Has Prospect’s July cover story, “Gordon Brown: intellectual,” started a mini-trend for attributing intellectual depths to politicians? In Monday’s Independent, Bruce Anderson claimed that David Cameron, too, is an intellectual. “He has read and thought a great deal about politics and about the human condition,” Anderson writes. Other evidence for the proposition? “It must be remembered that Mr Cameron got a first at Oxford without being a slave to his books.”
Reading between the lines, we can see a contrast being implied between two intellectual types: on the one hand the bookish, “clunking” and “solipsistic” son of the manse; on the other the well-bred “son of the old rectory” who, in the best traditions of English upper-class effortlessness, breezed through Oxford, barely troubling to read a book, and still emerged with a first. But there is a big difference between being clever and being an intellectual. Cameron may be the first—but is he the second? Even Anderson seems to half-acknowledge that his case is pretty weak. His final sentence reads: “Mr Cameron must prove that he has intellectual weight.”
Hi William, could your observation, “But there is a big difference between being clever and being an intellectual”, have any relationship to an ongoing debate in OurKingdom about Brown needing an intelligentsia which started with an article I wrote in openDemocracy a month ago on 26 June that noted, “Cleverness, or canniness, has little relationship to being an intellectual”? http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy_power/ourkingdom/gordon_brown.
best wishes, Anthony
Dear Anthony
I think I can say with confidence that there isn’t any relationship - although I did read your piece when you sent it into Prospect. The fact is, neither of us are being very original: that there is a difference between intelligence/intellectualism and mere cleverness is an observation that must have been made thousands of times before.
Best wishes
Will
ps I used the words “I think” above because I can’t entirely rule out the possibility of this being a case of crytomnesia. See my column in April’s Prospect
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=8624
There is a chasmic difference between intelligence and intelligentsia. Cameron’s positions, the questions he has raised lack a coherent, unifying concept.
His questions appear to be the start of an inductive discourse as his focus has been almost exlcusively at the effect level. They have not arrived at a core point however which leads one to assume like so many politicians he blows with the wind and somewhat like Captain Reynaud in Casablanca is a man without any conviction whatsoever.
Were he serious by this stage we would already have seen the threads of a political narrative that one can readily identify as cameronite.
Set against Blair in opposition or the dense musings of Gordon Brown hyping Cameron is a self defeating exercise that does not hold up to examination.
And if we really cut to the quick all of my experience inside Irish party politics leads me to believe that for every intellectual politician there are at least 3 or 4 men or women behind them possessing high intellect writing their positions for them.