INTRODUCTION
The intellectual historian Stefan Collini is considered one of the most prominent British academics.Footnote 1 Glowing accounts of his writings are not confined to the world of academia: major newspapers and magazines have not spared praise either.Footnote 2 Yet these highly appreciative comments remain at the surface of things in that they do not ask how this intellectual historian carries out his activity as a history writer, nor do they clarify what makes his writings rewarding reading, nor do they explain Collini's significance in relation to the historiographical trends of the last five decades or to current critical reflection. Therefore this article—for the first time and in detail—examines the central themes to be found in Collini's works; illustrates his methodological approach to the study of history; traces the unexpected similarities between his intellectual practice and that of cultural critics as diverse as Matthew Arnold and William Empson; points to the differences in content and vision informing his manifold scholarly pursuits and those of other intellectual historians (e.g. Quentin Skinner) as well as critics (e.g. Francis Mulhern and Terry Eagleton); and levels some criticism at his writings. Specific attention will be given to the centrality of cadence, congeniality, irony and sympathy, as well as to the function of the intellectual portrait in his narrative. The article's main claim is that Collini's history writing is better understood as the embodiment of the activity of the intellectual historian as critic.Footnote 3 This activity combines trained scholarship with an eclectic investigation of subjects of contemporary—above all, cultural, literary and political—traction. In turn, this move implies an evaluation of his practice as occupying a particular place within the field, which is why his work to date is charted here. Contrary to current scholarship on intellectual history, much of which is inclined in heavily theoretical directions, the following pages give a sense of what a well-known intellectual historian does in his practice, and of how he came to develop a certain type of work. In so doing, the article also focuses on the role of intellectual history in contemporary society and cultural debates.
COLLINI'S PROFESSIONAL LIFE AND WORKS IN CONTEXT
Born in Surrey in 1947, Stefan Collini was educated mainly at Cambridge, where he obtained both his BA (1969) and his Ph.D. in history (1977).Footnote 4 After a twelve-year spell in the “very congenial” environment of Sussex University, where in 1974 he had been appointed lecturer in intellectual history,Footnote 5 in 1986 Collini returned to Cambridge as lecturer in the English Faculty and as fellow of Clare Hall. In the year 2000 he was appointed professor of intellectual history and English literature, a post from which he retired in September 2014.Footnote 6 Collini's first book came out in 1979: Liberalism and Sociology focused on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British social and political thought. Four years later, a collaborative effort pursued with the Sussex intellectual historians Donald Winch and John W. Burrow led to the publication of That Noble Science of Politics (1983), which provided a fruitful instance of the “unity and coherence” of intellectual history as a discipline.Footnote 7 In 1988 came Collini's Arnold, which is part of the Past Masters OUP series and which was reissued in 1994 with a new Afterword as Matthew Arnold: A Critical Portrait. In 1991 he published Public Moralists, which was to be Collini's last sustained engagement in the fields of social and political thought. In the last twenty years, his interests turned to literary and cultural criticism. One prominent result of this phase was the widely discussed Absent Minds (2006).Footnote 8 More recently still, he devoted his energies to debates concerning the value of higher education and the effect of the “marketization” of the universities in Britain, the outcome of which was the debate-stirring What Are Universities For? (2012).Footnote 9
While this brief sketch reveals Collini's work to be distinct from that of the majority of contemporary intellectual historians in that it employs different genres, treats a wide(r) spectrum of chronologically disparate topics and reaches a public broader than that usually considered by most academics, it might give the wrong impression of a straightforward trajectory from intellectual history to criticism or from scholarly to general-audience writing. In fact, intellectual history and criticism are never separated in his work, nor are the two audiences. Exceptional in this respect, Collini's intellectual output is nonetheless the result of a rigorous training in history and needs to be situated in connection with two major stimuli that intellectual history has received from neighboring disciplinary areas during the last five decades. One is linked to the history of political thought, while the other has to do with literary theory.Footnote 10
Collini explained that by the late 1970s he realized that students of political and social thought did not pay enough attention to the literary dimension of the works they studied. This lack of passion for the imaginative power(s) displayed by past thinkers drew Collini to the type of work carried out in English departments. He was thus enabled to cultivate “a temperamental affinity with people who attend to the life of the imagination through language.” This corresponded to his increasing interest in the writings of literary critics as practitioners of an activity whose trademark is a special “sensibility” to “the variousness of different works.”Footnote 11 Equally, Collini did not feel “at home in the company of the theory-toting ‘Cultural Studies’ militia” either.Footnote 12 Shunning the label “writer,” he has defined himself as “an academic and a scholar” who writes “as a critic who has a university post.” Not “pure” enough to be regarded as “literary criticism,” his work is not exclusively “historical,” as is generally the case with intellectual historians, while cultural criticism seems “a little grand.”Footnote 13 Self-confessedly allergic to the “protocols of scholarly writing” de rigueur in academia,Footnote 14 he sees himself “almost [as] a professional intellectual refugee.”Footnote 15
A fundamental component of this identity is Collini's writing style. Displaying a predilection for muscular language,Footnote 16 his style is a key motif not only of his critical work (how to read), but also of his own writing (how to write): his sharp intellectual pen portraits, comprehensive accounts of divergent historical moments, compelling readings of particular texts, and wider academic book production signal a multiplicity of styles adopted by a singular (but eclectic) voice. A hallmark of his development as an intellectual historian–critic, style functions as a principled commitment and as a substantive practice. In this respect, it translates into his often demanding but sparkling prose delivered through an explosive array of vivid metaphors: A. L. Rowse's writing compulsion was compared to a heavy drinker's habits, with the inevitable downfall hovering over its victim; Noel Annan's praise for Margaret Thatcher was demolished as suggesting “someone who is excited by the smack of a firm governess.”Footnote 17
Collini combines critical observation with ferocious irony, which is intertwined with his sense of historical irony permeating the dynamics of the past. Flourishing on adjectival and adverbial pungency, his work is spurred by a rich repository of rhetorical resources, enabling him to address different intellectual platforms. This performance is best delivered through his favored genre, the essay, which suits Collini's argumentative and narrative pace as well as his personal painterly style. The essay also facilitates his engagement with a broader set of topics than the historical monograph. The essay, for Collini, ferries readers across to new islands of meaning, and indeed style.
As for continuities and breaks between his early work and what came later, Collini manifested a keen interest in forms of public argument and styles of expression already in the essay writing of the 1980s. However, the key element of his scholarly input until the early 1990s was still the somewhat uncongenial subject matter of political thought. The turning point occurred with his books on Arnold that allowed Collini to find his own voice in writing about the nineteenth century from a larger perspective than that then employed in the history of political thought. Such a change also took place in Public Moralists, where the political-ideas dimension present in the subtitle (“Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930”) is already less central compared to the curiosity shown for the cultural life of late Victorian and early twentieth-century Britain. Following this move, Collini attended more and more to issues of literary nuance: as part of the enterprise of attributing meaning to the past by being on more intimate terms with it, he concentrated on “forms of expression” closer to those informing “everyday human transactions.”Footnote 18 In this way he began to see a topic in its intellectual and emotional complexity.
Simplifying a little, it is possible to discern five stages in Collini's intellectual performance: the early studies in the history of political thought (Liberalism and Sociology; That Noble Science); the witty reviews and piercing essays exemplified by the three collections English Pasts, Common Reading and the very recent Common Writing;Footnote 19 the substantial monographs Public Moralists and Absent Minds; the critiques of highly debated themes yielded in That's Offensive and What Are Universities For?; and the scholarly editions of Mill, Arnold and Snow.Footnote 20 Cumulatively, Collini's heterogeneous writings offer a redescription (neither celebratory nor dismissive) of aspects of British (English) intellectual life from the mid-Victorian period to the present day in ways that challenge the clichés applied to that life and its products.
COLLINI'S PRACTICE AND SUSSEX INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
Averse to theory-laden statements with which to aridly fix prescriptive rules for a discipline, Collini issued no “methodological manifesto” defining intellectual history. So much so that he even played down one of his own views on the discipline as being characterized by a practitioner who can “read like a critic, analyse like a philosopher, explain like a historian.” Looking back at this motto, Collini observed that it is an exaggeration to consider intellectual historians as always engaged in theoretical analysis and an overstatement to hold an explanatory approach to the past as a prerequisite for their trade. What did not shift, though, is the importance for the intellectual historian of being able to “read like a critic.”Footnote 21 It is in this activity that resides one of the distinguishing features of Collini's work: to warn against all attempt at turning the past into a nicely prepacked box from which to pull out self-serving versions of it.Footnote 22
One instance of this critical intellectual history was Collini's rereading of John Stuart Mill's theory of liberty: whereas the historiographical mainstream made of Mill the herald of individualistic liberalism, Collini showed how reductive this classification is in regard to a thinker whose ideas were much more in line with ideals such as “altruism” and “self-restraint.” In elucidating Mill's notion of “individual liberty,” Collini distanced the nineteenth-century philosopher from principles with which he was commonly associated: politics as the uncompromising defense of individual rights and society as the realm of unbridled laissez-faire market dynamics. To place Mill exclusively in conjunction with these views obscured “the rather different, less fashionable, things he has to teach us.”Footnote 23 More broadly, this approach reflects the need to put readers in a position from where they can grasp (as insiders) the whys of certain phenomena and ideological developments going on in a given period.
This strategy also illustrates Collini's commitment to “close criticism” in the practice of intellectual history. Thus in Public Moralists he studied a group of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectuals, taking “human familiarity” as much as “cultural remoteness” as lenses through which to situate their ideas both in context and in relation to our perception of our “identity and conduct in the present.”Footnote 24 In his introductory essay to C. P. Snow's 1959 Rede Lecture “The Two Cultures” (1993), Collini contextualized Snow's controversial text, recognizing that his opinions have fallen “into a murky limbo” in that they are now out of joint with our cultural values, but equally that they do not belong yet in the cozy category of topics analyzed by professional historians.Footnote 25 Having reconstructed the larger historical origins of the question Snow brought to light—the then seemingly unbridgeable gap between literary intellectuals and scientists as holders of two cultures which did not communicate with one another—and having provided a biographical account of Snow, Collini gave a sympathetic sketch of the latter. By considering the motivations that had led to Snow's lecture, and the vitriolic reaction to it put forward by F. R. Leavis, Collini argued that the critic is not somebody who naturally inhabits the peripheries of society as a sign of his/her political opposition to the system. On the contrary, he/she should undertake his/her critical activity from within society.Footnote 26
Another major portion of Collini's practice was (and still is) devoted to demythologizing clusters of idées reçues, as with the “absence thesis” whereby Britain is a land where there are no more intellectuals because of their having been replaced by vulgar showbiz culture, by the marketing of the arts, and by the process of specialization headed by legions of academics (nostalgia) or one lacking intellectuals altogether and enduringly inhospitable to them by comparison with other countries (exceptionalism).Footnote 27 By the same method, Collini dismantled the lament-soaked notion according to which the golden age of the Victorian periodicals—considered more culturally elevated compared to any of their twentieth- and twenty-first-century counterparts—is long gone and all the worse for that.Footnote 28
Fusing historical rigor with fierce skepticism, Collini invariably teases out the frequently unself-conscious forces structuring mainstream readings of the past. For example, he connected the “catastrophist” views of the allegedly devastating effects of the Industrial Revolution on England's idyllically rural past set forth by J. L. and Barbara Hammond in The Village Labourer (1911) with the “oppositional” function assigned to culture by literary critics such as Leavis and Raymond Williams against a society marred by ruthless economic calculability.Footnote 29 Similarly, Collini pointed out that current fears of increasing specialization in academia are nothing new, having a long pedigree going back to Coleridge's view of the “clerisy” and to Arnold's take on “criticism,” namely two endeavors to reaffirm the value of broad knowledge against the threat of “the division of intellectual labour.”Footnote 30
Permeated by a good deal of optimism about the power of individual imagination in shaping culture and history, Collini's critical intellectual history is the spearhead with which he attacked the shielded rearguard of some ahistorical convictions about an object of study, a fashion or a situation (e.g. the meaning of “culture” in twentieth-century Britain).Footnote 31 Despite strong attention to the causes of these convictions, as well as to what made them resilient in a specified society,Footnote 32 Collini's approach was never informed—as he made clear as early as the 1980s—by the principle that the chief exercise of a critical mind consists in “unmasking” the hidden meanings of texts, as professed by Leo Strauss, or the deceptions of power, as done by Foucault.Footnote 33 Characteristically, Collini followed the Arnoldian lesson that to be critical means to correct “all forms of one-sidedness,” regardless of where they come from or of who countenances them, and to do so is a central concern of his intellectual history.Footnote 34
Collini has maintained a firm view of what for him constitutes intellectual history.Footnote 35 This constant stems from his initial steps as a historian at Sussex, where practitioners like Burrow and Winch contested the assumption that the discipline was a marginal branch of historiography compared to the real stuff attended to by proper historians.Footnote 36 The interdisciplinary approach to research and teaching cultivated in the 1970s at Sussex led Collini to dismiss “discipline-history” as a tool with which historians bore “a ‘vertical’ hole in the past (with all the consequent dangers of ‘tunnel-vision’),” which is precisely the opposite of what intellectual history does: to excavate “a ‘lateral’ site” in order “to explore the presuppositions, ramifications, and resonances of ideas . . . into neighbouring fields.”Footnote 37 Writing in the 1980s, Collini and his Sussex colleagues warned against the tendency of all discipline-history to fit the intellectual life of the past into a neatly coherent narrative, yielding teleological readings of it that reproduce the contemporary “consensus” established around the discipline in question. Consequently, authors are thrown into a “canon . . . as precursors or forebears” with winners and losers being paraded onto a stage where the only thing that counts is their alleged contribution to the creation of that discipline.Footnote 38 By contrast, in underscoring that disciplines are the outcome of intellectual coherence as much as of “historical accident or institutional convenience,” intellectual history helps us to understand developments and changes within a discipline, and to situate them in a broader context reflecting modifications in ambitions, interests and convictions in the national culture of a specific epoch.Footnote 39
Confronted by intellectual history's struggle to find its space next to social history (1960s–1970s) and cultural history (1980s–1990s), and subsequently by an academic climate dominated by political theory,Footnote 40 Collini invoked the necessity for intellectual history to carve out an “‘anti-specialist’ identity” for itself in order to be “flexible and eclectic” vis-à-vis scholarly subjects.Footnote 41 This being said, it would be misconceived to read Collini's commitment to interdisciplinarity as the outcome of a methodological blueprint: it is more an instinctive attitude to learning and knowledge that he acquired at Sussex. In fact, this attitude entailed Collini's move towards the role of public moralist in direct opposition to academic trends fixated upon professional specialism. The Sussex experience guided Collini on another front too. Against Lovejoy's history of “unit-ideas,” he preferred the term “intellectual history” to “the history of ideas” because the former stresses the engagement with a “human activity” rather than with abstractions taken as a-contextual objects of study that happen to be adopted by some minds at various times in the past.Footnote 42 Too dependent on the notion of “influence,” this approach is not contextual enough: as Collini put it, “Ideas cannot simply be caught, like chicken-pox”; “their epidemiology” shows “a more complex story, or stories,” involving affinity, adjustment, distortion. Intellectual historians study mistaken or confused ideas, and do not seek the truth in the same way as philosophers do. Instead of hunting for highly theoretical moments in thinkers’ oeuvre, Collini and his Sussex colleagues chose to be “alive” to both their ideas and their sensibilities; they paid attention to the “aesthetic” element in an author's work (“styles” and “genres”) and to the tension between search for consistency and intuitive dimension in it.Footnote 43
The Sussex intellectual historians insisted on appositely contextualizing ideas, in order to avoid anachronism.Footnote 44 However, for Collini intellectual history does not consider ideas wholly in their past-historicity either, but it chronicles how they founder due to criticism or become obsolete as a result of shifting cultural interests. He reflected on how at some point certain terms—once new or scarcely employed—became popular, enquiring into what lies behind this change.Footnote 45 The Sussex group also appraised the changes affecting an individual thinker as the outcome of intentional recasting of previously held thoughts, of modifications intervened in the public mindset of a society and of personal or material reasons. Whether dealing with Adam Smith (Winch), James Anthony Froude (Burrow) or L. T. Hobhouse (Collini), the Sussex practitioners relied on a winning methodological interplay between reconstruction of the internal mechanisms of concepts, study of the social and intellectual environment within which they came to light, and analysis of the possibilities engendered in unexpected fashions by processes of indirect causality and their unintended consequences. In addition, the Sussex intellectual historians offered a distinct outlook on the identity of intellectual history by promoting a chronologically and geographically far-reaching, as well as thematically eclectic, range of academic courses and research topics pursued at that university. With its system of joint teaching in literature, history, philosophy and the history of science, the Sussex curriculum not only fostered an enriching interdisciplinarity, but also opened up to a truly international dimension in assessing ideas and their impact across a number of countries. Thus Romanticism was studied in relation to the various societies where it had developed; Victorian religiosity, science and philosophy were comprehensively contextualized; and European modernism benefited from approaches which rested not only on philosophy and literature, but also on social science (Marx and Nietzsche next to Thomas Mann and Joyce, Freud and Durkheim).Footnote 46
By comparison, “the Cambridge School has been notably insular,” indeed less receptive to French, German, Italian scholarship and intellectual influences.Footnote 47 Given that this is not the only, and by no means the main, difference between Sussex and Cambridge, the next section analyzes their versions of intellectual history and considers the differing interpretative priorities informing the work of Collini and those of Quentin Skinner and John Pocock.
SUSSEX VERSUS CAMBRIDGE: COLLINI BETWEEN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY AND CRITICISM
While influenced by the methodology of contextualism adopted by Skinner, Pocock and John Dunn in the history of political ideas from the 1970s,Footnote 48 Collini is not an exponent of this historiographical approach tout court. In fact, he warned against applying “context” as a pre-given “template” to the material we encounter in our forays into the past. Context is judgment-dependent; that is, for a contextualist interpretation to be fruitful it is necessary to know already something about the thinker or the text being studied and to have a set of questions that we as historians ask. A contextualist reading does not make historians less immune to misreading the past: it is still crucial to get acquainted with the worldviews of past and present, while keeping in mind that ultimately the choice of what has to be brought to light stems from “experience.”Footnote 49
Chiefly focused on authorial intentionality, Dunn and Skinner provided a unilaterally textual as well as an impersonal (utterance-based), sympathy-lacking reading of a text and its voice(s). On his part, Pocock's prioritizing discursive paradigms studied as available languages (e.g. republicanism, ancient constitutionalism) in a sociocultural setting did not sit easily with Collini's sense of the complexity that informs the ways in which individuals reacted to, assimilated and reshaped the materials of their intellectual traditions. In the Cambridge approach as delineated by Skinner and Dunn there is something too (confidently) dependent on the “rational reconstruction” of what surfaces in the “propositional content” of a text, which excludes questions of style and register. In its Pocockian version, the analysis of the languages at hand at a given moment in time operates at a level that does not take into account the vagueness of words and the opacity of meaning. By contrast, Collini's Sussex way of proceeding entails the determination to become a reader “on whom nothing is lost,” namely the capacity to be alive to the multiple aspects of a past writing and a renewed “attentiveness” to all that surrounds it. In so doing, Collini put the accent on the “quiddity” of the sources we read,Footnote 50 which highlights another difference between his and Skinner's approaches. Collini did not contextualize only ideas and terms employed in the past, nor did he limit his interpretive efforts to establish their origins, but he assessed their role through, and impact on, different epochs.Footnote 51 In this respect, his work implicitly points to the risk of antiquarianism that a too rigidly contextualist method carries with it. Instead, by a constant seesawing between past and present, he promoted a contextualism of the longue durée,Footnote 52 and characterized intellectual history as cultural action whose validity stands up to that of the social and natural sciences.Footnote 53
Furthermore, while Skinner identified the formation of the state with the advancement of modernity and with the kernel of Western philosophical reflection,Footnote 54 Collini did not select one event or cluster of ideas as mainstays of his historical narrative. As for Pocock, his Machiavellian moment (the long journey of republican ideas from quattrocento Florence to eighteenth-century America) as the overarching motif of his work is again foreign to the fragmented range of interests cultivated by Collini. Whereas Skinner put forward a detailed methodology of the history of political thought based on philosophical premises derived from J. L. Austin and Wittgenstein whereby language is speech-act and performance in historical context,Footnote 55 Collini did not propose an explicit theoretical framework according to which to correct other practitioners’ way of writing history or as a vehicle for constructing his own version of it. Nor did he bring out a sustained reflection on the nature of history, the writing of historiography or the study of political thought, as is the case with Pocock.Footnote 56
Equally remote from Collini's attraction to tonality and voice is Skinner's focus on illocution, perlocution and intention as the theoretical pillars of the Cambridge school's contextualism. Such a distance—strikingly evident already from a terminological angle—is accentuated by Skinner's (and Pocock's) emphasis on texts as political actions. Collini's chief preoccupation has, instead, been to point up language's peculiar historical usages. Admittedly indebted to Wittgenstein, and thereby similar to the Skinnerian conception of the historical craft, this Collinian move departs from the Cambridge school in that it embraces the literary dimension of “our natural language” as the primary resource of historical-critical analysis.Footnote 57 Less concentrated on the linguistic “coherence” of texts or on the “continuity” of the languages spoken in certain historical debates than was Pocock, Collini is not a “student of social behaviour” either.Footnote 58
Collini's work captures the interplay between an individual writing voice, a larger intellectual context and a distinct social setting, without attempting to map out whole discourses or explain past ideas sociologically. Thus he consistently employed the approach of the literary critic, whereby a grasp of particular argumentative styles combines with an awareness of the demands of specific situations, which may be political but may just as often be professional or deeply personal.Footnote 59 More in the wake of a critic like William Empson than of the Cambridge school historians,Footnote 60 Collini views all historical-critical assessment of human experience as linked to the labor of everyday language. This means that there can be no adequate (contextualist) recovery of that experience without responsiveness to the semantic unruliness of language and to the power words wield over us as well as to that we possess over them.
As a Sussex-influenced practitioner, for Collini to critically interpret a text by focusing exclusively on its content underplays its emotional facets and overlooks the specificity of the particular. This element explains why he depicted the intellectual historian as “a portrait painter” who, through the use of “light and shade, perspective and proportion,” foregrounds “what was always there” scattered in the past but was not seen before.Footnote 61 As an intellectual historian committed to cultural criticism, Collini privileged the study of audiences as an important source of meaning in the interpretation of texts and the pursuit of close reading in combination with great heed to the historical dimension. His criticism is never disjoined from an underlying historical approach shaped by the methodology of Sussex intellectual history: indeed, history supports criticism.Footnote 62 Applied to a vast array of cultural and political issues, this twofold perspective aims to re-create “earlier intellectual worlds” that might persuade manifold publics to abandon some of their most ingrained convictions.Footnote 63
In order to provide a concrete picture of this mixed intellectual identity, and to make sense of it, we now need to look more closely into Collini's practice as the embodiment of the activity of the intellectual historian as critic.
LISTENING TO PAST VOICES AS AN ARNOLDIAN CRITIC
In characterizing his shift from the history of social and political ideas to cultural criticism, Collini spoke of his attempt to apprehend “the details of the tone of voice of past writers,” which has been seen by some historians as “flaky.”Footnote 64 His priority became to explore “literary voices and literary tactics.”Footnote 65 The aural element—sensitivity to cadences—has been pervasive throughout his publications since the mid-1980s, when, thanks to literary journalism, his attention to voices began to denote a different writing voice. In addressing the immense role poetry played in Ezra Pound's life, Collini remarked that the poet “heard the sounds and rhythms of words and lines so vividly” precisely because he had “cultivated his ear by his single-minded” familiarity with other poetic traditions.Footnote 66 Empson was a “critic who exhibited an unparalleled sensitivity to nuances of tone in literature.”Footnote 67 In his essays, Isaiah Berlin showed a particular “cadence”: “the cadence of the speaking voice” conveyed not in conversational manner but in the “high-toned and even oratorical” form of a vibrant piece of prose.Footnote 68 Richard Hoggart betrayed “cadences of the Protestant preacher” when reproachfully analyzing the conditions of the working classes following material improvement available to them in twentieth-century Britain.Footnote 69
This focus on “cadence” sets Collini apart from fellow intellectual historians who resort to terms like “‘thought’ or ‘views’ or ‘theories’” in their examination of past authors. The aural metaphor provides a more thorough discernment of “the modulations” of a thinker's “individual voice.” Its efficacy resides in its implying the presence of an audience that accompanies the multivalent enterprise of writing. It discloses the impossibility of understanding a text as if it were a solipsistic expression of one's mind; accordingly, the aural metaphor evokes the latter's vitality in perceiving it as part of a flow of ideals, beliefs, prejudices that constitute the cultural “common stock” available in a given society. Attentiveness to voice leads to a deeper connection with a writer's “experience.” By bringing to light idioms and registers as well as variations of “tone” in the writer's prose, Collini familiarizes his readers with a horizon of thought unfamiliar to them.Footnote 70
The critic Francis Mulhern has argued that “Collini's interest in voice is not only an enriching development in the historical understanding of thought; it defines a committed moral stance.”Footnote 71 So much so that, Mulhern states, “Ideas [for Collini] count for less than the voices that circulate them and the sensibilities that vary their texture.”Footnote 72 While it is true that voice is not simply utterance in that it involves a broader view of what matters in an author (issues of context, textuality, style, sensibility), nor is it akin to the Skinnerian concept of illocutionary force, it is unconvincing to associate Collini's attraction to voice with morality. In fact, it has more to do with his aesthetic commitment to understanding, and has to be seen as a hermeneutical feature of his criticism. Mulhern has also spoken of Collini's criticism as an engagement in “[c]onversational portraiture,” a “performance art with few more accomplished exponents.”Footnote 73 However, for Mulhern his cultural criticism is too “personal,” disavowing “the specifically social reality of public discourse.” Collini's role as critic is that of “a private face in a public place.”Footnote 74 But it is precisely in the personal dimension that the force of Collini's intellectual portraiture lies, in that it eschews the overly theoretical parlance of much contemporary criticism, opting instead for the warmer language of historical and biographical narrative combined with ironic characterization. Despite at times sounding severe, his essays bring their readers closer to the pulse of the lives of those whose works are under his gaze.
One instance of this technique is to be found in his studies of Matthew Arnold (1822–88), where Collini set out to recover “the tone and temper of his mind and the distinctive style in which it expressed itself.” Familiarity with Arnold's idiosyncratic literary voice provided Collini with a vision of the critic as somebody who needs to catch “the ear” of his/her audience.Footnote 75 The critic has to convey the literary subtleties of a text, without forcing any “prematurely” fixed interpretation upon it. Instead of explaining texts in ways that accommodate pre-given “criteria” (including political, religious or moral ones), for Collini we should let texts “come to us a little more” in order to produce, in Arnold's idiom, “fresh knowledge.”Footnote 76 Without skirting judgment, the Arnoldian critic communicates knowledge “as a sort of companion and clue, not as an abstract law-giver.”Footnote 77 Hence the critic rejects self-importance and mere fashion.Footnote 78 Through “slow criticism,” whereby full attention is paid to how language can be meaningful and misleading, imaginative and numbing, Collini made it one of his intellectual priorities to question the assumptions dominant in our society, as when targeting both the Tory and the Labour parties for their irresponsible promotion of unrestrained “individualism.”Footnote 79
In planting the flag of criticism in the arena of public debate, Collini followed in Arnold's steps. The latter's antipathy to what in 1865 he called the “over-preponderance of single elements” employed by intellectual groups or religious sects to explain the world is mirrored in Collini's defense of a catholic application of critical scrutiny. This principle extended to “vulnerable” groups as an antidote against the risk of being (sometimes too liberally) condescending in regard to the ideas held by minorities.Footnote 80 As Arnold confronted “the flatterers of the prejudices” of his age and told “unpopular truths” with regard to Nonconformism's doctrinal apparatus and nineteenth-century liberal orthodoxy, so Collini used irony to disclose “the too-simple or too-loud” informing views of contemporary society both on the left and on the right.Footnote 81 Arnold reflected on the place of culture in life and on its regenerating effect in society.Footnote 82 Unsurprisingly, it is in this part of his critical activity that Collini found the vigor of Arnold's writings:Footnote 83 culture becomes the weapon with which to lay siege at the citadel of entrenched social conventions, and oppose the economic and political forces behind them. Equally, history—not rationality per se—stands as a test for the plausibility of the critical categories that modern interpreters apply (often in a twisted manner) to the past.Footnote 84 Arnold's flaying “the philistines” and mocking “the complacent” of his time inspired Collini's cultural criticism.Footnote 85 It follows that, even though many of Arnold's opinions are now outdated to the extent that to “‘imitate’ his performance” is “fundamentally misguided,” listening to his “voice” helps to seize the ideas of past actors and their long-term influence.Footnote 86 As a critic, Arnold was at his best when mingling “the lightness of touch and the feel for style,” and this is one of the reasons why for Collini he is still relevant today.Footnote 87
These considerations raise the question of how Arnoldian Collini's work is. Collini declared that he is not one of “Arnold's most devoted champions.”Footnote 88 When told by some commentators that Arnold represents a “touchstone” of his work, he protested that he has not endorsed Arnold, nor has he tried to revive him as a thinker. And yet Collini is no doubt attracted to “the hybrid nature” of Arnold's writing and identifies with it. Despite obvious differences in method as much as in role, Arnold and Collini share an “economical yet devastating” prose.Footnote 89 Moreover, Arnold's playfulness, by which he teased “unsympathetic readers out of their—to him—unsympathetic convictions,” recalls Collini's own writing strategy. Arnold's literary voice is captivating: his targeting the parochialism of the British upper middle classes and his demolishing their prejudices appeal to Collini because of their being carried out through persuasive nudging rather than prescriptively. Like Arnold, Collini has always endeavored to untangle a writer's cast of mind in its emotional as much as intellectual elements.Footnote 90 Finally, in Arnold just like in Collini, literary criticism and social criticism are never dissociated: to Arnold's damning assessment of Victorian values, especially his rejection of the idea of the superiority of the “practical man,” corresponds Collini's searing critique of capitalism's fundamentalist discourse of “prosperity” ruling our society.Footnote 91 Interestingly, Arnoldian is also Collini's allergy to specialism as the defining identity of the intellectual.
This motif is intertwined with the question of what kind of public intellectual Collini is, and of how his stance on politics and society is perceived by other intellectuals in contemporary Britain. After discussing this matter, the next (longer) section directs some criticism at his works and addresses the issue of their reception.
COLLINI UNDER SCRUTINY: CRITICISM AND RECEPTION
Despite his eclecticism (or because of it), Collini did not bring all his thinking together in one overview, nor did he set out a unified narrative in his historical interpretation. Rather, he focused on the complexity of individual men and women (more the former than the latter) caught in their existential and professional whirlwind.Footnote 92 His essays are not written from one standpoint, nor are they intended to advance or dismantle any specific philosophy. Categories such as progress, national development, human rights do not permeate Collini's ontology, which is instead animated by a more short-term commitment to what I call a “liberal confidence” in the value of culture and education as bulwarks against the merely instrumental—associated with everyday politics and economy.Footnote 93 For Collini, intellectual activity is not inevitably interwoven with “a systematic critique” motivated by “a conflict with an opposing political force,” as with the New Left Review intellectuals (notably, Perry Anderson and the NLR-influenced Mulhern and Eagleton). Accordingly, he questioned their measuring the real weight of an intelligentsia on the basis of its fulfilling the mission of Marx, Lenin or Gramsci. This critique overlooks “the varieties of social criticism” practiced by contemporaries of those three luminaries such as Ruskin, Morris, Tawney or Leavis.Footnote 94
As for political allegiances, Collini explained that one should never start from nor rely on a single political inspiration in one's historical work. Likewise, a chief feature of cultural criticism is its “standing back” from partiality.Footnote 95 Yet his liberal agenda is undeniable: as for Arnold (“the disinterested ‘Liberal of the future’”Footnote 96 ), for Collini too criticism entails “some sort of sublime disinterestedness” whereby one's historicality is bracketed in order to be more objective.Footnote 97 Similarly to another liberal critic like Lionel Trilling,Footnote 98 Collini thinks that awareness of our historical distance from an author or a novel is indispensable in order to fortify the aesthetic–critical power needed to accurately interpret them. By contrast, Mulhern objects that “distance” has to be measured “within the space of the ideological dominant”; more dismissively, he points out that, being too “formal,” distance is not enough as “a criterion” by which to articulate “any criticism of society.”Footnote 99 Hence the question: what (political) alternative does Collini propose in light of his idea of culture?
Collini's self-positioning as a man of the liberal left imbued with Enlightenment values and attracted to the vision of the Victorian public moralist runs the risk of appearing disconnected from the pursuit of “a more just, free, rational and compassionate social order,” as is, instead, the case with the teleological but emancipatory posture of socialism professed by intellectuals like Eagleton.Footnote 100 Collini's attitude is mirrored in his writings where he mostly concentrated on well-established figures, with the result that, as history, his work might have benefited from discussing popular levels of expression (“the intellectual low life”)Footnote 101 and, as politics, it might have been more devoted to inspire change in the here and now. This critique recalls Mulhern's argument that Collini devalues politics to a “lesser moral reality against which culture-as-subject exercises its power of general reflection.”Footnote 102 Collini's liberal affiliation with Arnold's “depreciation of politics” is contested for its tendency to generalizing. For Mulhern, Collini's Arnoldian criticism—being deprived of a “properly critical concept of politics”—is deficient theoretically as well as practically in that it does not offer a “horizon of possibility” involving real transformations in the realm of concrete “social relations,” which all criticism should promote.Footnote 103 Along Eagleton's lines,Footnote 104 Mulhern dismisses as chimerical the pretence of defining cultural activity as a “disinterested” act of “exploration of human possibility.” Consequently, he sees in Collini's cultural critique of exploitative market diktats a mandarin move.Footnote 105 By his own admission, Collini recognized that his version of cultural criticism is not “terribly effective or influential as politics.” What it does instead is to stimulate perceptive thinking on those political or public issues to which Mulhern is attracted in ways that Mulhern's own “immersion” in them prevents from stimulating. Serious intellectual activity is therefore not a flight from reality: far from it if we consider, Collini argued, that the young Marx was inspired by German Romantic ideals of free artistic expression when he elaborated his theories concerning the oppressive tendencies of modern society over its members. A political critique can indeed proceed from ideas connected to “culture”; cultural criticism can influence political thinking: thinking about politics and thinking of politics. Marx and Arnold are in this respect closer than assumed by critics like Mulhern and Eagleton.Footnote 106
According to Mulhern, Collini's take on culture and politics is marked by Arnoldian elitism, whereby cultural critics are members of a “new priesthood” whose “authoritarian liberalism” renders them allergic to mingling in politics conceived as the democratic practice of improving society.Footnote 107 When branding Collini's criticism too “elusive,” Mulhern is decrying its Arnoldian tactics. This means that, like his congenial predecessor, Collini disavows “praxis.”Footnote 108 The chief target of this critique is what Mulhern calls “English cultural liberalism,” a practice that—lacking metapolitical elements—in Collini's hands has no defined commitment or goal, and as such is “insubstantial.”Footnote 109 This is precisely the accusation that Eagleton lays at the door of the Collinian middle-of-the-road liberal home.Footnote 110 For Eagleton, Collini embodies the un-oppositional academic in whose writings “commitment is finally irreconcilable with complexity.” Averse to “structural analysis,” and never tired of pointing out the generalizing statements of others but not his own, Collini is—in Eagleton's unsympathetic characterization—an “Oxbridge” don whose ideas are never “offensive.”Footnote 111 Defined—improbably though—as suspicious “of the left,” Collini is “uneasy with notions of power and oppression,” so that for him “society is just a delightfully diverse set of positions and opinions, with nothing as vulgar as a dominant power in view.”Footnote 112 Undeniably, Arnold and Collini are cultural critics who criticize their society as insiders: the former as a member of a social elite, the latter as part of an academic one.
Furthermore, for Mulhern the “possibility” of the (metacultural) activity of “cultural criticism” has to be cast in doubt, if not openly rejected as detrimental to politics.Footnote 113 Targeting Mulhern's “cultural politics” for denying the fruitfulness of “cultural criticism of politics,” Collini defended cultural criticism as a gesture affecting society in that it highlights issues that dominant public discourses take for granted or ignore altogether.Footnote 114 Unconvinced, Mulhern charges Collini's criticism with an antipolitical and apolitical streak.Footnote 115 However, Mulhern's intention to turn cultural questions into politics risks deforming criticism by way of exaggeration (the political assumes exclusive importance): he makes it an activity where the human stakes are less prominent than in Collini's cultural criticism.Footnote 116 Whereas Mulhern's criticism is largely dependent on political and epistemological considerations, Collini's is molded by aesthetic and hermeneutical concerns. The latter are sustained by his practice of bringing the historical–critical dimension to the table of current political, economic and policy-making discussions. This operation is not simply akin to attending to the past in order to learn from it, but also encourages better living in the future. Collini operates as the diagnostician of society's cultural dynamics and points us to “variousness” as antidote to “foreclosing the range of our perceptions.” After all, criticism consists in elaborating and justifying certain “perceptions about a given object,” with the goal of persuading an audience with whom the intellectual historian–critic is involved in a constructive dialogue. Criticism of this kind rejects all “claims to finality” because they halt this vital conversation.Footnote 117 For Collini the act of interpreting is central to human values: hermeneutical issues do concern people's lives.Footnote 118 Writing and living are never separate: to be a good critic presupposes applying one's perceptive insights to “the best writing” and the latter implies “being intelligent about living.”Footnote 119
As for lack of an “oppositional” stand in his work, Collini turned down the idea that being “critical” corresponds to being “oppositional”: rejecting Said's definition of the intellectual, he pointed out that it is extremely restrictive to reduce the task of critical reflection to antagonistic political engagement and to self-positioning as mouthpiece of the wretched of the earth.Footnote 120 To view intellectual work as quintessentially “oppositional,” as with the practitioners of the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” amounts to charging a minority of enlightened few with the capacity to unmask for the unaware majority the mechanisms of oppression at work in a society. It also means endowing criticism with the mantle of performing “political action.” Against this move, Collini observed that to build an intellectual identity on being “oppositional” eschews “responsible assessment of the effects of one's activities” and hampers the possibility of being constructive in the arena of intellectual exchange.Footnote 121 In regard to Mulhern's and Eagleton's criticisms of his want of engagement, and to the function of intellectuals like Tony Judt,Footnote 122 it can be said that Collini's public moralist resembles Raymond Aron's “committed observer.”Footnote 123 This model does not plead the functionality of history, nor does it consider history as a channel through which to dispense lessons on social responsibility or good citizenship. Ultimately, for Collini thinking historically through imagination and sympathy, and reading critically by listening to tones and voices, leads to reflecting on how “we ought to live,” indeed on what it means to live and to think about the daily experience of living.Footnote 124
Eagleton has also remarked that Collini is “as English as a vicarage tea party.”Footnote 125 This emerges clearly in his praising Hoggart's “public voice” as the embodiment of the “English way of being an intellectual: unpretentious, morally serious, reflective.” Hoggart was “an English moralist” in line with a tradition stretching back to “Ruskin and Lawrence on one side, Cobbett and Orwell on the other,” of whom for Collini we have a great need today.Footnote 126 Despite his composite range of interests, Collini is indeed an English intellectual drawn to the cultural tradition(s) of this nation whose ideal of the man of letters is fashioned in that very tradition.Footnote 127 In response, Collini affirmed that his is not a nationalist perspective, rather, it is the product of his English background and of his being at home in England.Footnote 128 Still, despite alerting his readers to the hypocrisy of reactionary politics, Collini did not confront head-on the nature of English nationalism, which in its less virulent version displays narrow-minded insularity, but assumes far more noxious manifestations vis-à-vis minorities, foreigners and other marginalized groups. Equally absent from his oeuvre is a cross-national frame of reference: this is always only secondary to the main insistence on national particularities, which bespeaks resistance to the global trend in contemporary intellectual history. Collini's English—at its widest European and North American—focus overlooks significant developments that occurred in the circulation of ideas and in the world of intellectuals in contexts such as South America, Japan, China and the Arab world during the last century.
The exchange debate with Mulhern and Eagleton's critique connect to the reception of some of Collini's more recent works. Whilst English Pasts was acclaimed as an accomplished intellectual achievement reflecting scholarly mastery previously displayed in Liberalism and Sociology, in his Arnold writings and in Public Moralists, Absent Minds was received more critically. Whereas the former works were criticized at most for their “acerbic” vein regarding some of their objects of study,Footnote 129Absent Minds came under attack for its content and approach. While Collini's writings until Absent Minds were praised for their anti-Whiggism and interdisciplinarity, this study was taken to task for its definitional strictures as well as (more surprisingly) for its downplaying the contextual situation within which twentieth-century intellectuals were allowed to act or were prevented from doing so.Footnote 130 These specific criticisms aside, the chief point has once again to do with Collini's idea of the twenty-first-century intellectual. Absent Minds left unanswered a few questions concerning the work of the new intelligentsias, their political allegiances, their relation to issues of national identity. Queries about intellectuals’ influence, notably in conjunction with pressing affairs such as migration, with the fragmentation of the social texture in terms of moral values, or with ethnicity and gender, whose effect is to alter perceptions of nationhood, are not, despite critics’ priorities, central to Collini's concerns. Not driven by ideals of emancipation nor defined by anti-establishment verve, the Collinian intellectual might be perceived as unheroic.Footnote 131
But this is not the whole story. Since publishing Absent Minds (2006), Collini gave prominence to questions of censorship, freedom of speech and higher education. In so doing, he recast his stance as an active critical voice in the anglophone intellectual world. His bravura in showcasing “how thinking is carried out, in what ways and by whom,”Footnote 132 led him to reflect persuasively on the uncertain life of the academic–intellectual at a time when the disinterestedness of university scholarship, just as its independence, is under threat due to the interference of political authorities intent on advancing dubious ideological agendas. This activity reflects his public engagement as an intellectual historian whose congenial affinities for some unexpected critical voice are explored next.
CONGENIAL AFFINITIES: COLLINI AND WILLIAM EMPSON
To fully understand Collini's approach to history and criticism, we lastly concentrate on a keyword which plays a special part in his works: “congenial.”Footnote 133 Collini has been drawn to authors—Hoggart, T. S. Eliot, Leavis, Trilling, Raymond Williams—who wrote as literary critics when tackling cultural and social topics. This affinity has to do with a congeniality of style and temperament.Footnote 134 Collini prefers exuberant, generous and irreverent writers who produce(d) “humanly appealing” portraits of a subject.Footnote 135 A good dose of “boat-rocking” is also in tune with his critical attitude vis-à-vis social tendencies, moral cant and general cultural primness.Footnote 136 He is a perceptive analyst of terms and turns of phrases utilized by those whose writings he examines.Footnote 137 A “discriminating history of the uses” of a specific word (e.g. “intellectuals”) informed his unpacking of the multiple ways in which that word was employed, and accounted for how this process displays presiding ideologies afloat in a given society at a given time.Footnote 138 His predilection for this critical strategy reveals a key congenial affinity for the literary critic and poet William Empson (1906–84), whose “offhand ingenuity” with which he unraveled “ever finer nuances of literary meaning” as well as “liberal rationalism”Footnote 139 appeal to Collini in ways in which, for instance, Eliot's “symbolic esotericism” does not.Footnote 140 This is especially true because Empson's outlook on literary texts (1920s–1930s) gives to common readers access to a textual moment without necessarily laying aside the critic's “sympathies.”Footnote 141
Most importantly, Empson's attention to “historical background” and interest in the ordinariness of language emanating from a text make his technique even closer to Collini's own reading of past authors.Footnote 142 Empson's insistence on the intentionality of writers chimes with Collini's deciphering of what a writer meant when he/she delivered certain words, using specific expressions or adorning his/her prose with particular adjectival forms.Footnote 143 Both Empson and Collini view a text as an open canvas onto which no one single meaning can be attached. This is part and parcel of what Empson called the ambiguity of a text, which is therefore seen not as a coherent ensemble but as an unrestrained source of meanings linked to the creative exploration of context. In turn, to maintain the ambiguous nature of a text enables its readers to participate in its unfolding as actors, not merely as passive consumers.Footnote 144 Empson's The Structure of Complex Words (1951) is congenial to Collini's method on two counts. First, it assigns meaning to texts not as the accumulation of words playing with themselves (in what is often a mere self-congratulatory game of critical show-offness), but as the expression of human agents whose experiences and beliefs the two critics follow in order to comprehend what was said. Second, by reckoning with the complexity of words and the multiplicity of usages surrounding them, Empson and Collini admit the absence of “anything as stable as a structure.”Footnote 145
In contrast to the New Criticism's restrictive concentration on “the words on the page,” Empson underlined the importance of “social experience.”Footnote 146 For Collini the “virtuosity” of Empsonian criticism consists in (t)his embrace of meaning and context. The intimate relationship between writer and reader cannot be exclusively based on works’ verbal texture: it has to be enriched by the reader's entering the ideological and personal world of the writer.Footnote 147 As Empson put it in 1930, “scholarship” entails the effort of “a man . . . trying to imagine another man's mind; as soon as that stops, he is off the rails.”Footnote 148 Scornful of rigidly theoretical and esoterically clad readings of literature, “the vast facade of imbecility” that hinders all dialogue between writer and reader, Empson—Collini remarked—highlighted the relevance of literature in shaping people's “ethical” dimension: “The central function of imaginative literature is to make you realize that other people act on moral convictions different from our own.”Footnote 149 It follows that for Empson—just as for Collini—criticism means to grasp an author's “feelings”:Footnote 150 this sensibility opens up “alternative” readings of the same text and discounts all prescriptions on the right approach to it as perilously limiting.Footnote 151 Endowed with great “imaginative sympathy,” Empson needs to be read, according to Collini, as a critical practitioner rather than as a theorist. This is reflected in his capacity for “sustained alertness and fertility” as a reader as well as for his unique display of “sensibility, analysis, argument and wit” as a critic.Footnote 152 Empson observed that the literary critic occupies a place that is “social” rather than “scientific”:Footnote 153 as such, he/she shapes “the taste of his[/her] period” through his/her distinctive voice.Footnote 154 For Collini, Empson accomplished precisely this thanks to the “unfussed worldliness” of his most discriminating judgments.Footnote 155 By conducing his/her readers to dwell on the ambiguity of words and their multifarious ways of conveying meaning, the Empsonian critic embodies the roles of appreciator and interpreter whose sympathy in examining a poem or a novel is a valuable addition to the enterprise of decoding texts and the world: texts in the world.Footnote 156 Collini agreed with Empson in that for him critics who want to be perceptive as well as persuasive need to possess a discerning eye with which to scrutinize “modern societies.”Footnote 157 Congenial to Collini is also Empson's “sense” of an audience with whom to engage in a dialogue deprived of narrowing methodological guidelines stifling critical analysis.
It is not surprising, then, that Collini is critical of scholars who fail to employ a good degree of sympathy when attending to past lives.Footnote 158 Among his targets we find those who interrogate texts with the sole intention of unveiling the apparatus of repression deployed by political powers against some marginal group.Footnote 159 In fact, to interrogate amounts to extracting an expected answer from a prisoner source which is thus forced to yield “the desired information.”Footnote 160 Equally problematic in this hermeneutical position is what Collini—in the 1990s as well as recently—called “a curious asymmetry” whereby only the prejudices of those studied are examined in place of those belonging to their student. For Collini it is indispensable to show a charitable interpretive vein when dealing with the deeds and thoughts of those we read, as well as to apply a healthy skepticism to our own explanations of them. Against historiographical orthodoxies (e.g. political history) whereby charity, imagination and sympathy—viewed as symptoms of discipline-lacking practices—ought to be banned, Collini saw them as pivotal to fostering new historical–critical knowledge.
In order to acquire deep historical understanding it is not sufficient to adopt some form of “deconstructive alertness” either. It is by being imaginative as much as compassionate that we become fully responsive to the voices of the past. Interpreting texts as if they were always potential sources of concealed utterances neglects their “communicative” dimension. It expunges the affective and living element with which we should address past works and present lives (direct “human experience”). Without accepting everything we encounter in the past “at face value,” it is as “human expressions” articulated in contexts different from our own that we need to consider the propositions we investigate, and to explain which we bring in our own concepts. In recovering what a writer wanted to say it is the use of the critic's experience that, for Empson as much as for Collini, becomes fundamental. Scrupulous “suspicion” is not enough: it is too clinical a way of reading texts, which are thus turned into specimens of “forensic” evidence to be judged in a court where scholars deem them “unacceptable” on the basis of the views they “inadvertently betray or disclose.”Footnote 161
In contrast to this perspective, Collini supported the Sussex-coined idea that intellectual historians are eavesdroppers “on the conversations of the past.”Footnote 162 This implies grasping what people said in their own terms, which is integral to the exercise of making sense of what was going on at their time.Footnote 163 To approach the dwellers of past lands is Empsonially to regard them as “agents,” not as “victims”: this means avoiding applying perceptiveness-lacking “condescension” to their visions of the world.Footnote 164 Collini brought up the contradictory and idiosyncratic in an author not as signs of his/her weakness, but as illustrations of his/her intellectual vitality. He therefore rejected the reductionism frequently exhibited by teleology-inclined historians as well as by social theorists (e.g. Ernest Gellner) when interpreting the events and inner life of their subjects.Footnote 165 The study of someone's ideas is never separate from that of the person in the flesh. A full picture is sketched in such a manner that the energies of past actors are not lost to modern readers whose tastes might need to be both accommodated and challenged: in this way, the intellectual historian–critic supplies a platform for understanding the long gone and, at the same time, stimulates new reflections on the here and now.
Likewise, for Collini, to box thinkers according to the perceived value of their theories or to label their achievements under such categories as “modernity,” “reason,” “progress” and “freedom” can only engender inaccurate intellectual history. Their “undiscriminating capaciousness” is “ahistorical” and thwarts a subtle comprehension of real dynamics of change within a temporally and spatially specific context.Footnote 166 Instead of discussing metatheoretical questions concerning the essence of literature, the concept of interpretation, the notion of reading or the relation between fiction and nonfiction, the Empsonian Collini opted for a more historically anchored understanding of “concrete” ways of life: criticism is bolstered by sound “textual and interpretative” intellectual history.Footnote 167
CONCLUSION
According to Stefan Collini, history writing must provide readers with “an informed historical perspective,” enabling them to dispel the often prejudiced and reductive opinions of those (politicians, educational administrators, the media) who occupy positions from which partisan interests and dangerous agendas can be imposed on people.Footnote 168 In its cultural and social function, this type of history writing is best pursued by what this article has portrayed as “the intellectual historian as critic,” whose feet are grounded in the fields of historical narrative and whose voice reaches audiences not confined to the usual arenas of academic exchange. In his/her critical approach to a varied spectrum of historical and cultural subjects, this practitioner—of whom Collini has here been taken as a leading representative on the English-speaking cultural scene—resorts to historical imagination and style as well as to irony and skepticism. This critical intellectual history aims to seduce its readers by establishing a close intimacy between them and the authors whose work it examines. It also engages with history writing as “a medium for allowing more adequate principles to infiltrate public debate.”Footnote 169
By dint of situating, and distinguishing, Collini's work both in relation to other intellectual historians and vis-à-vis critical practice, this article has shown that his historical–critical activity is carried out not in a heavily abstract way, but by thinking about history and culture along the lines of literary figures such as Matthew Arnold and William Empson, in contextualist (Sussex, not Cambridge) fashion, through aural metaphors, and thanks to sympathy and sensibility as keys to interpret the past and the present in their plural manifestations. Collini's trajectory is unusual because, although his work began by focusing on the history of social and political thought (albeit even there he dealt with ethical assumptions and rhetorical tropes rather than straight political theories), he moved away from these disciplines to explore what could be done by closer attention to the texture of writings and to the recovery of voice, cadence, tonality in authors whose texts belong in a variety of domains. At the same time, Collini offers a different and promising model for intellectual history because he also made his approach relevant to contemporary public discourse—by demonstrating how this kind of intellectual history can function as a form of cultural criticism and how his relativizing of academic disciplines is crucial to understanding the modern university. Ultimately, this activity illustrates the work and the idiosyncratic position of Stefan Collini: the intellectual historian as critic.
