Anthony Barnett (London, OK): This side of a coup, there needs to be an intelligentsia if a country's direction - the way it is governed and the kind of society it is - is to be deeply changed by government. By an intelligentsia, I mean an independent but influential network of thinkers and writers, call them philosophers, economists, novelists and film-makers, who are cosmopolitan enough to understand other societies and the thus the new route their own might take.
Martin Wolf challenged me to name an intelligentsia and I have, in a previous post. Now I want to prove my original suggestion. There are two reasons why Gordon Brown's programme needs an intelligentsia. For he has a two-fold ambition to make a lasting impact on the character and spirit of the UK, namely on its democracy and its Britishness. This can't be done just by those who have a "practical" and "technocratic" approach as Martin claims, it needs the influence of those "outside day-to-day politics", even those who view the world "through a predominantly literary, rather than scientific or technocratic, lens".
First, democracy. Brown says, "the best answer to disengagement from our democracy is to strengthen our democracy". If by strengthen he means to secure a few doors, take down some partitions and perhaps add an extra room to give a new lease of life to the old building this is not going to ‘restore trust'. If it means doing politics differently, as Brown has also said, then a transformation not a modernisation is called for - and for this to happen there needs to be a democratic intelligentsia.
Because it won't be enough to unveil participation devices based on reading Robert Puttnam, or even electoral reform. If you ask, ‘What causes the "disengagement" for which stronger democracy is the solution?' the next question is ‘Who do you need to help answer this question?' As it is about engagement history and feeling, it is the ground of the novelist. Will people really feel that a "stronger democracy" gives them more power? The NYRB has just published an extract from a forthcoming novel on politics in the age of terror, Diary of a Bad Year by the Nobel winner J.M.Coetzee, who writes, "To regain touch, you must at every moment remind yourself of what it is like to come face to face with the state - the democratic state or any other - in the person of the state official. Then ask yourself, Who serves whom? Who is the servant, who the master?"
Asked by a politician or a campaigner this question carries their already decided answer, it is rhetorical. Asked by a great novelist, it is an exploration. And something is wrong with our democracy that needs to be explored and diagnosed. It may infuriate Martin, but whether it is John le Carré asking about Britain's Cold War state or now about corporate power, or Quentin Skinner as a historian of theories of government, to take two established British figures, or Brazil's Roberto Ungar making the case for "high-energy" political inventiveness, the diagnosis cannot be left to state technicians and financial journalists - we need literary and philosophical types to poke their penetrating ways into the diagnosis our affairs if we want change of the kind the Prime Minister appears to have called for.
Which brings me to Britishness, At the end of the article which starts this exchange I wrote, "creating a strong sense of national purpose, of renewing Britain no less... needs a surrounding intelligentsia to succeed, even if in this case it may need to be one of the right". I do not assume, as Martin does, that all intelligentsia's are leftist cliques. But the main point here is that Brown says he is going for the totality. I do not assume that he is, but I am confident he ought to do so: there is something amiss overall, with both Britain and its democracy. In the about section of OK I call it a "good crisis" because there is the popular energy and ability to respond outside the normal channels of government. But is there the intellectual and cultural spirit and energy within in our political class?
