The intellectuals

To the ordinary man in the street who, alas!
Is a keen observer of life
The word ‘intellectual’ invariably means
A man who’s untrue to his wife

Thus Hilaire Belloc (from memory). The British have always been anti-intellectual, whereas in France you cannot become a serious public figure unless you have written a turgid self-indulgent book on philosophy and I remember once having to explain to a confused Swiss what ‘too clever by half’ meant.

Prospect Magazine has for a second year running held a poll for who was the ‘public’ intellectual of 2008. The three shortlisted are General David Petraeus for his Iraq plan, Thaler and Sunstein for ‘Nudge’ (the theory that it is better to point the way to correct behaviour and let the citizen make the choice, rather than to penalise bad behaviour) and Nouriel Roubini, the economics professor who forecast the crunch a year before.

There is only one thing these people have in common, pretty obvious, you might think, and that is that they were right and not stupidly wrong. You can have a maths professor who can’t buy a bus ticket but not one who confuses algorithms with logarithms. The professor who thought the boom would go on forever might well have been well read and clever but he is not going to win a prize for the public intellectual of 2008.

The reason I mention this rather basic point is that last year one of the 100 on the long list was Gordon Brown. This is a man who put it out that he was the progenitor of some new economic paradigm but who in fact did nothing more than embrace 1950s statism: ‘the man in Whitehall really does know best’, with the interesting twist that he would permit enough low regulation capitalism to pay for it. His policy, such as it is, consists of a confused mishmash of half understood theory, unconsidered morality and self-aggrandisement and it was glaringly, ear-trumpetingly obvious that it was wrong. I began to think that Prospect, whose editor David Goodhart is himself something of an intellectual, had taken leave of its senses to try replacing the New Statesman as the rag de choix among the Fabian diaspora, and I confess I still don’t really trust it.

Anyway Brown wasn’t on it this year. Petraeus won, even though Prospect opposed the Gulf War. Good stuff.