British intellectuals have their say

Ten celebrated thinkers offer their thoughts on Britain’s relationship with its intelligentsia Alain de Botton, philosopher ‘Most influential intellectuals are now employed by the state’ A public intellectual is someone whose reasoned ideas have an impact on a broad swath of society. This has been disproportionately interpreted as meaning a poet or a writer – the logical conclusion then being that we don’t have very many public intellectuals and the ones we do have are no good or not as good or as flamboyant as those of the French. My feeling is that the term “public intellectual” should be stretched to include those whose ideas help to determine what goes on in the broad swath of national life, not just poetry or the essay, but in education, housing, health, transport, architecture and so on. Most of the really influential public intellectuals are now employed by the state and we’ve never heard of them. They don’t generally have a public profile, but they have a public impact – I think that’s where the confusion often comes in. We think we have no public intellectuals because we don’t have Bernard-Henri Lévy. But BHL doesn’t make anything happen; he just writes books that appeal to, at the very best, 20,000 of his country

Posted by on May 7, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.