The Errant Intellectuals

The poets, essayists and novelists of London's usually imperturbable P.E.N. Club listened in horror. Famed Oxford Historian (The Churchills) Alfred Leslie Rowse was saying: Some British intellectuals "very much to the'fore" are "highly unrepresentative" of British intellectualism and "create a pretty general disrespect for the rest of us." His No. 1 target: Philosopher Bertrand Russell.

A peppery independent, Rowse said he enjoyed Lord Russell's "naughtiness, but for his judgment of political matters, I have no regard." Now the advocate of British disarmament at any price, Russell not long ago was arguing learnedly for a preventive war against Russia. Years before, he was fiercely opposed to Britain's defending itself against the Kaiser's Germany. Groused Rowse: "You need to be very clever to be so silly as that."

Then he took off after another oracle, the late Socialist Harold Laski, who for years taught political science at the University of London. Laski, he charged, had no knowledge of how things operate in human affairs. "Laski, who could not ride a bicycle, said pretentiously and characteristically that if he only had the theory of bicycle riding explained to him, he would be able to ride it. The truth is quite simple, and has nothing to do with theory.

He just hadn't the feel of the thing, the sense of balance, the common sense that millions have of how it works. My opinion is what it always was, that the immense mass of his published work is practically valueless."

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