Page 41 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

CULTURALISM

and the more specifically pedagogical strategic orientation first broached
by Arnold.
As with Arnold and Eliot, so too with Leavis, a common culture,
that of the pre-industrial organic community, and its continuing echo
in the legacy of the English language, are pitted against modern industrial
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civilization, in both its capitalist and its communist forms. Here,
though, there can be no compromise with the existing class structure,
such as Eliot was clearly prepared on occasion to countenance. Rather,
the literary intelligentsia was to be mobilized around Scrutiny, and
against the developing mass society. In itself, this almost certainly
represents a much more plausible programme of action than any in
either Arnold or Eliot. But nonetheless, Scrutiny no longer exists; and
even Cambridge itself never adopted Leavis’s proposal for a model
English school. What Leavis recognized, in a way that Arnold could
not, was the capacity for collective self-organization latent within the
intellectual class. He failed, however, to confront its obvious likely
corollary: that the intelligentsia as a whole—the cultured minority,
and not simply Bloomsbury and the Times Literary Supplement, both
of which Leavis detested—might prove as incapable of Arnoldian
“disinterestedness” as is the establishment itself. In that failure is
surely to be found the source of much of the bitterness and rancour
which so soured Leavis’s later years.

Leavisism as a professional ideology

It was Leavisism, and the peculiar claims advanced by the Leavisites
on behalf of the discipline of English, which provided Perry Anderson
with one of the keys to his extremely influential reading of the
structure of the English national intellectual culture. His argument is
by now an old one, but nonetheless one which warrants repetition.
Britain alone of the major European countries, he observed, produced
neither a classical sociology nor an indigenous national Marxism. The
intellectual culture thus constituted lacked any “totalizing”
conceptual system, and remained indelibly marked by this absence at
its very centre. Anderson adds, however, that in anthropology, the
study of other societies, and above all in literary criticism, such
totalizing thought did develop: “in a culture which everywhere
repressed the notion of totality, and the idea of critical reason, literary

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