Absent Minds. Intellectuals in Britain

In 2004 the sociologist Frank Furedi published a well-received monograph entitled Where have all the intellectuals gone? It is a question that has been asked repeatedly in Britain for more than a century, but following the publication of Collini's book it ought not to be asked again. His answer is that intellectuals—like the poor—are always with us. As too are the nay-sayers who lament the absence of an indigenous intelligentsia but who, in a poignant paradox, are themselves examples of the intellectual class whom they have identified as missing. What Collini calls the ‘absence thesis’ is a myth, and one that he delights in forensically examining and dismantling. His objective, as the reader is warned in an unapologetic Introduction, is not to write a comprehensive history, still less a survey, of intellectuals in British society. It is, rather, to examine ‘the question of intellectuals’. This is an important distinction,...