The numerous events and copious press coverage marking the fiftieth anniversary of C. P. Snow's May 1959 Rede Lecture at Cambridge University, entitled The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, have been a testament to the continuing interest in the origins and applicability of Snow's Two Cultures thesis. It is timely, then, that Guy Ortolano has provided us with a detailed and insightful study of some of the debates and beliefs surrounding it in its heyday. In The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Snow argued that literary intellectuals had long opposed science, technology, industry, and progress, not only contributing to British decline but also retarding economic development in Asia and Africa. He called for the British education system to produce more scientists and engineers and so to combat the failures of a dominant literary culture. His thesis generated substantial interest and debate that continued through to the 1970s and indeed beyond.

Ortolano has chosen to approach the discourse about and around the Two Cultures through the thinking and polemic of two leading protagonists: Snow himself and the Cambridge don and literary critic F. R. Leavis, whose criticism of Snow in a February 1962 lecture was prominent then and is well known to historians today. Building on recent reassessments of Snow and his Two Cultures (prominently by David Edgerton), Ortolano argues that the “two cultures controversy” (involving Snow, Leavis, and their allies) was not a clash between the arts and the sciences, or between a literary and a scientific elite, but rather between two differing understandings of modern civilization and its challenges. Snow's “technocratic liberalism” emphasized modern civilization's industrial and scientific basis. Modern national economies, industries, and indeed nations themselves needed to be managed by talented and educated experts working through state bureaucracies. By contrast, Leavis believed that modern civilization, emergent in the seventeenth century, increasingly revolved around mass culture and crass materialism and so threatened culture and the creativity of individuals. Taken together with an opposition to socialism and conservatism, Ortolano labels Leavis's position as “radical liberalism.” (100).

Ortolano uses several frames for his study of Leavis and Snow's thinking; the most important was the concept of a “meritocratic moment” lasting from 1945 to 1975. He begins by examining the arguments Snow advanced in The Two Cultures and their development from the time of his scientific work in the thirties to his literary success in the fifties. He then moves on to similarly examine Leavis's “radical liberalism” as it developed from his literary criticism in the thirties to his social criticism in the sixties. He then examines the university as a site for the transformation of Leavis's and Snow's social priorities into institutional realities, focusing in particular on the tussles over science and English at two Cambridge colleges. He examines Leavis's attempts to materialize his beliefs through the English faculty at Downing, and Snow’s, through the English faculty at newly founded Churchill College. He then considers Snow's attempts at the development of a scientific style of social history through, in particular, an alliance with historian Peter Laslett and his nascent Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure and explores how declinism pervaded Snow's understandings of modern Britain. Ortolano also focuses on Snow's thinking on international affairs (noting Snow's rejection of a cold war perspective in preference for a postimperial one) and on Leavis's arguments against Western-directed poor-world development, which he saw as the imposition of destructive materialistic civilization. By the seventies, during the “eclipse of the meritocratic moment,” Ortolano highlights an apparent reshuffling of ideological positions. Not only did their positions evolve, but more important the shifting ideological background left them with rather surprising allies—including, in Snow's case, the newly emergent American neoconservative movement. Snow, ostensibly a man of the center-left defending the masses, appeared increasingly, through his continuing defense of elite privilege, of the right. Leavis, a long-standing defender of elites and elite education, found that his attacks on the materialism of modern civilization and on the projection of Western developmentalist models on poor countries reverberated with the left.

Ortolano's book is not a wide-ranging examination of the many discourses and debates relating to the concept of the Two Cultures in postwar Britain. It is rather a rich and meticulously detailed examination of the changing thinking of Leavis and Snow on society, modernity, and civilization (of which the Two Cultures controversy was a part) and their attempts to institutionalize this thinking in the fifties and sixties. Although Ortolano's exploration of how widely their views were held is somewhat patchy (these connections are most detailed in his examination of Snow and declinism), the reader will nevertheless learn much about previously understudied aspects of postwar Britain, namely, the relationship among science, literature, and cultural politics. His work's ultimate importance, however, lies in its insistence that we stop looking at British history through Snow's eyes. Ortolano shows instead how we can use the Two Cultures to understand the wider ideological and social currents to which it was intimately related: liberalism, declinism, meritocracy, and technocracy.