Happily coinciding with today’s transfer of power to Gordon Brown, the July issue of Prospect, published today, features a six-article symposium on Brown as intellectual.
Gordon Brown is the first prime minister in decades—possibly a century—who can be said to be a genuine intellectual. This must be significant—but the question our writers attempt to tackle is: how? Despite his bookishness, curiously little is known of Brown’s worldview. He has roots in Scottish social democracy, but how far has he moved on? What books are most important to him? Why are two of his favourite thinkers right-wing Americans? He is a moralist, but is he also a practising Christian? And as Brown moves into No 10, what will all this mean for the governance of Britain?
These and other questions are considered by our six writers:
John Lloyd on Brown the intellectual
Iain McLean on Britain’s other intellectual prime ministers
Daniel Johnson on Brown the unsophisticated bookworm
Geoff Mulgan on the American inspiration behind Brown’s thinking
Richard Cockett on the question of Brown’s religious faith
Kamran Nazeer on Brown’s book Courage
As ever, let us know your thoughts in the comment boxes.
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[...] Prospect Magazine has all the goods. [...]
John Lloyd writes,
“On one of the few occasions I have met Brown, I responded by recommending The Leopard, the great postwar Sicilian novel by Giuseppe di Lampedusa, which I was then re-reading. Brown grunted, and dropped the subject. I got the impression that novels were not among his priorities.”
The grunt was probably a groan. Postwar indeed. The novel takes place in the 1860s.
Essay – English Journeys
“English Journeys†is an excellent essay with a weak ending.
I have lived through more or less the same period and spent long periods in other countries where I too often felt my Englishness as something inherited, un-requested, undeserved and poorly understood. My father’s certificate of honourable discharge from the Rifle Brigade in 1919 has recently been found on top of an old wardrobe. It shows English and Australian riflemen presenting arms to Britannia on her throne inside a small stone temple. The temple has columns draped with ribbons inscribed “British Isles, Overseas Dominions, Indian Empire, Colonies, Protectorates†and, on the headstone, “God and my rightâ€. In 1945, at six years old my infant class was told by the school head-mistress, “today, and on this day every year from now on we will celebrate Empire Dayâ€. It never happened again. Later, as a cub and a scout, I swore allegiance to concepts I only began to understand many years later.
Robert Colls very skilfully and helpfully evokes vague impressions of Englishness and belonging similar to those that have assailed me from time to time throughout my life but, when he comes to “take our history and use it to see an English identity on the horizon†he looks too near and gets it wrong.
“Our history†is not the past few hundred years, it is the past 4.5 billion years and the persistent theme has been changes in the complexity of the systems that exist. When the Earth first cooled, for long periods, , complex systems took three steps forward and three steps back until chance produced a more complex system that persisted. That persistent increase in complexity made three steps forward and only two or even one step back a possibility and that produced an avalanche of increasing complexity that lasted until all its possible permutations were exploited. Thereafter, the new, more complex systems settled back to three steps forward and three back until the next chance persistent increase in complexity and resulting avalanche of change occurred. This pattern of development has persisted through a parade of ever increasing complexity from large molecules to coacervates, archeae, cells invertebrates, mammals, man, families, tribes, cities, countries, nation states to global companies and organisations. Our history does give a very clear message and forward direction it is towards greater complexity.
Powerful religions have made major contributions to building the societies that exist around the globe. In order to do this they have often suppressed naturally up-welling complexity and rationality in the people they sought to control. In England we have an enlightened Christian church that realises it must morph into a new form if it is to persist and contribute to the more complex society that is emerging. We also have, in some communities of immigrants, religions that are less advanced along that same path and actively resisting the journey. They are not alone in resisting the emergence of complexity in the general population; legal and illegal purveyors of drugs offer to solve our problems with a drink, pill, powder or fag. Banks offer to solve our lack of financial success with more debt. Fast food companies offer us love and affection through consuming an amount and type of food that will underpin the disease that will kill us.
The strength of past Englishness has been its encouragement of the emergence of complexity in much of its population and it is to be hoped that this will be so in the future. If one needs a particular target, why not aim for a population, press and news media who, when, as happened early in 1998, they were offered the choice of focussing on letters from a major group of political activists to all the major American institutions of government recommending war and the destruction of many thousands of lives or focussing on the American presidents naughty cavorting with an intern, they chose to focus on the saving of lives? If we could reach that target within the next decade, Englishness would have taken a major step forward.
I suspect the author meant “post-war” novel as in “written after the war”, not as in “a novel where events of post-war history are depicted”.
One small thing: Brazilian names are a little messed up in Mulgan’s (otherwise very good) article. The theorist of progressive education is Paulo Freire, not Freiere. And I suspect that the author meant Fernando Cardoso (famous sociologist of the sixties who later became Brazil’s president for most of the nineties), not Felipe Cardoso, in the first paragraph.
If you read books relevant to your chosen career does that make you an ‘intellectual’? A businessman might read ‘In Pursuit of Excellence’ and perhaps Handy’s stuff – does that make him an ‘intellectual’? One would hope that our leaders continue to read after they have finished doing their P.P.E’s or studying jurisprudence……
1. Surely Wilson, and possibly Atlee too, were “intellectual” enough not only in the voracious book-reading sense but, more significantly, in their sweeping/innovative vision on how to take the country to the next big stage?
2. If one has to deconstruct Gordon’s mental make-up, one cannot really miss Adam Smith : not simply Smith’s well-recognised free-trade (Wealth of Nations) influence, but his typical character-building prescription for prudence, benevolent justice, and self-command (as categorically introduced/emphasised in the 1790 edition of Moral Sentiments).
I’m as tired as the next person of the neoconservative requisitioning of a primped-up Churchill legacy as some beacon of all things glorious. I also find The Great Man’s many historical volumes pompous and silly. That said, he did at least write them, no? Do we really have to stretch back to Balfour to find an “intellectual”?
I must be missing something. Please enlighten.
Replying to Fred Frank:
” I … find [Winston Churchill’s] many historical volumes pompous and silly. That said, he did at least write them, no? Do we really have to stretch back to Balfour to find an “intellectualâ€?
I must be missing something. Please enlighten”.
I decided not to include Churchill on my list of intellectual PMs because what he contributed to his books was style, not substance, which was done for him by an army of research assistants. He did at least write them, but he didn’t research them. The style is magnificent, but it doesn’t make him an intellectual on my narrow definition. Streetfighter, yes: I recommend “The People’s Rights” 1909 (reissued 1970) for a Winston Churchill most people don’t know.
Attlee wrote The Social Worker (1920), a practical and perhaps “scholarly” rather than an intellectual book, as well as two books in the 1930s when he was deputy leader and then leader of the Labour party. Attlee would not describe himself as an “intellectual” though, and he scoffed at those who considered themselves intellectuals. And surely Attlee should be included in the list of those prime ministers who “share courage, coolness and decisiveness”.