Cabbage-heads and Kings
Bernard Henri-Levi says something interesting in an interview with Johann Hari, about the lack of public intellectuals in Britain: “Perhaps it is because you did not have a revolution. Intellectuals have never rebuilt your country. They have always been incidental.�
It’s interesting, of course, because it isn’t really true. In the middle of the 17th century something not unlike a revolution did happen in England, and it was as much a revolution of ideas as of material forces. It’s always struck me as a great shame that, unlike the French, the English are unaware, ambivalent or even hostile to our revolutionary past. Of course there are difficulties (particularly Ireland, where the ‘heroes’ of the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution were definitely villains); but still, we got rid of our King over 350 years ago, and we can do it again, as 1688 proved. More importantly, perhaps, we argued about it passionately every step of the way. That’s something to be proud of surely?
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