Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Over in the openDemocracy mothership, I have just written an article about Gordon Brown as an intellectual. My argument is that if a politician like Brown wants an intellectual project to succeed you need an intelligentsia to support it, including writers and poets and people with a shared depth of reading and culture - even if you disagree with them ferociously. I argue that Brown's "new constitutional settlement" is an intellectual's project as is "his commitment to creating a strong sense of national purpose, of renewing Britain no less". This too, "needs a surrounding intelligentsia to succeed, even if in this case it may need to be one of the right".
Enough of quoting myself, Martin Wolf comments, "If Brown is an intellectual without an intelligentsia, then he is in a wonderful British tradition. The last thing any country needs is an arrogant, usually ill-informed and predominantly literary set of dreamers that believes it is an intellectual elite, thinks itself 'progressive' and believes it knows best how the country should be run."
This is shameful, knee-jerk philistinism from an economics journalist who writes well, reads hard and, yes, thinks he knows best and sometimes does. The point is, we already have an intellectual elite of the kind he describes, it is called the civil service. And part of my argument is that this is precisely not an intelligentsia, however 'clever' it might be.
As against Wolf's caricature, Britain needs an intelligentsia that is realistic about the country because cosmopolitan, widely read and well-informed, cultured in the sciences and economics of life. It needs to be an intelligentsia with the spirit and aspiration of what the Scots call the 'democratic intellect'. And we need it to save us from the simulacrum of smartness which characterises our already existing elite of mediacrats who have the country in their grip.
