn other languages. In Britain, only a quarter of state-funded secondary schools make modern languages compulsory. A generation of linguists is about to be lost and with it the country's capacity to understand a different world. University language departments will close, the U.K. Foreign Office will find itself short of competent staff and British academics will declare themselves the last true intellectuals, in blind ignorance.

In France, by contrast, 25 per cent of books are translations. On the Left Bank (Paris), the window on to the world is wide open; on the South Bank (London) it has almost closed. —

© Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

(Agnes Catherine Poirier is a journalist on the French daily Liberation.)

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Stories in this Section

End the killings now
New find strengthens Darwin's theory
Of hi-tech, low efficiency, and malls
"White supremacy" or racism?
The return of the Hong Tou A-San
A belated but welcome move
Corrections and clarifications
There are no British intellectuals
Reprehensible act
India's troubles
Offer of sops
Ill-conceived move

Copyright © 2006, The Hindu. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu