Born Mikes György in a small Hungarian town in 1912, he had been too young to experience the staid but stable Habsburg world eulogized in Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. He instead came of age in a very different kind of Central Europe. One in which old certainties had disappeared, and new ones had yet to crystallize. Where radically “modern” cultural and political forces vied for attention in Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, Warsaw, and beyond, feeding off the new culture of uncertainty.

With fascism and Stalinism ascendant in the Thirties, hundreds of thousands of Central Europeans fled their homes. Mikes was one of them, the product of a great migration that, if not quite entirely forgotten, is certainly inadequately remembered in Britain. As Owen Hatherley argues in his masterful new book, The Alienation Effect, those Central Europeans like Mikes were part of the first modern mass migration that “had a really decisive, transformative and positive effect on British culture”.

Though Hatherley’s focus is on the arts — the émigrés often came as bearers of a continental modernism fiercely resisted before (and even after) their arrival — their influence on the course of British politics, economics, philosophy, and more was often equally consequential. Of course, even if their influence had been negligible, the fact that hundreds of thousands of Britons today can trace their ancestry back to this migration is itself cause for interest. In the early 21st century, both of Britain’s major parties were briefly led by such descendants (Michael Howard and Ed Miliband).

But unlike the postwar imperial migration since mythologized as the founding act of modern, multicultural Britain, the place of these Central European exiles in the national story (or stories) has been left much more ambiguous. When London’s Overground lines were given names for the first time in 2024, the one running through areas settled by immigrants from the “West Indies” was christened the Windrush line. No Finchleystraße or Freud line appeared, however, in those parts of northwest London favored by Central Europeans to commemorate their role in the making of modern Britain.

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The two cases are not of course strictly comparable. The Windrush story is a fundamentally British one, carrying British citizens (or those that were soon to be such) to the mother country that had ruled over them and their ancestors for centuries. They were not, as the Mikes, Freuds, and others were, “aliens” from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, or Poland. This status condemned tens of thousands bearing German or Austrian citizenship, many of whom were Jewish, to mass internment in 1940/41. Even though many chose to remain in Britain after this experience, it offered the starkest example of what it meant to be an “alien”.

Some Central European migrants came in passing, spending a few years in Britain before moving on, like the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. Others, like Sigmund Freud, arrived just in time to die, gifting little to their country of refuge except for a stage replica of the life they left behind. But tens of thousands — including Freud’s grandson Lucian — made the United Kingdom their permanent home.

They were overwhelmingly educated and middle class and — excepting the 250,000 Poles of Anders’ Army, unable to return home due to the Communist takeover of Poland, who were offered citizenship in 1947 — mostly of Jewish descent. They were not necessarily people who saw themselves as Jews or considered it an important part of their identity, however, but rather highly assimilated urbanites from modern and cosmopolitan cities like Berlin, Vienna, and Budapest who shared and had taken pride in the national and urban cultures they were raised in.

By the time they arrived in Britain many of them had thus experienced a double alienation. First from their homelands that had turned on them, and only then as “aliens” forced to adapt to the peculiar non-continental ways of the British. If the various émigré accounts recorded by Hatherley are anything to go by, the new migrants and refugees viewed their new home with a mixture of bemusement, confusion, and admiration.

Compared with the ferment and upheaval on the continent they had left, Britain appeared to these Central European exiles as an aloof and parochial haven of good manners, peace, and stability. The socialist psychiatrist Charlotte Wolff described “a sense of enchanted unreality” taking hold of her as she disembarked at Dover in 1935. The comfort and quietness of the subsequent train to London “acted like a tranquilizer”. The Marxist intellectual Perry Anderson lamented this tranquilizing effect that he thought had caused Central European exiles to leave their continental radicalism behind, instead adjusting to “the mediocre and inert” culture that defined “the most conservative major society in Europe”.

Hatherley’s book is a belated riposte to Anderson’s thesis. He explores all the ways in which these exiles did indeed bring their radical continental ideas with them: how they helped to write the cultural code of the “modern Britain” created out of a crumbling post-Victorian empire in the mid-20th century. Often with an explicitly Left-wing conviction that the mock Tudor houses and tenement slums were symbols of the capitalist rot of Thirties Britain that had to be swept away and reinvigorated with new artistic, social, and economic ideas fit for the “modern world”.

There was, for example, the Hungarian-born Stefan Lorant, who had a successful career as a filmmaker and photojournalist in Germany before being forced to flee on account of his Jewish heritage. In 1938 he co-founded the Picture Post in London, modeling it on the Münchner Illustrierte Press he had edited in Germany. It became wildly successful and influential thanks to its pioneering photojournalism and its anti-fascist political stance, both of which long outlived Lorant’s own stay in Britain which lasted only until 1940.

British publishing too was revolutionized by Central European encounters. The London-based publishers Phaidon Press and Thames & Hudson, known for their high-quality and visually striking illustrations, are both the products of Viennese exiles, while Penguin Books effectively copied its modernist book design from the pioneering German publisher Albatross Books.

Then there were the countless producers, cinematographers, set designers, composers, and costume designers that formed the invisible backbone of the British film industry. Or photographers like Bill Brandt, who used their lens to make permanent their own “alien” perspective on British life. Sculptors who brought monumental and abstract forms onto British streets and art historians like Ernst Gombrich and Nikolaus Pevsner who introduced German systematization to the British study of art and architecture. And, most notoriously of all, the architects and planners that helped to transform the ruins and slums of the Forties into the cities Britons know today.

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Depending on one’s perspective, these architects are either the greatest prophets or the greatest scoundrels of modern British history. The continental utopianism undergirding their embrace of sleek modernist architecture is either an “un-British” abomination or a welcome, if imperfect, contribution to British architectural traditionalism. Indeed, Ian Fleming hated Ernő Goldfinger so much for blighting Hampstead with a row of modernist houses that he turned him into a Bond villain. (With a suitably evil modernist lair, naturally, itself designed in the film adaptation by a Central European exile.)

Much of the influence of Central European immigrants was, however, unseen. The 1942 Beveridge Report that laid the intellectual foundations of the postwar welfare state was ghostwritten by four economists, two of whom were born on the continent — Nicholas Kaldor and E.F. Schumacher. Many of their achievements were eventually repudiated, if not quite undone, by the Thatcher government, whose émigré Central European economist of choice was the Austrian Hayek. “This is what we believe!” Margaret Thatcher reportedly proclaimed at a Conservative Party meeting in the Seventies as she slammed a copy of Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty down on the table.

In the 19th century the notion that the birthplace of industrial capitalism should take economic cues from Austria would have read as a bad joke, like taking lessons on empire-building from the Germans. Yet, as Hatherley’s panoramic portrait of Central Europe-on-Thames shows, by the late 20th century it was difficult to find any aspect of British life that had not been touched by some sort of Central European intervention. It would be absurd to attribute any development solely to their influence, but it would be equally absurd to dismiss them entirely.

What makes it hard to tell as a distinctly British story, however, is that Britain’s Central European migration was small compared to the much greater numbers who made their way to the United States, USSR, and newly founded state of Israel. The waves of post-imperial migration from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia, by contrast, were distinctly rooted in British history, something that makes Windrush an attractive metaphor for modern Britain’s transition to post-imperial multiculturalism.

The “aliens” from Central Europe who chose to make Britain their home in the Thirties and Forties do not fit comfortably into this narrative. Yet as Hatherley convincingly demonstrates, they helped Britain forge its own vision of 20th-century modernity, not as a facsimile of the world they left behind, but as a new synthesis of old and new, of continent and isles, of Britain and Central Europe. They brought ideas and experiences with them but naturally formed new ones as they adjusted to their new home, working hand-in-hand with British counterparts. As the “aliens” slowly became British, so too did Britain become a little “alien”.

In the West, information has a habit of wanting to be free. Every so often, government documents are recalled, or a court order prevents an issue from being discussed — but once the material is out in the public sphere, especially online, it is generally very hard to retract it. Since this is the norm for liberal societies, we sometimes underestimate how important it is to keep bodies of knowledge free and accessible to the public.

In today’s illiberal China, by contrast, we see what happens when the preservation of information for the public is less important than protecting the ruling system. The Chinese government is determined to prove it can be made to disappear at the snap of its fingers. In March, it was announced that large parts of CNKI, the major Chinese research and academic database, were being closed to overseas readers. The Chinese insist that this is just tit for tat, as it’s harder for their own researchers to get access to Western research databases. But that’s disingenuous. It’s true that there are now security-linked restrictions on some researchers from China getting access to Western hi-tech labs. Yet Chinese historians, political scientists and sociologists still have easy and convenient access to sources in the West, such as the UK National Archives.

Foreign academics studying China aren’t nearly so lucky. Overseas access to China’s historical materials — particularly those from the turbulent years of Mao Zedong’s rule — is now off-limits. This wasn’t always the case: a number of key archives including the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were open to foreign and domestic scholars during the first decade of this century, allowing for astonishing insights into the formation of Mao’s foreign policy (and, as it happens, helping China to make its current foreign policy more legible to the world). Then, in 2012, most of the collection was closed off again. No single explanation was given other than a cryptic “zhengli” (reordering or tidying up), but in retrospect, it marked the start of a decade of narrowing boundaries for academic and political discussion as Xi Jinping tightened his control over China.

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The closing of archives might seem like a rather specialist complaint. But the wider issue — the illusion that once information is out in the open, it remains there — is more fundamental to the behaviour of writers, thinkers, and societies as a whole than the liberal world sometimes realises. China’s intellectuals have to reckon not just with the battle to get material out in the open, but the reality that any victory may be temporary, and the door may narrow or close again.

Consider the writing of Wang Xiaobo, a well-known Chinese novelist in the Eighties and Nineties. Unsure what to make of his wry and ironic fiction, the authorities first banned his work, then allowed it to be published in the relatively more liberal atmosphere of the mid-Nineties (though it has been only sporadically available in China since then). Wang’s story is neither unique nor particularly tragic: it is often the case in China that the same artist is both feted and censored. But his story is illustrative of the way that information and access come and go in China, a phenomenon that shapes attitudes towards reality.

In China, collective knowledge and memory are fragile. To give them more substance and staying power, Chinese intellectuals have come up with two different techniques. The first is to embrace the ironies surrounding the ephemerality of the written word. Wang’s most widely-known novel, Golden Age, now in a new translation for Penguin Classics by Yan Yan, is an account of the Cultural Revolution: the decade from 1966 to 1976 when China was racked by an internal civil war instigated by Mao in an act of purgative revenge against his own Communist Party, which he believed was sidelining him.

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Yet Wang’s book doesn’t offer the kind of grand narrative sweep present in Jung Chang’s Wild Swans and other bestselling memoirs of the Cultural Revolution. Instead, it opens with a “sent-down youth” named Wang Er, a young man exiled to the countryside during Mao’s political storm. During his time in the village, he has a long on-off affair with a young female doctor until the two of them are discovered and forced to self-criticise. This tactic of demanding that political offenders recount their own “crimes” was a standard part of the project of ideological purification from the Forties onwards. But rather than going through a violent and painful humiliation typical of the Cultural Revolution, the wayward couple is simply made to write confessions of their Orwellian “sexcrimes”. The cadre in charge of monitoring the confessions seems to enjoy them for their prurient detail rather than seeking to use them for reforming the recidivists.

For much of the novel, Wang depicts this strange parallel Cultural Revolution, far removed from the violence in the cities. It is only later that we find out that the anti-hero has been witness to a horrific confrontation when he gives an understated but devastating account of a teacher who is persecuted until he throws himself from the window, and whose family are left standing on the ground next to scattered pieces of his brain. Like much of the writing of post-1949 history in China, Golden Age only makes sense when the missing elements are added in late in the day.

This mixture of irony and violence is not the kind of thing that the Party tends to favour. The Cultural Revolution is not completely off limits for discussion in China, but it’s hard to talk about it in tones that suggest it was anything other than a terrible historical error — the fault of a few erring leaders — that the Party itself successfully corrected, and that it’s time to move on. Wang’s approach, in contrast, implies that the wounds of that time have never really healed. That bleak interpretation must be one of the reasons that the book was illicit (though widely read).

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Chinese writers today face even greater challenges than Wang. As Megan Walsh points out in her book, The Subplot, popular fiction is now written at high speed online, and is highly commercial, bringing in the kind of income that many Substackers can only dream of. Yet online readers can suddenly find their favourite epic blocked by censors. Unlike Wang’s physical novels, which could at least be hidden in private libraries during times of harsh censorship, today’s bestselling fiction can disappear overnight. Just because you read something today doesn’t mean you’ll find it tomorrow, whether it’s a historical document about the Cultural Revolution or a multi-part fiction series about lesbian martial arts champions. Fiction flickers on the screen: you have to catch it while you can.

This leads us to the second way that some seek to preserve memory, as illustrated in Ian Johnson’s new book Sparks, which gives a highly empathetic account of the way that China’s historical community gets around the rules that prevent the preservation of documentation and restrain historical analysis. The fate of the journal China Through the Ages (Yanhuang Chunqiu) offers a particularly disturbing example. For decades, the journal, officially permitted as a vehicle for the more liberal strain in Chinese Communist politics, was allowed to publish documents and essays that forced attention to the darker and more complex side of Chinese Communist history, even referencing figures such as Zhao Ziyang, the former party chief placed under house arrest after Tiananmen Square in 1989. Then, in 2016, the magazine was shut down in a political purge (although it reappeared under new management). Such unpredictability means that historians have to resort to other means to preserve material: either publishing as online “newsletters” that don’t require an official publication permit, or publishing abroad. The seeming solidity of an ISBN melts into the air — even more so in an age where digital-only publications can be switched off at a moment’s notice.

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Today in the West, there are major, unresolved debates about how electronic data can be preserved when technology makes old formats such as CDs obsolete. There is also a growing divide between institutions and societies that can afford to keep databases switched on and those that can’t. But these choices are very different from deciding that a particular body of historical data — records of top Party leaders’ discussions; economic data about unemployment — should vanish because they are politically inconvenient. This fear of disappearance profoundly affects the way that China preserves its modern history. Libraries and even databases are still important, but the piles of printouts in a local historian’s back room, next to the rice cooker, or those videos of Cultural Revolution survivors kept on a private laptop take on a particular urgency because handing them over to an official archive could mean disappearance rather than preservation.

Wang Xiaobo died young in 1997, so we don’t know what he would have made of a 21st-century China which largely lives on the internet. He would probably have been pleased that his own books are reasonably freely available today. But he might well have been hard at work on a novel that reflected the here-today-gone-tomorrow fragility of history, fiction, and memory in today’s authoritarian China, where it is easier than ever to disseminate information and simpler than ever to cut it off.

They are there to discuss how Jarrow United had, the previous night, with “an almost Proustian display of modern existentialist football” beaten Bologna, “annihilating by midfield moral argument the now surely obsolescent catenaccio defensive philosophy of Signor Alberto Fanfrino”. As Brian speaks of a performance “thrusting and bursting with aggressive Kantian positivism”, Jimmy looks increasingly anxious, says “Good evening, Brian” as an answer to three questions, and tries unsuccessfully to talk about his new boutique. He eventually resorts to grunting: “I hit the ball first time and there it was in the back of the net.”

This Monty Python sketch was first broadcast in 1969; the clash between football’s supposedly neanderthal practitioners and its hyper-intellectualised theorists has been current for more than 50 years. Even then there were counter-examples, perhaps most notably Jack Charlton and Danny Blanchflower, but the Buzzard stereotype was widely accepted. The contrast to an interview given this week by the 37-year-old Burnley manager Vincent Kompany, whose team kick off the Premier League today, is striking. It’s not just that Kompany is comfortable in five languages, has an MBA and speaks eloquently and with nuance about race, but that the world he represents is so removed from Buzzard. Today, the footballers have become intellectuals too.

The idea that a player, say, lining up a volley is performing extraordinarily complex calculations at astonishing speed is not new. “I don’t deny the differences in style and substance between athletic and conventional scholarly performance,” the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote in Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville, “but we surely err in regarding sports as a domain of brutish intuition… The greatest athletes cannot succeed by bodily gifts alone.” But what Kompany is talking about is less instinctive. His Burnley players spend an average of an hour a day going through video analysis and working on tactics. “In football,” he said, “we’ve allowed our players to be lazy, in a way. The culture in football was always to just focus on the football and we shouldn’t be too long in the classroom. The culture is changing — you can’t get away with this anymore.”

And you can see this shift every weekend. Almost every top side these days “presses”, a high-risk tactic that looks to recover possession high up the pitch. To work, it has to be performed at great intensity and with precision across the team. If a single player gets the timing or positioning wrong, a huge space can be left in the defensive structure for the opponent to exploit. There is a need for preparation, coordination and concentration, and, given the fluidity of football, the ability to calculate angles and anticipate possibilities almost instantaneously — and that means intelligence.

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Nonetheless, the Monty Python sketch is startlingly prescient. Are footballers’ names really so predictable that it should have been possible to pre-empt the existence of the former Wigan midfield cognoscento Jimmy Bullard? And how did they anticipate the existence of a Stadium of Light in the North-East — albeit six miles from Jarrow in Monkwearmouth, once its sister monastery?

It’s the heart of the joke, though, that stretches beyond unnerving coincidence. Monty Python caught very early the incongruity of an intellectual class seizing upon a game whose culture at the time was resolutely unintellectual. This was broadcast two years after Celtic, with wave after wave of thrusting positivity, had defeated the catenaccio defensive philosophy of Inter in the European Cup final, rendering it obsolescent and paving the way for the coming of the Dutch Total Football. For the first time, certainly within a British context, pundits and columnists began to employ words like “philosophy” to describe a manager’s outlook. That intellectualisation reached off the pitch as well, to the literary celebration of fandom in Fever Pitch but also the examination — at times arguably romanticisation — of the hooligan lifestyle by Bill Buford and Martin Amis.

From the early Sixties it had been apparent that English football was moving into a new age, as managers such as Don Revie at Leeds and Bill Shankly at Liverpool adopted increasingly methodical — and to their critics, boring — approaches to winning football matches. The discussion around football slowly became more sophisticated, prompting a backlash at the 1966 World Cup, largely from non-specialist columnists appalled at the apparently foreign idea that the working-class game might be about more than just running and kicking.

“They talk down to us as if football was a new television panel game which the natives are seeing for the first time,” wrote J.L. Manning in the Mail. “You know the clever-clever fellows I refer to. There are those who say, arrogantly of course, some people thought it was dull, but we in the game were fascinated by the tactics. It’s a great pity football crowds are not better educated. They would enjoy it so much more… Educated? About football? To understand football requires the intellectuality of the gnat… I am willing to bet that a team which plays this rubbish will not survive the quarter-finals.” Alf Ramsey’s side, of course, playing a modern innovative form of football that was almost brutalist in its disdain for frippery, not merely survived the quarter-finals but won a major trophy for the only time in England’s history.

Even at the time, Manning was a self-consciously reactionary figure, and while his successors certainly exist, they tend to be isolated these days. What the fractured media landscape has done is to allow people to discuss football as they want to discuss it, from sweary rants about the biases of referees to intricately detailed tactical analyses and all parts in between, which itself has led to a paradoxical phenomenon.

This is an age in which thinking generally is in retreat. We’ve had quite enough of experts. Tribalism and superficiality reigns supreme and performative anger is celebrated. The BBC, seemingly terrified of being perceived as exclusionary, manages to include almost nobody. See, for example, the recent documentary series Earth, in which Chris Packham wanders around a series of beautiful locations introducing repetitive CGI before, hidden away at the end, the scientists come in with a great slew of ideas and information. Or see Between the Covers, the BBC’s sole books show, so anxious about being condemned as elitist that it seems to spend half its time talking about how difficult reading is.

Football here is the unlikely exception. There’s certainly plenty of partisan nonsense and vacuous pontification about, but it’s not a sphere in which expertise is commonly mocked. Long gone is the chummy golf-club atmosphere that used to pervade studios, reaching its nadir at the 2010 World Cup when pundits admitted to never having watched the sides they were covering and Alan Hansen mocked Lee Dixon as a swot for being able to name Slovakia’s key player, Marek Hamšik.

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In part, this is to do with football’s position as a driver of satellite subscriptions. There was an early recognition by Sky that if viewers were paying significant sums each month to watch football, they were likely to be interested enough by it to want in-depth analysis. What Andy Gray began, Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher have carried on, so that Monday Night Football now offers an unapologetically high-end discussion of the weekend just gone, with argument backed up by video analysis and data. And as Neville, Carragher and their guests often don’t agree, it’s one of the very few spheres of modern British life to feature actual debate, fuelled by evidence.

A little over a decade ago, Match of the Day was defending the banality of its coverage by insisting it had to appeal to the casual Saturday-night viewer as well as the devoted fan, but it has upped its game significantly in response. And it’s not just television: from newspapers to blogs, podcasts to magazines, the best modern football coverage is self-aware, wry, allusive, inventive and founded on an assumed canon of knowledge — the great games, players and managers of the past. Perhaps, as Janan Ganesh has argued, football, seemingly so unimportant, offers a “safe space” in which people can “take their brain for a ramble”. The irony is that, as football increasingly becomes a tool of foreign policy and as its global popularity spreads to levels unprecedented for any cultural mode, it has probably never been a less safe space for aesthetic free-play.

Or perhaps it’s just that when people write about a subject they love for readers who also love it, when culture wars are merely a distant rumble, what results is a discourse that assumes a lot of knowledge and prizes fresh and recondite information. This doesn’t mean that all or even many players are reading feverishly, doing degrees or especially comfortable in front of a camera. But the unintelligent player simply no longer exists at the highest level. And while the pretensions of some football coverage are certainly worth calling out, the Python sketch simply wouldn’t work today — if only because that sort of serious in-depth programming is no longer the preserve of the arts, but of football.

Thus ran the closing paragraph of a letter the Belgian Sinologist Pierre Ryckmans — known under the pen name “Simon Leys” — wrote to his French friend Pierre Boncenne in 2008. As Leys admitted, French interest in the United States had an old lineage. Since the 1770s, thinkers such Alexis de Tocqueville, Joseph de Maistre, and Hector de Crèvecoeur had both been repulsed and attracted by the exploits of the post-revolutionary US. “America is often cited to us,” de Maistre exclaimed in the 1790s, but “I know nothing so provoking as the praise showered on this babe-in-arms. Let it grow”.

De Maistre’s coordinates began to shift towards the close of the 20th century. In the Eighties, French sub-intellectuals such as Bernard-Henri Lévy followed Tocqueville with immemorable memoirs such as American Vertigo. As an anti-Gaullist, Lévy clearly took a much softer stance on American civilisation than many of his countrymen. In the Forties, French novelist George Bernanos still saw the utopia imagined by Americans as “little more than some little Yankee boot-black eating his sugared peanuts — a half-Saxon, half-Jew, rat-faced prairie-dog with who-knows-what negro ancestor at the core of his itching marrow”. The only hero the Americans were capable of producing was the “future king of Steel, Rubber, Oil, the Truster of Trusts, the future master of a standardised planet, that god which the universe is awaiting, the god of the Godless universe”. Here was the American dream — a crazed nightmare from which France should wake up as soon as possible.

Today, this rabid anti-Americanism has given way to a more complex pattern of exchange. On top of its dollar stream and Hollywood movies, the US has been busily exporting its culture wars, from gender to racial justice to abortion debates. As Daniel Zamora has noted, these have redrawn cleavages along the way. The result has been a silent Americanisation on both sides of the political spectrum: Le Pen followers import Republican culture language about the dangers of “wokeness”, while Macron followers take their cues from Clintonism. After the Second World War, European reactionaries such as Bernanos worried that everyone would become American in a “positive” sense. Today, Americanisation continues through anti-Americanism: a “negative Americanisation”, where even the most rabid anti-Americans are as American as can be.

Jean Baudrillard’s America (1986) — a travelogue the philosopher compiled after a series of stays in the country in the late Seventies and early Eighties, spanning the end of the Carter presidency and the start of the Reagan years — does not stray in either direction. Instead of adulation, Baudrillard took a more forensic approach. He wanted to understand the US on its own terms. French resistance to Americanisation was not only futile, in his view, but also actively harmful. It delayed a reckoning with a distant mirror: like Tocqueville, one had to treat America as a sign of things to come, evincing a high tolerance of ambiguity without ever falling into declinism. Rather than allergically rejecting the US, Baudrillard asked: what is America the name of? What made this necessary?

Baudrillard drew on a much older tradition of French moralism with this approach. Since Montaigne, French philosophers have used the New World to relativise the prejudices of their own societies, but also to assert superiority. Patrician to the core, this latter attitude approached the US much like the Comte de Bouffon approached 18th-century America — a continent in which a humid climate induced permanent nervosity, an argument about New World degeneracy which motivated Thomas Jefferson to write his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). France and America might have been twins, but they were not of the same age.

Baudrillard’s background on the Left played its own role in this transmission. His time at Guy Debord’s French Situationist International — the New Left formation which contested both official communism and the state elite in the Sixties — informed his critiques of consumer culture. Debord was no populist: rather than a high tide of worker power, he saw les trente glorieuses as a period of total capitalist triumph, in which commerce had extinguished the Frankish warrior spirit. Baudrillard followed these cues in America. Like Tocqueville and Debord, he came to the US as an aristocrat in a peasants’ clothing, looking both down and up. The chaotic clash between ancien régime and modernity birthed a culture shock; on this tension Baudrillard drew, peering at the new world with a vantage point from within the old.

Baudrillard never became American. He remained an eternal stranger. But this sovereign indifference granted him a distance necessary for social analysis. Add to this a tremendously French sense of style — his diaristic entries are written with a verve and rhythmicity unequalled in contemporary social science — and we are apt to understand the continuing appeal of his works in the 2020s. Purely on form, Baudrillard has held up.

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Baudrillard’s oeuvre is sizeable. The Cool Memories series (1987-2004) remains as timely as ever, and his comments on the Gulf War prefigure today’s discussion on the digital “hyper-real”. The Divine Left (1985) predicted the French Left’s disarray before Hollande. So why read America, particularly in 2022? Why go for a testimony of the age of Reagan in the age of Biden, when the Eighties are confusingly far away? Are we not witnessing an empire in decline, a dying supernova which sends its light across the universe before it implodes? Read in this way, it makes little sense to grant Baudrillard’s America a prime place.

Yet things are not that simple. The Reaganite boom and supply-side economics are no longer with us. The current head of the Federal Reserve is hardly Paul Volcker. The unipolar Nineties which Baudrillard registered are far away. But America is hardly gone. Rather than fade from view, the United States have weathered the new century with a ruthless tenacity and gusto. As Adam Tooze  has argued, the US has clung on to external power while continuing to manage internal decline — a tree growing despite fungi hollowing out its trunk.

Nothing exemplifies this better than the current Russian invasion. The result of Putin’s war has been a full-blown “return of the king”, as Wolfgang Streeck has noted, with European industry and security policy subordinate to American geopolitical imperatives. To some Europeanists, it feels as if the EU is effectively run from Langley, Virginia. Energy costs are destabilising the German export model. Dollar supremacy is stronger than ever. The biggest army in human history is now trying to reshore its industry. Liquid gas supplies find their way to Stuttgart. The result is a dazzling compound: late imperial Rome with a stock exchange and nuclear weapons, and the same spectacle of public acclamations that accompanied the crepuscules of the pagan world.

The result also is a vertiginously unbalanced form of hegemony. In 2016, theorists proclaimed the “end of the American century”. Today, the Trumpite interlude has revealed itself as exactly that — an interlude — and Biden continued to decouple supply chains. Ironically, the anti-Trump has doubled down on Trumpism without Trump. The politics of other developed nations are also Americanising, with Germany now holding regular BLM rallies and trans controversies a recurrent feature of many European public debates. The hollow universality of American culture induces both despair and comfort: in its vulgarity, the greatest promises of capitalism express themselves, from diversity to social mobility, while its sorrows, from extreme poverty to the marketisation of the self, stand out as ominous warnings.

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All this grants Baudrillard’s book a refreshing contemporaneity. From Silicon Valley to evangelicalism to Trump to polyamory to the military-industrial complex: each receives due mention in America, placed in a stream of consciousness that makes up the book’s main body:

“Take this white Christ carrying a heavy cross down Main Street, Venice. It is a very hot day. You want to tell him it has already been done, 2,000 years ago. But he is not trying to do anything new. He is just carrying his cross the same way as other people carry ‘Jesus Saves’ or ‘Know Jesus’ badges on their cars. You could point out that no one — not a single person — is watching, and that he is accorded only indifference and derision as he passes. But he would tell you that was exactly how it was 2,000 years ago.”

Compare these to a description of a flight into Los Angeles, a “luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity, stretching as far as the eye can see, bursting out from the cracks in the clouds. Only Hieronymus Bosch’s hell can match this inferno effect.” “Once you are beyond the mountain”, however,

“a city ten times larger hits you. You will never have encountered anything that stretches as far as this… The irregular, scattered flickering of European cities does not produce the same parallel lines, the same vanishing points, the same aerial perspectives either. They are medieval cities. This one condenses by night the entire future geometry of the networks of human relations, gleaming in their abstraction, luminous in their extension, astral in their reproduction to infinity.”

Such paragraphs are interspersed with a cooler assessment of the United States as the first nation to arrive in post-history. Here is “the post-orgy world”, “the electronic tribalism of Silicon Valley”, with its “reduced pace of work, decentralisation, air-conditioning, soft technologies”. “Culture itself is a desert there,” he notes about California, “and culture has to be a desert so that everything can be equal and shine out in the same supernatural form.” This might be “paradise”, Baudrillard concluded, “but a very slight modification, a change of just a few degrees, would suffice to make it seem like hell”. Do we possess a more vivid depiction of the US in 2022?

Anti-Americanism might be a moral imperative for Europeans. It certainly is satisfying. But a disinterest in the US is hard to justify politically, let alone strategically expedient. As Nick Burns noted in a reflection on America, Baudrillard’s real message is that “we have to perform American experiments on ourselves”. Baudrillard’s book is Democracy in America for the coming century.  For better and for worse, America’s politics are our politics, and the only way out is always through, as Baudrillard already concluded in 1982.

Sounds like bad news, right? Perhaps. But it has always been this way. Historian Arthur Herman’s 1997 book The Idea of Decline in Western History describes declinism from its nineteenth-century origins in concepts of racial and intellectual degeneration to its late twentieth-century manifestations in the eco-pessimism of Al Gore and Ted Kacyznski. Herman’s major point — that theories of decline evolve in a dialectical fashion both with theories of progress and with competing theories of decline — is about as unexciting a perspective as any author can offer, so it should hardly come as a surprise that his work failed to stem the tide of warmed-over apocalyptic literature.

As a historian, I always regard with bemusement the various attempts at laying down universal “laws of history”, much less writing the history of the future. The former, even in the hands of individuals such as Peter Turchin or biophysicist Jared Diamond, seems too close to writing an adversarial legal memorandum: first you state the laws, then you fit the facts, which at any rate are always disputed. The latter is closer to fiction than to history, more interesting for what it tells us about an author than for the validity of its claims.

“The collapse of the world is a young man’s game,” Peter Karsten, my dissertation advisor, used to tell me, citing both the history of English property law — which historians F.W. Maitland and Frederick Pollock framed as a perpetual conflict between parents seeking to protect their estates and children interested in selling them to experience fleeting material pleasures — and his own experience as a young officer on a destroyer during the Cuban missile crisis. His point was: no matter how apocalyptic the times, life goes on, much as it always has, for good and (mostly) for ill.

Scattered along the stages of life’s way are, of course, a handful of catastrophic events, born of weather or war or whatever other time and tide-tossed horrors mankind must face. More common are tiny tragedies such as the closing of a family business, the diminution of a hometown, the untimely death of a breadwinner — all collapses of a sort, setting lives on downward trajectories, and sometimes difficult for even the sharpest minds to distinguish from broader trends that might actually imply planetary extinction or the “passing of a great race”, whatever those concepts would entail.

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The discourse of decline and collapse, then, plays out primarily on this personal level. For example, Peter Turchin first theorised “elite overproduction” as the source of societal collapse in his 2016 book Ages of Discord. But the idea that there were too many would-be elites floating around was at the front of my mind five years earlier, when I was applying for tenure-track history positions. And even after I secured one of these coveted jobs, the effort left me scarred; I came to regard the humanities as a dying field enthralled by mumbo-jumbo, an ember near extinction that served as a microcosm for the world itself.

Beyond the realm of the personal, at the level described by Herman, decline and collapse represent a topic with perennial appeal for public intellectuals and their publishers. Books on the subject are always among the best-selling releases in any given year: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Earth in the Balance, The Twilight of Democracy, The Democracy Trap, Democracy on Trial, Giving Up on Democracy, The Frozen Republic, The Selling of America, The Bankrupting of America, The Endangered American Dream, and Who Will Tell the People all appeared within a ten-year span between 1985 and 1995, during which time the United States continued to hold peaceful federal and state elections while my own household priorities were related to bare-minimum subsistence and survival.

It is simple enough to explain the public’s thirst for this material — personal setbacks of any sort can make a person feel as if the whole world is coming to an end. For public intellectuals, the incentives to produce it are irresistible. Predictions and forecasts are some of the easiest pieces to write, particularly if their reckoning is far enough in the future that their author can change directions if the winds begin to shift. And as Pierre Bourdieu noted in his essay “The Metamorphosis of Tastes”, intellectual work constitutes a field where supply — increased as colleges and universities graduate more would-be public intellectuals — creates its own demand. Elite overproduction of this sort might not serve as a bellwether for social unrest, as Turchin argues, but it represents a useful shortcut when determining how much writing will be published relating to the relationship between social unrest and elite overproduction.

After all, the prophets of decline rely heavily on the work that came before them. One of the most obvious genealogies runs from Friedrich Nietzsche, whose pioneering work in its expurgated, pro-German form prompted Oswald Spengler to write his own historical analysis of concepts like “race”, “blood”, and cultural creation in the West. Spengler in turn inspired Arnold Toynbee to produce an even longer series of works, which borrowed Spengler’s concept but welcomed the West’s gradual decline. All the while, everyone else was reading them in order to respond to their work, with a 1928 Time review of the second volume of Spengler’s The Decline of the West noting that “it was imperative to read Spengler, to sympathise or revolt”.

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When one views declinism at a far remove from its truth or falsity, its professional function becomes apparent: it is a fun and easy thing for intellectuals to argue about. These ideas become mere pieces on a chessboard, with the moves of the authors improved and refined over the course of their careers. This is not necessarily good or bad, but rather the nature of the marketplace of ideas.

However, this work, when consumed carelessly and in bulk, can exact a significant toll on members of an already-atomised society. Even sophisticated readers of decline and collapse literature find themselves reacting to it on the personal level — more personal than ever before in a society of extremely siloed “selves” and “identities” four decades past the “culture of narcissism” examined by Christopher Lasch. In such a world, even people far removed from poverty struggle to imagine their posterity. Millenarian fantasies of death and hellfire sell well when the people building society cease to imagine a future. The idea of the world ending in one’s lifetime certainly offers a romantic prospect for some melancholy souls.

But the world, even the world of recorded history, will likely outlast these naive notions. The Annales School of historical writing’s concept of the “longue durée”, with its emphasis on the impact of slow-changing factors such as geography and climate, offers a mature counterpoint to “histoire événementielle”, the event-driven historical approach that popular historians struggle to avoid, given the ease with which every minor political scandal or protest march can be laden with significance and transformed into a portent of the end times.

My own perspective on the matter aligns most closely with G.K. Chesterton’s, as articulated in his short essay “A Much-Repeated Repetition”. There, Chesterton noted that “although the life of man is a terrible thing at many times and in many places” and “he has much to put up with in any case”, he “has not to put with the horror of history repeating itself”. The future outcome of human history remained a mystery to him, but he was sure that tyrants laid to rest did not rise from the ground again like blades of grass. “In history a thing recurs,” he wrote, “but it never recurs quite exactly.” The story of mankind remained “literally a story: that is, a thing in which one does not know what is to happen next”, and thus a narrative in which one still has an active role to play throughout their lifetime.

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A heavy dose of declinism can ease an anxious mind by providing a compelling justification for passivity and quiescence, but this is also its most invidious side effect. Under its influence, one might sneer at small things you can do right now, focused interventions that can turn the tide of this or that event.

But we are never quite as powerless as we assume. For example, the campaign against critical race theory in education was largely the work of one man, Christopher Rufo. His efforts, love them or hate them, appear to have played a part in the outcomes of several 2021 American elections.

Mind you, victory or defeat in a process as mundane as an off-year election hardly means the end of world. But this, thank heavens, is precisely the point.

He eventually became a YouTube Bruh: that genre of male intellectual celebrity, like Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray, “destroying” idiots in bite-sized video clips. But the appeal of Hitchens, to me at least, wasn’t just polemical; he possessed a suavity that impressed me powerfully. He was just as likely to riff on Anthony Powell’s twelve-novel sequence on twentieth-century British upper-class life as to publicly humiliate a religious crank.

I was 13 when I first discovered him. He had a similar appeal to me as James Bond: the willingness to engage in combat, the charm and sophistication of a worldly bruiser, even the booze. In a 2000 documentary called Hitch Hike, made by Channel 4 and tracking Hitchens’s book tour of his polemic against Bill Clinton, he said, “Jimmy Cameron was the reason I wanted to become a journalist”. He added that Cameron, who was a foreign correspondent, wrote a piece in 1966 outlining all the things he had accomplished as a journalist. Here is Hitchens ventriloquising Cameron: “I’ve sat with Ho Chi Minh, and I was deported from South Africa, and I was there listening to Nehru at midnight when India became a free country. I’ve also swum in all the five oceans and fucked on all five continents”. Hitchens himself made the world of the hack seem glamorous.

Or, perhaps, not the glamour of Bond or a foreign correspondent, but another form: the monied public intellectual. As Ian Parker puts it in his excellent 2006 New Yorker profile of Hitchens: “Hitchens has the life that a spirited thirteen-year-old boy might hope adulthood to be: he wakes up when he likes, works from home, is married to someone who wears leopard-skin high heels, and conducts heady, serious discussions late into the night.”

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On the topic of glamour, there was something also Francophile about him, and not just his fondness for exposing part of his chest in interviews and debates. He was an eighteenth-century style iconoclast, a public school Voltaire, who took down sacred cows: Bill Clinton, Mother Teresa, Princess Diana, and God. This tendency toward confrontation was instilled by his education in Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, the heretics of Communism. One must never stick rigidly to the party line. Individual responsibility and moral conscience were essential.

Nevertheless, there was also a coarseness beneath his oratorical sheen: when he tried, for instance, to divorce the civil rights movement from its religious influence, emphasising the secularism of A. Philip Randolph over the religious fervour of Martin Luther King. This was sophistry. Arguing, as he also did, that religion poisons everything, was intellectually juvenile and inconsistent with his deep appreciation of John Donne.

When he said, moreover, “there is an unusually high and consistent correlation between the stupidity of a given person and that person’s propensity to be impressed by the measurement of IQ”, this was a brilliant epigram. H.L. Mencken would be proud of its rhetorical force, but it’s also nonsense: IQ is one of the most stable findings in psychology and social science.

Related to this coarseness was his deep appreciation for vulgarity and obscenity. Substantial passages of his memoir Hitch-22 are dedicated to explaining the games he used to play with Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Clive James and others: the boomer version of Dr Johnson’s Club. He called the gathering “the Bloomsbury kebab joint”. One of their games consisted of substituting the word “heart” for “dick” in well-known titles, or the word “love” for “fuck”, or “love” for “hysterical sex”. So they got, among many other confected titles, “The Dick of the Matter”, “The Man Who Fucked Women”, and “Hysterical Sex in a Cold Climate”.

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He once said to an audience who were distracted by a heckler, “leave him alone … I wouldn’t piss on him if he was on fire”. On the question of Mother Teresa’s virginity, he wrote: “Who can say what happened with the dashing boulevardiers of Skopje when Agnes Bojaxhiu was but a pouting and trusting lass? (The whole problem with missionaries is that one never quite knows their position.)”.

This bawdiness was at times entertaining and at times embarrassing. But what we value in intellectuals is not often the particular arguments they make but their personality. As Edward Said wrote, in an essay about public intellectuals, “when I read Jean-Paul Sartre or Bertrand Russell it is their specific, individual voice and presence that makes an impression on me over and above their arguments because they are speaking out for their beliefs. They cannot be mistaken for an anonymous functionary or careful bureaucrat”.

The voice of Hitchens worked less well in print. As Martin Amis once wrote of his good friend: “He thinks like a child; he writes like a distinguished author; and he speaks like a genius”. Martin’s father Kingsley was more brutal: he described Hitchens as “the one who can talk but can’t write”. This was in the Seventies, during Hitchens’s New Statesman days, when his prose was more functional and didactic. According to Amis fils, however, Hitchens’s writing improved after 1989. But there were still some odd tics in his style after this, such as his tendency towards using brackets for a needless digression on some point, and puncturing that digression with a showy italicised word or phrase. I can endlessly listen to him speak in interviews and discussion panels; but reading him can be a bumpy experience.

When Amis said Hitchens thought like a child, he was getting at something. Although Hitchens’s moral convictions seemed admirably clear, they also strayed into simple-mindedness: some of his criticism of the “anti-imperialist” Left and religious extremism is still valuable, but his zealous support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan looks even more disastrous now.

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Although Hitchens spent much of his career going after sacred cows, many of his fans now treat him in a hagiographical fashion. After the Spectator journalist Angus Colwell wrote a piece criticising Hitchens’s gung-ho support for the war in Afghanistan in August, many people described Colwell as possessing “sour grapes” and argued that Hitchens was “living rent-free” in his mind. These responses speak to the cultishness that surrounds some of Hitchens’s fan base; it is like someone is attacking their dad.

But if there is one thing worth taking from the writings and life of Christopher Hitchens, it is the importance of thinking critically and independently. Turning a blind eye to his faults out of a sense of sentimental loyalty seems profoundly un-Hitchian. It’s a shame that many of his supporters do this. But then again, as the title to Julien Benda’s book about intellectuals suggests, La Trahison des Clercs, public intellectuals are often like clerics. We should be able to admire Hitchens’s voice without taking it as holy writ.

The Lark Ascending; Romance for Violin and orchestra was a revised version of a composition Vaughan Williams wrote just before World War One for solo violin and piano. Referencing a poem of the same name by George Meredith, the piece lasted around 15 minutes and had little in the way of musical pyrotechnics for Hall to get her teeth into.

Yet today the Lark regularly tops ClassicFM’s annual Hall of Fame — ahead of Beethoven, Mozart and all the rest. Explaining why they love the piece, fans often point to how it evokes the beauty of the English countryside, rather like a Constable painting. As Peter Sallis, assured of his place in English rural folklore from his role in Last of the Summer Wine, put it: “You’ve only got to listen to it, and you’re listening to England.”

The Lark has often assumed a sense of nostalgia, conjuring up images of what has been lost: the unspoilt England or Britain that existed before the arrival of two World Wars and the era of mass road-building, sprawling housing estates and out-of-town shopping centres. It recalls “an Arcadia that perhaps never was,” as one radio presenter recently remarked with a hint of a sneer.

There is certainly something in these descriptions, not least in the orchestral accompaniment with its gentle rise-and-fall which maps on to the undulations of the English countryside — and indeed to English speech. Talking about Vaughan Williams and his fellow English composer Edward Elgar, the late conductor Richard Hickox said: “Our speech has a lot of rise and fall and our countryside [that] they knew so well has lots of rise and fall. I think the landscape of England really did affect them…”

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However, Vaughan Williams’s music and his attempts to create a definably English musical language are routinely dismissed as parochial. Chrissy Kinsella, who runs the London Music Fund, recently wrote that the Lark “is one of the dullest pieces of music known to man, and that is a hill I am prepared to die on” — a sentiment, it seems, that is shared by many.

Now it is certainly true that the Lark can be dull. Vaughan Williams’s champion Adrian Boult once lamented a performance in which “we all agreed that the poor lark never left solid earth”. Overplay has made it over-familiar for many. Sometimes it does not always match our moods. Some of us may never be in the mood.

However, it is uncanny how often these comments appear with a political edge. The Lark’s popularity and its associations with Englishness, nostalgia, the past and the countryside is more than enough to trigger the average progressive. Kinsella, whose charity has London Mayor Sadiq Khan as patron, laughed along at a colleague blaming the Lark’s popularity on the English. The music writer Hugh Morris recently suggested: “the residual spectre of British (read: English) exceptionalism that characterises our politics, governance, and musical life runs strong in Vaughan Williams… It’s no surprise that he now represents a highly middlebrow attitude to music in the UK.”

Again and again in such comments we find the assertion of quite a strong “us” and “them”, gathering Vaughan Williams and his unassuming piece around England and Englishness as unfavoured categories, typified by dullness and backwardness. A certain referendum result never appears to be far away. “Just like Brexit the British are fixated on The Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams,” says one critic.

These recurring associations suggest how the piece serves, at least in part, as a proxy to display distaste for other things and people. Certainly, attacks on the Lark tend to be addressing a wider world around the piece as much as the piece itself.

One of the common accusations made against it is “backwardness”, which implies a ranking schema based on how it relates to history: a work either looks backwards into the tainted past or forwards into an imagined and apparently better future, either sharing the taint or the betterment.

In this way, the theorist takes over the meaning of works of art: measuring and judging. It rather evokes what John Carey wrote about in The Intellectuals and the Masses: of self-styled intellectuals working — and using their work —to distinguish themselves from the inferior plebs.

Certainly for many, disparaging the Lark, its popularity and its English associations appears as a way to demonstrate superiority, to place oneself ahead of others, as more mature in the progressive fashion. This also brings the group together, reproducing solidarity through group superiority, thereby reproducing political power.

In a lecture given at Cornell University in 1954, Vaughan Williams said:

“My old teacher, [the German composer] Max Bruch, used to say to me, ‘You must not write eye music, you must write ear music.’ But many musical writers who ought to know better think that music is not what we hear with our ears but what we see on the printed or written page; and some of them say with pride that they never want to hear music, it is enough for them to see the score.”[1. Ralph Vaughan Williams: The Making of Music (Cornell University Press, 1955). Chapter 3: ‘How do we make music?’]

In privileging what is written over what is heard, the theorist wrests music away from the listening experience towards the measurable and tangible, which are more accessible to judgement. Is it inventive and innovative? Does it represent a “step forward” from the “music of past”? What do people invoke in support of a piece and how does this measure up to our value system?

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However, appealing to the tangible often ends up disregarding and delegitimising meaning. Talking about the Lark on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, Christine McVie of Fleetwood Mac captured how powerful the music can be:

“It hearkens back to my father again. But also, when I first heard this piece of music I collapsed in tears with emotion. I just thought it was probably the most beautiful piece I ever heard. And also, interestingly, Peter Green was very influenced by this piece of music. It hearkens to some elements of what Peter’s playing and his guitar when he plays Albatross and other such pieces  . . .  It’s like a prayer.”

The comment sections of Lark videos tell similar, often moving, stories. One of the most highly rated comments on YouTube reads: “My sister told me about this beautiful work today, as I was feeling pretty suicidal…. Listening to this music lifted my heart above the clouds and I felt the pain subside… I know there is Love because it is written into this music”. Indeed, the Lark seems to contain a special magic for those who are struggling existentially. “This is what finally coming out of a depressive episode feels like,” reads another comment.

In this latter sense we might think of the Lark representing what it is like to be in-flow, in life: not in conflict with the world or withdrawn from it, but aligned to it and living within it.

Vaughan Williams’s widow Ursula wrote:

“He had taken a literary idea on which to build his musical thought in The Lark Ascending and had made the violin become both the bird’s song and its flight, being, rather than illustrating the poem from which the title was taken.”[2. Ursula Vaughan Williams: RVW: A Biography of Ralph Vaughan Williams (Oxford University Press, 1964), p.156]

From this standpoint, the violin part is not so much attempting to translate the words of the Meredith poem into music, as to be that flight and that song. The accompanying orchestral parts, which some players find dull and boring, have a quiet yet powerful role, gently supporting the soloist. They form the environment in which the little bird sings its song and soars to great heights.

Perhaps, in its simplicity and ease — and in its sense of the individual being supported — the Lark shows us what it means to be free. We might think, then, that its sneering detractors, in trying to prevent the Lark from speaking for itself, display a certain contempt for freedom.

There’s no business like intello-business, and for centuries it came from Paris: Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, Zola, Sartre, Camus and de Beauvoir once defined both public engagement and intellectual glamour — the ultimate in intersectional cool.

As far back as the 18th century, Diderot famously boarded with Catherine the Great while Voltaire, a steadfast correspondent of Catherine’s for decades, visited Frederick the Great at his Sanssouci for two years. Victor Hugo, somewhat unfairly, destroyed Napoleon III’s reputation in posterity for good (he dismissed him as “Napoléon le Petit”). Jules Verne predicted the future; Proust and Céline, at opposite ends of the spectrum, illuminated the precipices opened by the Great War.

Marc Bloch opened up historical studies to social sciences and painstaking assessment of primary sources in context, while Fernand Braudel mapped out mentalities and trends over centuries in the Mediterranean. Sartre and de Beauvoir travelled across Russia, China and America, sprinkling intellectual pixie dust at universities from Cornell to Smith and Wellesley ­— or endorsing Communist dictators from Mao Zedong to János Kádár.

When the young André Glucksmann, one of the bright stars of the Nouveaux Philosophes, organised the public reconciliation between Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre in 1979, the encounter took place in the office of President Giscard d’Estaing at the Élysée. Le Président looked on benignly from the sidelines, obviously enjoying a validation that in everyone’s mind bested the popular vote he’d won five years earlier.

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By Anne-Elisabeth Moutet

Glucksmann and Bernard-Henri Lévy, for all their Left Bank rich boys swagger, had rightly called the end of the French intelligentsia’s love affair with the radical Left: no more fellow-travellers, no more Odes to Stalin (from France’s greatest 20th century poet, Paul Éluard, no less); no more apologias for Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Even staged, it was momentous.

But perhaps the more pertinent question is: who would a Nazarbayev, Kim Jong Un or Lukashenko invite today, assuming they even saw the point? Where are the successors to Sartre and Aron? To curry favour with their president, Kazakh oligarchs found more soft power value in buying Prince Andrew’s decaying marital home. Kim Jong Un had to make do with Dennis Rodman. Contracts with Tony Blair’s associates have replaced correspondence with Voltaire.

Camus died in 1960, Merleau-Ponty the following year, while Sartre’s death in 1980 was followed by Aron in 1983, Foucault the year after and de Beauvoir in 1986. Derrida lingered on until 2004, pre-deceased by Bourdieu in 2002; but by that time they had become their own statues, only of use to radicalised Ivies at $60,000 a pop, to spruce up their toxic mix of race/gender/linguistics/post-colonial studies. The only French novelist of true international note is Michel Houellebecq, a misanthrope and a pessimist whose protagonists embody anomic failure.

Compare our four most recent Nobel Prizes for literature — Claude Simon (1985), Gao Xinjian (2000), J.M.G. Le Clézio (2008), Patrick Modiano (2014) — with their predecessors (Romain Rolland, Anatole France, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre) and the problem becomes obvious. Of all the works by current aspirants to the title of Public Intellectual, you can probably take Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century to the barricades, but it’s a dry read at 976 pages. (Piketty’s most publicised political stance was his public support for François Hollande in the 2012 presidential election. It has not aged well.)

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When the talented Le Figaro columnist, Eugénie Bastié, recently asked Éditions Gallimard’s residing sage Pierre Nora, 89, what he thought of the state of intellectual life in France today, Nora couldn’t find enough epithets to characterise his disdain. “Do we have an intellectual life left? It has collapsed. Well,  subsided, really. Shrunk… Ran out of steam… French intellectual life is provincialised.” (And no worse insult is possible from the heart of the Septième Arrondissement.)

Back in 1980, Nora co-founded the influential Le Débat bi-monthly review with the sociologist, historian and philosopher Marcel Gauchet, who to this day — aged 75 — sits in the next-door office at Gallimard. A trio of Paris publishing houses set the Parisian intellectual tone, issue excommunications and sweep up the majority of literary prizes, a situation which has not changed since Balzac’s Lost Illusions. I once witnessed the editor of a lesser intellectual review paying court to Gauchet in hopes that they might publish a joint issue with Le Débat. It was straight out of the Duc de Saint Simon’s Memoirs of the Court of Louis XIV. The joint issue never happened.

Called upon to answer Bastié’s question, Gauchet doubled down, stating that “Intellectual life nowadays is non-existent.” And just to emphasise the point, he and Nora closed down Le Débat last year. Bastié, who’s 29, agrees with this downbeat assessment. “Fifty-thousand people walked behind Sartre’s funeral procession [in 1980],” she writes in the newly-published La Guerre des Idées. “Nowadays it’s Johnny Hallyday’s they follow.”

In many ways, France’s intellectual life suffers from the same conformism as French politics, or French society at large. Just as our vaccine roll-out was plagued from the start by pusillanimity, negativity and the structural incapacity of France’s top-heavy bureaucracy to think imaginatively or admit to mistakes, French universities or Grandes Écoles haven’t produced a critical mass of robust dissidents. Conformism is the key to good grades and social advancement, whether in government, the private sector or in an intellectual community where the gatekeepers have sometimes held the same job for half a century. Outliers — they do exist — take years to receive some sort of acknowledgement; and this is more often conferred by newspapers opinion pages or cable channels talk shows, neither of which make for solidly grounded arguments.

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What we get, in keeping with the rest of the world, are strident debates. Thoughtful thinkers like Alain Finkielkraut, once a promising Gallimard author, now a member of the Académie Française (an honour that usually smothers its holders to complete irrelevance), has become little more than a conservative columnist. Finkielkraut is regularly targeted by the Left: cancelling attempts, as early as 2005, by Le Monde, Libé and L’Obs, lumped him in a group of right-of-centre commenters as a Nouveau Réactionnaire (boo, hiss).

Finkielkraut still publishes books that sell well and has a France Culture (think Radio Three) weekly programme, but his influence in Parisian circles of power is non-existent. Unlike in the United States, non-personhood in France isn’t followed by the actual destruction of your professional life; you just become an intellectual ghost.

As for French intellectual soft power nowadays, it lives more in old symbols than in actual argument. There are no French Jordan Petersons to polarise public opinion and draw crowds of thousands (even if on Zoom these days) to demonise or applaud their latest pronouncements. Foucault and Bourdieu, being safely dead, cannot protest the uses they are put to in American universities: their former students refute most of these, but this isn’t much heard beyond our borders, and not just because the French language is in full retreat.

The language barrier has to some extent protected us — so far — from the excesses of identity politics; but as a cultural rampart, it’s a Maginot Line. It’s a sad retreat from what politicians up to Jacques Chirac used to praise as le rayonnement de la France (“rayonnement” can either refer to the benevolent light of the sun’s rays, or to atomic radiation; in today’s performative anti-colonialism it’s the second meaning that’s more often implied). French intellectuals need to be less retiring and limelight-shy — and there’s a sentence I never, ever expected to write.