Our Age

...Meanwhile, Annan's contemporaries went about changing almost everything...

...What consequences does theorizing entail...

...A skeptic, an admirer of Machiavelli, Hume, Halifax the Trimmer (a seventeenthcentury man who changed his mind about the Stuarts), Noel Annan is suspicious of solutions, saviors, ideologues, and all-ornothing system builders...

...Annan organizes his book around large themes that subsume 22: 17 January 1992 Commonweal his portraits—modernism, pacifism, changes in manners and morals, perceptions of ideologies like Marxism, or of events like the Spanish Civil War...

...Annan favors students who can be found in libraries and labs rather than at demonstrations...

...And with this half-baked idea about personal integrity, related as it is to G.E...

...Honor, country, and even sound credit and private enterprise were most often considered for fuddy-duddys, vulgarians in the market, nannies, and arrogant aristocrats...

...Annan 's third idiosyncratic figure, the philosopher Michael Oakeshott, taught and wrote against the grain, urging intellectuals to question rationalism and to throw away one of their favorite ideas— that the university might become a service station for every social need and a staging area for change...

...The territory that he marks off for study —"our age," the generation that came of age and made its contributions between 1919-1951—is actually only part of his inquiry...

...Like Berlin, he admires tolerance, compromise, and the intellect seasoned by contact with very different books and experiences...

...They hated authority and its neat explanations, turning to their impulses and to novels and poems that were free of the conventions of form and the emphasis on didactic subject matter...

...The latter phrase—lately appropriated from Kant by Isaiah Berlin for his new book—conveys the sense that thinkers' theories and plans can never straighten out human nature, whether the philosopher's own or in the world he contemplates...

...Against loose talk posing as social philosophy, Annan offers a brave defense of pluralism and order...

...He is perhaps the foremost practitioner of a kind of history that characterizes minds, places them in broader contexts, and yet never neglects the ticks, crankiness, and "crooked timber of humanity" in subjects...

...Annan goes hard on Graham Greene for picturing Kim Philby as a valiant freedom fighter, a twentieth-century equivalent of a brave Continental Jesuit infiltrating the tyrannical realm of Elizabeth I. He also comes down on thinkers who give the nod to a younger generation trying to dismantle the universities...

...Why and in what ways did British intellectuals between the wars reject tradition...

...Annan's approach to intellectual controversy is a subtle blend of recollection, biographical sketching, and tracing of background materials in philosophy, political thought, and styles of living...

...The Cambridge spies come across not as people of principle but as scoundrels who have forgotten that one's country is one's friends, is indeed a whole network of civilizing relationships...

...Did these people—Keynes or literary dons or philosophers of law—influence "us" for better or worse...

...Annan is not cynical: he finds that many of his contemporaries—whether they knew it or not, whether they agreed with him or not—embodied such ideals...

...With thinkers like Annan around—and with so many younger people who also sparked his thought—it's hard to worry about Britain's decline...

...The book—filled with the ideas, styles, and decisions of thinkers, artists, and people of action—is a work of civic virtue: Lord Annan is writing with the public purpose of examining and judging just about every political and social scheme, every artistic and literary current, that has made the contemporary world what it is...

...Extending his exploration beyond the concerns of the British, he has taken in the issues of the world community—everything from justice for minorities to poverty in the third world to how people think about history, progress, and rights...

...David Castronovo This magisterial account of British intellectual life in the central part of the twentieth century is a stunning achievement...

...But he also uses certain chapters to focus on outofstep figures...

...Like Matthew Arnold, Lord Annan is scathing about the dark impulse to act violently in defense of a perhaps good cause...

...24: 17 January 1992 Commonweal...

...He moves between personalities and impersonal forces, neither staying with the Great Men interpretation of history nor wholly rejecting it—like many of his contemporaries— for a Germanic or French faith in class struggles, forces, and material circumstances as determinants of events...

...Among his subjects are Oxbridge historians and philosophers, wits and essayists, policymakers, and creative artists...

...another deviant, F.R...

...Too analytic and forceful to descend to mere anecdotes about thinkers, he nevertheless brings their memorable phrases and quirks into a torrential story of war, social change, and disaster...

...Annan gives pride of place among intellectuals of his generation ation to Berlin, a historian who believes that good ends sometimes conflict, that truth is not unitary, and that aggressive claims for liberty and freedom can lead crooked-timbered human beings down the road to serfdom...

...While going abstract in the arts, they scorned the unexamined life of our forebears...

...Forster mused...

...Each group is measured against its avowed principles, but also against Annan's own criteria...

...While the conventional iconoclasm stood for an austere and rebellious modernist style in literature, a stripping away of conventions in politics, a championing of intimacy and sexual liberation, a "deviant" like Evelyn Waugh believed in strange things like sin, hierarchical society, and the cruel paradoxes of living...

...What ideas should be taken into the street and acted upon...

...Better to betray your country than your friends, E.M...

...As a historian of ideas and a sociologist of intellectuals, he goes back to the Edwardians and Victorians and comes forward to the era of student radicals, hardnosed Thatcherites, and postmodernists of every stamp...

...Is a thinker honest and honorable as well as interesting in the history of ideas...

...Although he is also witty and mocking about the repressions and priggishness of the public schools and the life of his father's generation, he is essentially in cool pursuit of those who find that "moral indignation is the supreme joy in life...

...A gift for mockery—learned from Bloomsbury— was only part of the dismissive attitude toward received ideas...

...Annan's search for principles of order in the thought of his generation leads him to Bernard Williams, a philosopher who embraces Aristotle's Ethics, and a magnanimous man with a fixed character based on honesty and fear of debasing himself out of self-interest...

...Several extended passages in the book are gracefully ironic about "enlightened" intolerance, imbalance, and the desire to reform the world...

...What are the complex effects that flow from the minds of men and women who mocked the idea of the gentleman, the public schools, the ideal of duty, the conventional precepts and pieties of a thousand-year-old civilization...

...Leav is, sat in "our" midst at Cambridge and preached against aestheticism, self-indulgence, and idle wit...

...And yet his intellectual gallantry makes him admire genuine Commonweal 17 January 1992: 23 chance-takers and martyrs, for example the noble John Cornford, a poet and radical activist at Trinity, who died in his early twenties in the Spanish Civil War...

...Moore's notion that only artistic sensations and pleasurable friendships are important, Annan takes hold of his major theme in the book: the morality of abstract thinking, the responsibility of the intellectually gifted who, often to their embarrassment, enjoy the privileges of the haute bourgeoisie...

...Williams speaks of "thick concepts" like mercy and scrupulousness, the mainstays of civic virtue...

...Annan's most admirable characteristic is his ability to derive sustenance from those with whom he can't quite agree...