Page 42 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

LEAVISISM AS A PROFESSIONAL IDEOLOGY

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criticism represented a refuge”. Indeed it did, though we need to
stress the full extent to which it was Cambridge rather than Oxford
English which came to provide that refuge. “It was not by chance”,
Anderson writes, “that the most significant work of socialist theory of
the fifties, Raymond Williams’s Long Revolution, should have
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emerged out of literary criticism”. From Cambridge literary
criticism, one should surely add.
Anderson’s analysis has been importantly supplemented by
Francis Mulhern’s The Moment of “Scrutiny”. Let me draw
attention, in particular, to Mulhern’s characterization of Leavisism
as: “a quintessentially petit bourgeois revolt, directed against a
cultural order that it could not fundamentally alter or replace… It
was, accordingly, a moralistic revolt from within the given culture:
bearer not of an alternative order but of the insistence that the
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existing order should live by its word”. Leavisism’s ultimate fate,
its simultaneous success and failure during the 1950s, arose
precisely from this “petit bourgeois” character. In the years
immediately following the 1944 Education Act, the existing order
did finally begin to live by its word. Thus, Mulhern argues, the very
success of Scrutiny’s cultural project increasingly rendered obsolete
its organised intellectual militancy, so that subsequent English
criticism became dominated by a kind of tame “Leavisism”, a
Leavisism increasingly shorn both of the intellectual combativity
and of the interdisciplinary competence that had characterized
Scrutiny itself. The hegemony of this tame Leavisism remained
effectively unchallenged until the late 1960s and the 1970s, when
the emergence of various structuralisms finally precipitated, in
England as elsewhere, a “crisis in English studies”.
English criticism had its origins in the liberal public sphere of the
late 17th and early 18th centuries; the disintegration of that public
sphere resulted, in the late 19th century and, more importantly, in the
20th century, in the institutionalization of a new academic criticism
within the university; Leavisism, the guilty conscience of this
academicism, represents, as Eagleton says, “nothing less than an attempt
to reinvent the classical public sphere, at a time when its material
conditions had definitively passed”. The impossibility of any such
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project explains not only the obsessive, almost paranoid, quality of
much of Leavis’s own writing, but also both Leavisism’s gradual decline
into an increasingly inoffensive aestheticism, and its ultimate demise

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