The Intellectuals and The Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880 - 1939

by John Carey

In this landmark study, John Carey analyzes the elitest views of some of the most highly respected literary icons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This book, as defined in his preface, "is about the response of the English literary intelligentsia to the new phenomenon of mass culture." Readers may be shocked to learn that H.G. Wells liked to think that this newly emerged "mass" would be eliminated by plague and atomic bombs; that Yeats wished them to perish in an apocalyptic war against the educated classes and that D.H. Lawrence visualized a huge lethal chamber in which they could be exterminated.

John Carey's devastating attack on the intellectuals exposes the loathing which the mass of humanity ignited in many of the virtual founders of modern culture: G.B. Shaw, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot and others. Professor Carey compares their detestation of common humanity to Nietzsche, whose philosophy helped create the atmosphere leading to the rise of Adolph Hitler. Any student of modern literature and history will find John Carey's incisive book both enlightening and disturbing, an essential read for a full understanding of where we are today.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Literature

246 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1992

Reviews

[Karen· · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a brisk, no-nonsense fashion John Carey marches us through the dark muddy morass of early Twentieth Century intelligentsia's aversion to 'the masses', especially the female kind. None of these writers come out smelling sweet. We know who the usual suspects are. Also sprach Zarathustra contains the infamous advice "Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip." D.H. Lawrence would 'build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace' and then bring in the sick, the lame, the maimed; W.B. Yeats joined the Eugenics Education Society, T.S. Eliot maintained that the spread of education would lead to barbarism. Yes. Somewhat paradoxical, that one, I'd have thought, but here the man is:

There is no doubt that in our headlong rush to educate everybody, we are lowering our standards...destroying our ancient edifices to make ready the ground upon which the barbarian nomads of the future will encamp in their mechanized caravans.

Even those who do not openly express such extreme views still betray their inbred sense of superiority, their conviction that attempts by the uneducated to acquire culture can never be entirely successful, apparently because of a certain lack of 'breeding' or 'good blood'. In Howards End poor Leonard Bast's bid to educate himself by reading the classics and going to concerts is not only unsuccessful, but ill-advised. He has 'a cramped little mind' and we can be assured that 'He was not as courteous as the average rich man, nor as intelligent, nor as healthy, nor as lovable.' Virginia Woolf is given short shrift: her initial reaction to Ulysses, we're told, is that it is an 'illiterate, underbred book', the product of a 'self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating...' Her upper-class prejudices overcome her feminism too. Miss Kilman in Mrs. Dalloway is precisely the sort of woman a feminist should support: independent, with a degree in history, employed by the wealthy Dalloways to tutor their daughter Elizabeth, she is portrayed nevertheless as a plain, middle-aged bitter woman in a cheap green mackintosh. She perspires. She plays the violin, but the sound is excruciating. She has no ear.

Surprisingly, not even George Orwell escapes John Carey's condemnation. You'd think that he, at least, would come out as a Good Bloke, but nay, even he, even he. Apparently he was brainwashed as a child to think of the lower orders as the great unwashed. According to Carey, Orwell was aware of this as a planted idea, and yet unable to escape from the physical revulsion he felt, which led to ambivalent feelings and muddied thinking. Dirt as something redeeming for him, Orwell; if he can get down low enough it might redeem him for his past career as an imperialist oppressor.

It's a convincing case that John Carey makes, undeniably. There was legitimate concern about the rapid growth of population, less legitimate was the perception that all these horrid people were crowding into and taking possession of the places that were created for the exclusive use of the privileged. Those who considered themselves superior were forced to defend the castle: out of those crowds they conjured 'the masses', defining and re-writing them in order to segregate themselves. The 'masses' were, thus, mentally inferior, suggestible, inconstant, capable of thinking only in images - in short just like women. The modern era has been taken over by the voice of the masses, civilization as we know it, created by a small intellectual aristocracy, will be swept away by the barbarians. The optimistic liberal idea that the masses can be educated is erroneous. The crowd is depicted as subhuman, or, in a concomitant movement, a cosmetic mythology of the peasant masses is created - for which writers mostly had to turn abroad, since the Industrial Revolution had eliminated the peasant class in England. A further response to this revolution, the rise of mass culture, was to generate the idea of a natural aristocracy, consisting of intellectuals.

On the question of precisely what makes natural aristocrats aristocratic, there was some disagreement. One suggestion was that there was, or ought to be, a secret kind of knowledge which only intellectuals could possess - a 'body of esoteric doctrine, defended from the herd', as D.H. Lawrence put it.

John Carey's controversial thesis is that it was this desire to create a badge of belonging, a craving for distinction and power that fuelled the project known as 'modernism'. Intellectuals, or those who aspired to that status, turned away from the pleasures that they considered were the mark of the masses, such as human interest, emotions, and other such 'sentimental irrelevancy'. Their project was to mark themselves out as intellectual by producing work that was complex, obscure, esoteric, or, in other words, just plain difficult. Only to be appreciated by those with a higher aesthetic sensibility.

There's something troubling about this theory. The intelligentsia, he claims, turned away from those elements of art and artistic production that they thought would appeal to the masses: thus realism, logical coherence were abandoned and replaced by irrationality and obscurity. But, rather disarmingly, Carey admits that judging how deliberate the intent to alienate the masses was is problematic. When T.S. Eliot says 'Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult', is that an exhortation, a decree, a recommendation: or is it a perceptive piece of logic, saying that given the confusion of life and the speed of change and the novelty of ideas, that any poetry that reflects all that life offers must, of necessity, be difficult?

Ulysses is given not a few pages: Carey is appreciative of Joyce raising a representative of 'mass man' to the status of epic hero, showing us, in all its intricacy and complexity, the inner life of a man of the people, and thus endowing him with humanity. But this is not entirely redemptive, in Carey's view, because, he claims, "it is also true that Bloom himself would never and could never have read Ulysses or a book like Ulysses. The complexity of the novel, its avant-garde technique, its obscurity, rigorously exclude people like Bloom from its readership." That may be true, who am I to say? But it doesn't prove that it was Joyce's intent and purpose to exclude people like Bloom from his readership. Life's trials and tribulations, petty quarrels, odd coincidences, riddles, rhymes, fragments of songs floating in our heads, defecation, fornication, joys, pleasures, drinking, singing, missed opportunities, small satisfactions, bizarre associations, fantasies, dreams, allusions, word-play: all human life inside a novel. The opposite of exclusive, you'd think. An aesthetic choice rather than a political one.

The first part of The Intellectuals and The Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 is entitled 'Themes' and is a humdinger: the second part consists of case studies where Carey tests out his theory on a number of writers who are no longer terribly popular or well known outside of an English Literary History course, such as George Gissing for example. I have to admit that I skipped large chunks of part two. Within part one he does a reading of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock which is, well, let's say idiosyncratic. His theories are thought-provoking, but they don't always stand up to rigorous application.

[Sunny · Rating 5 out of 5]

6 stars. How I haven’t come across this writer before I have no clue. I’ve already ordered a handful of some of the other books John Carey has written. This is a dangerous book in many ways. A testament to its danger is the fact that I am now reading Mein Kampf as a result of some of the insights I gleaned from this book. The intellectual and the masses is about what it says on the tin – intellectual elitists and the sheepish masses. John paints a hugely lugubrious picture of what would today be the iPhone addicted, Instagram pouting, snapchat chatting, brain dead, culture starved junglist masses. He gives examples from a whole host of writers that I have been lucky enough to read already. His writing style is ridiculously readable and at the same time the level of abstraction and intellect he stretches his points with was very very impressive. It's the cerebral equivalent of boxing against Naseem Ahmed: you're hit from angles and power shots you never expected. He talks about authors such as Nietzsche, HG Wells, DH Lawrence, EM Forster, and Bernard Shaw inter alia. He says that at the time of the turning of the last century before the world wars began, the anti-massive views that some of these authors shared were not as inflammatory as it comes across today. Nietzsche was quoted and probed more than any other author in this exquisite morsel of a book. Some of the best bits in the book were:
• Orwell: “my poems are dead because I’m dead. You’re dead, we're all dead. Dead people in a dead world, life under a decaying capitalism is deathly and meaningless … look at all these bloody houses and the meaningless people inside them.”
• “The intellectuals could not actually prevent the masses from attaining literacy. But they could prevent them reading literature by making it too difficult for them to understand." - Ju get me bruv?
• "The Frankfurt theorists shared the view that mass culture and mass media as developed under capitalism had degraded civilisation in the 20th century. They blamed radio, cinema, newspapers and cheap books for the disappearance of the inner life.”
• “What care I that some millions of wretched Israelites died under the Pharoes lash or Egypt’s? It was well that they died that i might have the pyramids to look on. Is there one amongst us who would exchange them for the lives of the ignominious slaves that died?
• "What Is life but heroic pretence? Our houses are jerry built, our clothes shoddy, our food adulterated, ourselves not what we are."
• “Peasants were also favoured because they seemed pre-commercial. Their bond with the soil went deeper than mere economics. Commerce lay at the heart of Gissing’s discontent with the modern”
• “The submerged population talk in a crude dialect and listen to babble machines which broadcast crude false news items and shout slogans to attract attention. Even in the upper city levels Graham finds there are no books any more, only videos or porn videos labelled in simple phonetic English. “
• “Thousands of people who know nothing of literature go around under the delusion that they are alive but without literature you can’t see, hear or feel in any full sense.”
• “But he feels even sorrier he declares for true born Englishmen who find themselves in competition with Jews. He presents it as a scandal that a man of the same blood as Chaucer and Shakespeare should because his parents have not had the low cunning to accumulate money be obliged to abase himself before some offspring of an Asiatic bazaar tout” - my personal "theory" on the Jewish link to their apparent fascination is this. To some degree I believe it to be true. The majority of Jewish people I have personally met first and foremost I should have had more dimensions than that part which is associated with money. However I do believe that link is a valid one; a subtle and at times a more prominent focus on the monetary value on any item or service that they buy can be seen marginally more on the whole than in the gentile community. Why? My reasoning is a simple one: as a historically nomadic group of people, their peripatetic movements would have put them in different towns and villages and countries. One thing above all else that could have supported their safety was money. The other: knowledge.
• “The press the cinemas and advertisements must have the stains of pollution removed and be placed in the service of a cultural idea. (This reminded me of Robert musil's the man without qualities). There must also be compulsory physical education at school with plenty of boxing and gymnastics and a corresponding let up on purely mental education, so as to stem the weakness and degeneracy of the urban population who are at present unfit for life’s struggle.”
• Intellectuals have opposed the spread of television just as vociferously as they condemned newspapers in the early part of the century. I don’t see how any civilised person can watch TV far less own a set pronounced WH Auden in 1972” – totally agree with that. We don’t have a TV in our house either :)

[Liam Guilar · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this because it's quoted in Rose's book on the intellectual life of the British working classes. It's the point where what I think is an otherwise excellent book stumbles. So I read this to see why Rose had quoted from it so approvingly.

In the Preface Carey begins:

"This book is about the response of the English literary intelligentsia to the new Phenomena of mass culture. It argues that Modernist literature and art can be seen as a hostile reaction to the unprecedentedly large reading public created by late nineteenth-century educational reforms. The purpose of Modernist writing, it suggests, was to exclude these newly educated (or ‘semi-educated’) readers, and so to preserve the intellectual’s seclusion from the ‘mass’."

The argument stands or falls on Carey's ability to prove that claim "The purpose of Modernist writing"....

So there are two things which most people wouldn't have trouble with.

1) During the period in question, British society was riven by class prejudice and writers, mostly from the middle and upper classes, exhibited this in a variety of unpleasant ways. They made statements about the masses and 'the common man/woman' which are often staggeringly vile. Carey quotes them.

2) 'Modernist writers' produced a literature which was not as easy to read as the novels of Marie Corelli or the poetry of Henry Newbolt.

In the preface Carey states that the second is causally related to the first. Unless i've missed something, he doesn't attempt to prove this at any stage in his book.

The basic flaw in the argument can be seen in that preface where he defines "Mass" but at no stage does he define "intellectual" or the "Intelligensia" which allows him to quote anyone who can be conscripted to proving number one above no matter how dim they sound or how minor they were in the scheme of things.

The book is mostly dedicated to providing a great deal of evidence for the first point. Which seems like over stating the obvious. There's plenty of evidence for snobbery and lack of knowledge and understanding: a staggeringly ugly quote from George Moore, some ugly examples from a variety of fictional source, a lot of D.H Lawrence (who might have objected to being called an intellectual), but some of it is baffling (there's a reading of 'Prufrock' which is hard to credit to a professor of literature at Oxford) and some of it seems very selective, and some like its own form of snobbery. Sometimes it seems like he's wilfully misreading, his dismissal of Mass Observation is strange, and his treatment of Ulysses, after allowing you can't accuse Joyce of contempt for the "common man", is just wrong.

However, there's no attempt to prove the conspiracy theory. I think there's something unintentionally funny about the idea that Pound and Eliot and Joyce were writing the way they did as a deliberate conspiracy to exclude the "masses" from reading their work. The fact that Pound, who indeed was an intellectual snob, was deriding popular poetry in his criticism, not because it was popular but because he thought it was bad, escapes Carey. The idea that Joyce or Eliot wrote the way they did because they were looking for ways of writing that suited their artistic purpose and interests never gets considered. (The idea that a writer who doesn't rely on his or her writing for income might not care about what the majority of people think of his writing, only about the peers he or she respects, isn't considered either.)

If you didn't know about class snobbery at the turn of the century, or how vile some of its statements can be, the book might be a revelation, but as a literary historical argument it fails.

[Richard Epstein · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is difficult to overstate the loathsomeness of many of the great modernists. My current favorite among Carey's many, many examples:

T.S. Eliot, attacking community singing [!] in the Criterion for June 1927, fears that if it is permitted to spread it will transform the English individualist into 'the microscopic cheese-mite of the great cheese of the future'.

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read this many times, but have a hankering to re-read it, as I'm becoming more interested in Modernist writers such as Jean Rhys. I'm surprised Rhys only credits a cursory mention in this book, as her depiction of English people as insects is very pertinent to Carey's argument that Modernist writers saw the masses as less than human.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book argues that early 20th century intellectuals, particularly literary modernists like Woolf, Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence, were not just appallingly elitist, but elitist in a way that was new to their time. That is, intellectuals juxtaposed themselves as a class or caste with an imagined "mass" humanity: weak, idiotic, cringing, stinking, violent, impulsive, and above all, hopelessly inferior to intellectuals in matters of literary taste.

This new imagination of "the masses" was developed in response to concerns about population growth and the potentially destabilizing effects of the spread of education. Thomas Malthus, who died in 1834, was widely read in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as a prophet of the famine, war, and civilizational collapse that was sure to come from a cowardly liberal refusal to check out-of-control "breeding," especially of the inferior races and nationalities. In England, the educational reforms of 1870 led to a dramatic and speedy increase in literacy. Populations which were formerly illiterate and lived (to the intellectuals' eye) an appropriately animalistic sort of life - a practical life, of the present and the senses - were now getting it into their heads to buy trashy newspapers and novelettes, or worse yet, serious literature.

The former case, i.e. the spread of popular culture, was debasing and frivolous, and made the life of the mind less financially feasible for the intellectuals, because publishers and printers no longer had time for work that would fail to turn a profit. The latter case - i.e. the rise in adult humanities education for the working poor, Great Books-type reading groups, popular lectures, and so on as documented in Jonathan Rose's book The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes - was worse, actually, because the masses could only ever bastardize and bowdlerize great art in their feeble attempts to understand it. Such people were only "semi-educable," and mediocre, bourgeois half-education was much more dangerous than no education at all, which was considered the appropriate amount for most people.

You'll notice I've made ample use of the generalizing category "the intellectuals", which, unlike its partner category "the masses," is not an imaginary category and therefore can and should be specified. Which intellectuals? When? Where?

Well, the people Carey mentions the most are Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot (all aforementioned), George Gissing, H.G. Wells, W.B. Yeats, Wyndham Lewis, and G.K. Chesterton. The primary philosophical force Carey identifies is Nietzsche. You will note that I said the book focuses on literary modernism, but Gissing, Wells, and Chesterton are not self-evidently modernist in their aesthetics or aims, and Chesterton in particular strikes me as anti-modernist. (I don't know why his low opinion of impressionism, of its interest in dissolution and subjectivity, would not also apply to Eliot and Woolf, respectively.)

Conversely, there are prominent modernists who Carey concedes do not fit into his box. Faulkner is barely mentioned here because the focus is on Europe, but his work is very radically anti-elitist and pro-human. The aesthetic challenge of As I Lay Dying is a byproduct of Faulkner's belief that poor, illiterate tenant farmers share a common humanity with everyone else, and that the subjective experience of their humanity is just as rich, intricate, and tragic as that of the wealthy and highly educated. I could buy an argument that Quentin Compson's experience at Harvard in The Sound and the Fury implicitly endorses the elitist view that education of the fundamentally ineducable is damaging to themselves as much as to society (as Quentin's breakdown and fate could be read to attest). But such an argument would have to contend with the fact that the Compsons are not white trash but members of a decaying aristocracy - hardly obvious members of "the masses."

The other major modernist exception is Joyce, who Carey does discuss, though to my mind unconvincingly. Ulysses is a sympathetic, empathetic depiction of an extremely ordinary man, right down to his also ordinary bodily functions. Molly Bloom's exultant, triumphant, life-affirming Yes embraces sweaty, impulsive humanity with the same fervor that the quotations martialled by this book reject it. (In letters and diary entries Woolf repeatedly refers to her social inferiors as being secretly made of a sort of pulsating, sub-human ectoplasm; given this revulsion for bodies it's hardly surprising she found Joyce vulgar.) Nonetheless, Carey argues, the aesthetics of Ulysses place it in an ambiguous position. By making the book far too difficult for most people to enjoyably read, Joyce allows his readers to sympathize with, even champion the common man, while nonetheless always being reminded by the book's allusive difficulty of the intellectual gulf which separates the reader from someone like Leopold Bloom. The book's form distances the reader from Bloom even as its content draws him closer.

Again, I find this unconvincing. First, it isn't obvious to me that Ulysses is unenjoyable by most people. It isn't necessary to grasp every classical allusion to appreciate the book's poetry, its boldness of style, and its unafraid earthiness. I also understand that Joyce gave his first gift copy of the book to his favorite Parisian waiter (this might be anecdotal but I like it). Second, the book's formal difficulty is necessary to achieve its artistic goals. It is an attempt to psychologize from the inside out, and Joyce's looping and fragmentation reflect this. The idea that its difficulty serves as a distancing mechanism to keep elite readers from feeling squeamish is therefore completely superfluous. It has no explanatory power of its own. The thing it is meant to explain is already better explained in artistic rather than social terms.

That's my big problem with this book. It doesn't just argue that early 20th century intellectuals often had grotesque views about class, race, the advisability of eugenics and the waiving of consent. If that is all that it argued, then it would just be stating the obvious, or what should be obvious. It also claims - and I do think it's just a claim, not an argument - that modernism was an attempt by the intellectual elite to preserve their own status by excluding the majority from comprehension of the art that they created and deemed valuable. In order for this claim to hold in general, it would need to hold in a number of specific cases. And in order for it to hold in a specific case, you would have to demonstrate that the difficulty and formal idiosyncrasy of a given work is not needed for the work's coherence or depth of achievement. I am certain that you can find some examples of this (Gertrude Stein, maybe?). But to tar the whole movement with that brush seems too simplistic.

The book is split into two halves. The first half is a series of four general lectures that intelligently and often wittily compile and comment on quotations from the writers listed above, which document and elaborate intellectual animus toward the mass. The second half is a series of case studies on specific writers; among others, two chapters are given to H.G. Wells and a long concluding chapter to Wyndham Lewis, whose "intellectual program" is compared with that of Hitler, the leader Lewis supported right to the very end. In both halves, the sheer contempt and revulsion for common humanity which was in the intellectual air of the period is, as I have said, not surprising, but nonetheless shocking to read. The book is worth reading as a reminder of that, and for Carey's flowing prose. Just don't expect a systematic argument.

[Melody Schwarting · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thoroughly engaging and well-argued piece on modernist literature. Carey's thesis is roughly that the self-proclaimed intelligentsia of 1880-1939 isolated themselves from "the masses," revolted against mass culture (newspapers, advertising, and canned food rankled), and developed a self-protective, pro-aristocratic body of literature. The "mass" is understood as people without the blessing of aristocratic birth.

"The intellectuals could not, of course, actually prevent the masses from attaining literacy. But they could prevent them reading literature by making it too difficult for them to understand--and this is what they did. The early twentieth century saw a determined effort, on the part of the European intelligentsia, to exclude the masses from culture. In England this movement has become known as modernism." (16-17)

"Realism of the sort that it was assumed the masses appreciated was abandoned. So was logical coherence. Irrationality and obscurity were cultivated. 'Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult,' decreed T. S. Eliot." (17)

I was particularly enlightened by Carey's examinations of Friedrich Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence. I've never read Lawrence and have always had a sneaking suspicion that Nietzsche was less than helpful. Carey reveals Lawrence's desire to "dispose of society's outcasts" (Carey's words, 12), and Lawrence has a detailed imagining of how it would take place (a movie and poison gas, quite avant-garde in 1908). Nietzsche, on the other hand, is not quite so imaginative, but more forthright in his disdain for the unwashed hordes of people without the luck to be born aristocrats. Carey quotes him: "Nietzsche affirms that 'the great majority of men have no right to existence, but are a misfortune to higher men.'" (12) Nietzsche's elitism comes across in statements like "religion is the opiate of the masses (volkes)." Sometimes, volkes is palliatively translated as "people," but the arrogance of the statement hints that Nietzsche indeed refers to the dreaded "masses."

Being American, I took a concupiscent delight in watching Carey (a non-aristocrat himself) skewer modernist writers. He covered no American authors besides Eliot, who rejected his American heritage, and fit so neatly into Carey's paradigm with his 800-subscriber Criterion. I'd be interested to read American authors of the same period, particularly the expats, with Carey's work in mind. Does a democratic nation, without scraps of feudal culture hanging about, really yield such a different literary culture?

Carey draws the line at 1939. He concludes with a chilling chapter on Wyndham Lewis and Hitler, saying, "The tragedy of Mein Kampf is that it was not, in many respects, a deviant work but one firmly rooted in European intellectual orthodoxy." (208) As a historian, I find one of the most chilling responses to Nazism to be the ignorance of Hitler's cultural program. Hitler and the Nazis he led are often depicted as soulless pigs. Carey's work nearly becomes cultural history in parts, particularly with statements like: "Hitler also believed just as firmly as, say, T. S. Eliot or Wyndham Lewis in the permanence of aesthetic values. In Mein Kampf he contrasts the all-time greats, such as Shakespeare, Schiller and Goethe, with the degeneracy of modern culture." (199) Quoting Hitler: "'Wars pass by. The only things that exist are the works of human genius. This is the explanation of my love of art.'" (199) Hitler rabidly guarded the gates of genius.

"It is true that Hitler goes on to suggest that the feat of producing the great achievements of Western art effectively establishes the supremacy of the Aryan race: 'It is evident that a people which is endowed with high creative powers in the cultural sphere is of more worth than a tribe of negroes.' However, even this would meet with no demur from twentieth-century intellectuals such as H. G. Wells and Wyndham Lewis." (199)

tl;dr Carey presents an important lens for reading literature published between 1880-1939. If you've ever been made uncomfortable by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, H. G. Wells, D. H. Lawrence, and the rest of the modernist alphabet soup, I'd recommend The Intellectuals and the Masses to help you understand their oeuvre.

[noblethumos · Rating 5 out of 5]

John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses is a provocative and polemical intervention in the intellectual history of modernism and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European culture. First published in 1992, the book challenges the conventional assumption that literary modernism and its associated intellectual movements were inherently progressive or emancipatory. Instead, Carey advances the controversial thesis that many leading intellectuals of the period were animated by a deep-seated hostility toward democracy, mass literacy, and the cultural empowerment of ordinary people. By foregrounding this antagonism, Carey reorients debates about the moral and political character of modernist thought.


The central argument of the book is that the expansion of mass education, the rise of popular journalism, and the growth of democratic politics generated profound anxiety among cultural elites between roughly 1880 and 1939. Carey contends that this anxiety manifested itself in a rhetoric of contempt for “the masses,” often couched in biological, aesthetic, or quasi-scientific terms. Drawing on an eclectic range of figures—including H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Friedrich Nietzsche, and José Ortega y Gasset—Carey argues that many intellectuals sought to reassert their authority by redefining culture as something necessarily inaccessible, difficult, and exclusive. Modernism’s celebrated formal complexity thus appears, in Carey’s account, not merely as an aesthetic innovation but as a defensive strategy against cultural democratization.


One of the book’s strengths lies in its wide-ranging and often incisive close readings of primary texts. Carey is particularly effective in exposing the anti-democratic implications of seemingly abstract aesthetic doctrines. For example, he links modernist hostility to realism and popular narrative forms to a broader rejection of mass readerships, while also tracing the convergence of literary elitism with contemporaneous discourses of eugenics, degeneration, and crowd psychology. These connections lend the book considerable critical force, revealing uncomfortable affinities between canonical writers and authoritarian or exclusionary modes of thought.


At the same time, Carey’s method is deliberately adversarial. He resists contextual or charitable interpretations that might mitigate the political implications of his subjects’ views, preferring instead to emphasize continuity between aesthetic elitism and social prejudice. This approach gives the book its rhetorical clarity and accessibility, but it also invites criticism. Some scholars have argued that Carey homogenizes a diverse set of writers and intellectual traditions, flattening important differences in political commitment, irony, and historical circumstance. The category of “the masses” itself, as used by Carey, sometimes risks becoming as monolithic as the caricatures he critiques.


Moreover, Carey’s skepticism toward intellectual authority occasionally shades into an anti-intellectualism of its own. By framing the conflict largely as one between arrogant elites and an implicitly virtuous public, the book leaves relatively little room for examining the genuine philosophical and aesthetic problems posed by mass culture, commodification, and technological change. As a result, Carey’s moral clarity can come at the expense of analytical nuance.


Despite these limitations, The Intellectuals and the Masses remains an influential and unsettling work. Its enduring value lies less in the conclusiveness of its historical judgments than in its capacity to disrupt complacent narratives about modernism and cultural progress. Carey forces readers to confront the possibility that some of the most revered figures of modern literature were deeply ambivalent—if not openly hostile—toward the democratic transformations of their age. For students and scholars of modern intellectual history, literary studies, and cultural criticism, the book offers a bracing reminder that aesthetic innovation and political virtue are not necessarily aligned.

GPT

[Barbara Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I probably can't give this book an unbiased review, because I agree so strongly with its position that I kept muttering 'yes! yes!' to myself while reading. If it hadn't been a borrowed copy I would probably have been marking the margins with exclamation points and 'how true!'s.
Carey offers some great insights into how the English middle class of the 1800s re-formed itself into a self-acclaimed upper class, the 'Breed' who were of the 'Blood', and how they did that by pushing down the working class (from which most of them had recently emerged) and increasing the division between classes - in the kindest and most condescending way, of course.
Of particular interest to me was how a generation that had only just achieved the status of a 'place in the country' (Kipling, Tolkien) hastened to celebrate their deep roots in the soil (without actually getting their hands dirty with it) and to deplore the lower-class 'trippers' who because of bicycles and trains were able to get out of the cities and factories for a day and enjoy themselves. Any number of parallels to be found with people nowadays who buy unspoiled property on the BC coast or islands and then complain about the next wave of settlers.

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important book about one particularly reprehensible strain of literary and cultural modernism. Great stuff.

[Joseph Leake]

Would benefit in places from more nuancing and greater historical dimension; but overall this was highly informative (and, not infrequently, absolutely hair-raising). I benefited a lot from this.

[M. · Rating 2 out of 5]

The thesis of this book is that literary modernism (including authors that wouldn't enter the label, too), led to Nazism.

While this book makes you think about the roots of the eugenics movement, it suffers from a bit from disorganization in the first part, attributions of statements that correspond more to characters in works of fictions rather than said authors. Although, in many cases, he backs them up with letters, as others have pointed out. Another rather annoying point is that he continuously has an ambiguous relationship towards Christianity: he begins by introducing the concept of masa damnata as the beginning of individualism but then asserts most of the modernists that worked to ofuscate the understanding of the masses out of contempt for the poor and their education, sexism, eugenics, classism and a sense of entitlement closer to Nietzschean outlook is hardly Christian. It's crazy how these views resemble the alt-right.

His analysis of Graham Greene and his utilitarianism regarding the Catholic Church was called for, but I am not sure how much would Evelyn Waugh fit the same mold. The heroes of this book were Chesterton, Bennett, and in a hard position, people like Joyce and Orwell.

Some authors, like Wells had two chapters for themselves. He kept name dropping Woolf and decrying her contempt for Christianity, but an analysis of her ideas never came in depth, not even her opposition to Nazism because she was married to a Jewish man, as well has her inclusion on a Hitlerian blacklist (http://virginiawoolfblog.com/virginia..., just in case let me correct myself about Woolf and say I found this: https://www.theguardian.com/commentis...) among with other figures he mentions here as being essentially okay with Nazism.

I also fail to understand why he constantly brings up Ortega y Gasset, to my knowledge he wasn't that influential in anglo ambients, but I could be wrong. His theory is that this terrible elitism espoused by the likes of D.H. Lawrence, H.G. Wells, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, A. Huxley, Gissing and others paved the way for Nazism and Fascism. Not too sure how this is, but I would remind Carey that Wells also defended Stalin even before all proof to the contrary, but very much apologized for statements against the Jews after knowing how horrible the Holocaust was.

Yes, I'm not too sure I can look at H.G. Wells or A. Huxley the same way now, but he was impulsive and probably mentally unstable (I mean, he ended up saying whole extinction of the human race was preferrable).

All in all, could've been better written. I'm critical of mass culture and unnecessarily being a snob, but because art must have a criteria in order to be what it is and reach people, and this is what Carey doesn't seem to understand.

[B · Rating 2 out of 5]

Carey repeats throughout the book that the word "masses" is "a sign for the unknowable". Carey doesn't have the same aversion for generalisations when it comes to pulling any writer who ever wrote something prejudiced and sticking the label "intellectual" to them.

It seems to Carey that these very different writers all have the exact same evil plan to keep the plebs from understanding their novels.

It's amusing to laugh at the wishy washy snobbery in (for example) Gissing's books but Carey ignores the ambivalence within the works he criticises. He identifies the characters who resemble his image of Gissing and assume they speak for the author exact. It's such a disappointing and pointless approach for an academic to take. This text doesn't uncover anything meaningful because of how egregiously the writer cherrypicks his examples.

It's a funny read at times and it's good to be aware that ideas about suburban spread and eugenics were prominent for certain writers but the book offers little value or nuance when it comes to discussing this period.

[Paul Fadoju · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved it. It opens your eyes to see the veil that is cast over men's intelligence and that your birthright is stronger than education.

[Andrea Fiore · Rating 4 out of 5]

* Ci siamo scoperti uomini leggendo scrittori che non ci ritenevano tali. Ma come può chi nega la mia umanità, comprenderla così a fondo?

* Gli scrittori più grandi sono quelli che tra i loro pregiudizi verso la massa e l'intima persuasione dell'unicità irripetibile di ogni individuo, scelgono la seconda. Spesso la contraddizione tra le loro convinzioni e le loro creazioni è tanto evidente quanto lacerante.

* I capitoli su H.G. Wells e Arnold Bennett sono eccellenti.

* L'accostamento tra l'atteggiamento elitario degli intellettuali inglesi presi in esame e le posizioni teoriche di Adorno, Horkheimer e Marcuse mi sembra profondamente sbagliato. Senza addentrarsi troppo nella questione, basterebbe un solo dato. La critica dei francofortesi all'industria culturale nasce proprio dalla radicata convinzione nelle capacità rivoluzionarie della classe operaia; più precisamente, fu proprio per spiegarne la passività e l'acquiescenza di fronte alla crisi economica e all'avanzata dei fascismi, che i francofortesi iniziarono a studiare fenomeni di massa come la radio, il cinema o la letteratura di consumo. Il loro piglio apocalittico nasceva quindi dallo sconforto causato dal mancato elevarsi a classe generale da parte della classe operaia, non da convinzioni elitarie o aristocratiche. Un conto è la delusione che nasce dalla fiducia mal riposta, un conto è il disprezzo radicato nel privilegio.
Che poi fosse corretto o meno proiettare le proprie ansie di redenzione messianica sulla classe operaia, è un altro discorso. Inoltre è innegabile che l'anticapitalismo dei francofortesi avesse radici più romantico-decadenti che propriamente marxiste; ma come ha argomentato Michael Löwy in più sedi, questo non è affatto un problema per un marxismo aperto e non dogmatico.

[Joe Bardsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carey's main argument—that modernists essentially made their work more complex out of a desire to exclude the increasingly educated general public from understanding their work—is a compelling one in itself. However, his text is at its most interesting when discussing the internal conflict that plagued certain left-leaning authors of this era: namely, that they believe in social justice and equality, but also that the public masses are somehow lesser than the artist. The way this sets some of them against democracy is especially fascinating, as well as troubling, particularly given the recent upsurge in anti-democratic sentiment around the world.

See my Substack post for more thoughts: https://substack.com/@josephbardsley/...

[Sarbook · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://sarbook.com/product/351641
این کتاب پژوهشی بسیار ارزشمند در رابطه با دیدگاه‌ها و نگرش‌های روشنفکران از اواخر قرن نوزذهم تا 1939 است و در این 60 سالی که مورد پژوهش قرار گرفته است می‌توان با دید واقع‌بینانه پروفسور جان کری در مورد روشنفکران انگلیسی آشنا شد. در هر فصل از این کتاب سعی شده است نوری به مبحث مورد نظر نویسنده تابانده شود و با استفاده از ادله‌های عالمانه تمام گفته‌های خود را به اثبات می‌رساند، هرچند خود این نگرش می‌تواند مخالفانی را نیز داشته باشد اما مخاطب اثر با مطالعه این کتاب پی به جهان‌بینی نویسنده کتاب در اثبات گفته‌های وی خواهد برد.

[Bill Tress · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Carey is a clear thinking and writing Oxford professor. His thought processes are unpretentious, and his books always stir the imagination to ponder and analyze his commentary. The observations portrayed in this book are not the ideas of all intellectuals. He focuses on a group of English writers from the period 1880 to 1939. This group of so-called thinkers saw most people as less then human and advocated for mass genocide to foster a superior race to rule the world – sound familiar? Carey tells us that there is an eerie sense that what is described as turn of the century radical thought still radiates today in our politics and prejudices.
A point that Carey amplifies is that these writers felt that “educating the masses is a mistake that leads to a weakening of the seclusion of the intellectual; A seclusion needed to create great Art”. Carey describes the various ways in which writers and intellectuals - the likes of TS Eliot, D.H. Lawrence and Nietzsche and their acolytes sought to exclude the masses from culture. These writers felt that "the principle around which modernist literature and culture fashioned itself was to exclude the masses, the defeat of their power, the removal of their literacy, the denial of their humanity".
The arch villain in this book and the major purveyor of these ideas is Friedrich Nietzsche. This man’s thoughts became the genesis of the Adolf Hitlers of this world, his message delivered in his book “The Will to Power” was to declare a war on the masses by higher men”. and of course, he includes himself in the term higher men! One of Nietzsche’s acolytes, Knut Hamsun is quoted in his book, “Hunger” as saying” I believe in the born leader, the natural despot, the master, not a man who is chosen but the man who elects himself to be ruler over the masses. I believe in and hope for one thing, and that is the return of the great terrorist, the living essence of human power, the Caesar”. In 1933 he arrived, and his name was Hitler. Nietzsche further has stated “The old, the sick and the suffering suggest themselves as particularly ripe for extermination, he affirms that the great majority of men have no right to existence, but a misfortune to higher men, This reader believes that this raving is the work of a mad man, but Carey does not take a position; he just lays out the words for others to interpret.
Nietzsche is quoted as saying, “What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms -- in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins. We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors - in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all...”. This language denies the existence of a God whom we would consider the ultimate truth.
As stated by Carey, All these so called highly developed intellects seem to agree on the definition of “the herd mentality” Even Freud stated, “The individual in the mass becomes a barbarian, ferocious and violent, and also childlike and credulous” What happens Freud explains is that the individual on becoming a mass man, throws off the repressions of his unconscious instincts: The apparently new characteristics, he then displays are in fact the manifestations of his unconscious mind in which all that is evil in the human mind is contained as a predisposition; the mass represents the “primal horde”. I found this concept quite interesting because I witnessed it on January 6, 2021. One man, a so called “very stable genius” – as defined by Donald Trump, whipped up a crowd into a mob and sent them to attack our government offices in an effort to overthrow an election and our democratic government. As individuals most were good citizens who loved their Country, yet they lost all perspective as a mob. Our highly developed intellects have been quoted on this subject, as follows: "Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one." January 6, 2021, is a prima facia case for this theory.
Once Carey completed his lecture on the precepts of this group of men, he presents case studies that analyze their body of work and how they incorporate these wild notations into their fiction. This was quite fascinating to me because the alter egos in their fiction spread the nonsense that permeates the authors beliefs, we read and say, “well done, what a well written and interesting story”, all the while failing to see the hidden subversions presented by the writer. In the future, I will look harder at fiction and its meanings when reading.
The case study on H.G. Wells was also a case of genocide and elitism bourgeoned by his fictional creations. In addition to being a fiction writer Wells made futurist predictions about our world and looking back we find that they were quite perceptive. For instance, in 2022, our planet is dying and intellectuals like Steven Hawkins predict that man will have to leave this planet within 100 years and search for other inhabitable planets for our species to survive. H.G. Wells was quite foresighted by predicting such a conclusion to our world, while also spewing crackpot theories regarding the need to eliminate large masses of humans to create a superior race.
In the case study of George Gissing, a disciple of Nietzsche, he criticizes the concept of education of the masses. He feels that education is a thing of which only the few are capable and in the case of women his skepticism redoubled. Carey feels that one reason for reading Gissing is that he allows us to watch the superstitions that dominate our idea of culture taking shape. In this case study, Carey shows how all of Gissing’s prejudices are evident in his handling of his female characters. This explanation has taught me to closely watch for a writer’s biases in how he develops his fictional characters. He convinced me that Gissing was a kook, but not an intellectual!
The case study on Arnold Bennett starts out by classifying Bennett as the hero of this book. This man sees the world far more clearly than most of us. He is a prolific writer who profits from his writing and makes so called intellectuals frustrated enough to criticize him and render his work low brow because it is enjoyed by the masses. Carey introduces Bennett at the right time in his discussion of intellectuals and the masses. At the end of this case study Carey’s comment about Bennett being the hero of this book is found to be quite accurate and refreshing. Bennett articulates what this reviewer was feeling when he debunks the thinking of the so-called intellectuals. This reader is impressed by Bennett and his body of work and I am prepared to seek out some of this works for further study.
While reading this book, it was obvious that the thoughts of these early twentieth century authors had a great influence and/or reinforced the thinking of Adolf Hitler and Carey uses his last chapter to further illustrate this point. I am left unnerved by Carey’s use of the word intellectual when referring to Hitler. I see Hitler as a sick demented mind, a psychopath, a mass murder but never an intellectual. The word intellectual is applied throughout this book to the English writers and followers of Nietzsche even though their thoughts and opinions are sick. Websters dictionary says an intellectual is a person possessing a highly developed intellect. I assume from Carey’s use of the word it must apply to almost anyone even psychopaths.
This was a very interesting topic and lecture on many levels. In the future I will look more closely to an author’s character development to understand the real thoughts being portrayed. I also have a clearer understand of Nietzsche and his influence on early twentieth century thinking. Thinking that gave us Adolf Hitler. Carey gives the reader much to think about in this book.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although it’s probably more meaningful in December than February, this is the best book I’ve read so far this year. My soul cries out for more texts like this: an academic who has read widely and deeply and intelligently on their topic, and can arrange it in a timeline comparing and contrasting the voices in a whole intellectual movement. I could have read all the individual writers in this book and never have drawn the conclusions Carey does. (Although the only one who tempts me, now, is Arnold Bennett.) It’s absolutely fascinating to learn the insights of this intellectual reactionary-ness, and Carey draws some strong conclusions about the rise of Hitler in this milieu. The strangest thing is that I can side with the ‘intellectuals’ in a lot of aspects, like the hatred of advertising, and a feeling of exclusion and isolation from the ‘masses’ who like sportsball and Love Island. But really, the way they felt about women, and the natural conclusion of thinking like this (the Shoah) is sufficiently off-putting.

Though it usually purports to be progressive, the avant-garde is consequently always reactionary. That is, it seeks to take literacy and culture away from the masses, and so to counteract the progressive intentions of democratic educational reform.

Interesting critique.

Orwell – ‘We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun.’

The Lancet Commission would agree!

Le Bon: Crowds are intolerant and dictatorial. But they also respond to force, not kindness, and admire the ‘Caesar-type’ – again, like women. UGH.

‘Most probably,’ he lamented, ‘they did not know how to make love or even to eat and drink properly.’ Priestley does not divulge what alerts him to this curious possibility.

Carey has a very witty turn of phrase too!

Orwell He reflected this quandary when he wrote that ‘the thinking person’ is usually left-wing by intellect but right-wing by temperament.

I find more and more than categorising yourself into a wing is unhelpful because humans can hold so many contradictory opinions at once.

As supermen they can expose the inbuilt fallacy which disqualifies all human thinking, but they can do so only by human thinking.

Heehee.

Single women cannot be civilised either, for women must make love to men before the ‘exquisite’ is available to them

Can’t find a legit argument against that lol.

Like the masses He must conform to the intellectual’s imaginings; like the masses He must ratify the intellectual’s distinction.

And the idea that intellectuals thought God should endorse their opinions is lolsome but also in keeping.

Democracy, Wells believed, was fatal, since the only appeal democractically elected politicians could make to the electorate was patriotic, and patriotism inevitably led to war.

Like he’s not WRONG.

Bennett: The makers of literature feel the miraculous interestingness of the universe. Their lives are one long ecstasy of denying that the world is a dull place.

I really must read some Bennett.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really don't know where to start with this book. It is disturbing without doubt and since it was written in 1992, the reader would expect it to be a little obsolete or at least not so "consternating" (the reaction it caused when originally published). But the reader is in for a surprise.

Having read Carey's autobiography (The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books and having liked it very much, I decided to tackle his more controversial work, The Intellectuals and the Masses. His biography was witty, funny, with many serious passages making it a balanced read. He keeps a similar style in this one, but he is on a mission which sometimes makes him come across as vindictive and superficial. What is immediately apparent is that Carey is a progressive, a liberal (in the American understanding), a social democrat. I am too, so that was not a problem for me. He is not extreme in any way.

The point he wants to prove is that the founders of modern culture, the early 20th century intellectuals, actually hated the masses and how they invented modernism in order to prevent those same masses from accessing "highbrow aristocratic intellectual" matters ( here I’ll let the reader find out for himself the explanation for this pompous expression). Not only did they invent opaque modernism but they also somehow inspired Hitler and other dictators. I will not spoil it for other readers by enumerating how Carey actually does it but I can give my impressions of this rollercoaster.

He divides the first part of the book in 4 themes (the effects of population growth on intellectuals, how they decided to define those newly emerging masses, how the development of suburbs and new jobs for the masses gave them cold sweats, and how the intellectuals saw themselves as a natural aristocracy of knowledge). The second part of the book are case studies of some authors relevant for Carey’s demonstration (Gissing, H G Wells, Arnold Bennett, Wyndham Lewis, and believe it or not, Adolf Hitler's intellectual program...)

Carey quotes a lot, too much, and even if he quotes letters and recorded conversations, he quotes a lot from the fiction written by the incriminated writers.We all know fiction is not always exactly what the author thinks, but Carey makes it sound like it is. Which is kind of lazy work and not what I expected of him. There is a lot of Nietzsche in there too. He is the prime culprit. Everything somehow comes back to him.

Some of the writers mentioned where many times despicable in their comments, one cannot just escape that fact (especially in the passages where eugenics are discussed, the eternal question: who should be allowed to have children?). But as a historian by education, I cannot help to point out that one must judge according to the period that is studied. We cannot expect early 20th century writers to have our modern views on culture, gender, race and so on. Fast growing population and industrialisation were a shock at that time, something we can't even fathom today. Reactions from the thinking and educated minority were bound to be extreme as well. Intellectuals had the time and means to start analysing what was happening and what it would mean for humanity in the future. But Carey turns this into a freak circus where almost all of them want to simply kill off everyone, and not just in their fantasy world. It is fun to read about it but if you are intellectually inclined yourself, you might find it a bit unfair.

Just a few telling examples. We all know that Orwell was using his writing in order to analyse and criticise the effects of rapid industrialisation and population growth (especially the combining of the two and how it impacted human beings and nature). But Carey quotes his fiction and his essays and interprets them as a sure sign of hate and pure disgust towards the masses.
It is interesting to learn that early intellectuals were already very ecologically minded. British landscapes and natural wonders, streams and fields, were disappearing fast with the expansion of the suburbs built to house the growing urban populations. Writers often felt that it was important to talk about it. But Carey turns this too into a negative. True, their way of writing about it was not always subtle but times were different. We cannot look at it as if it was today. But Carey does exactly that and sometimes it makes the reader feel he is doing it only for the “wow” effect.
The chapter on Wyndham Lewis is also problematic. Lewis was a known satirist, should we take everything he said and wrote as fact? Also despite the fact that Lewis retracted the praise he had for Hitler (saying he had reconsidered in light of new facts), Carey ignores this and paints him as a basic nazi (even when it is painfully clear that Lewis had many psychological issues and suffered from various paranoias and complexes)
The last chapter about how Hitler and British intellectuals of the time were basically on the same wavelengths is way out there. One rarely sees points stretched this far in serious critical essays.

In general Carey seems to forget that many people who think a lot or have a gift for thinking complex ideas are prone to nihilism and tend to see life as pointless. Writing is a way of expressing things without going mad. It looks awful on paper and in conversation but nobody ever really acts on it. We cannot accuse people of having fantasies, however despicable they might be. If somebody is inspired by them , the problem is , frankly, elsewhere. Sometimes writings were meant to shock on purpose so as to jolt the reader. What I also got out of the book is a serious impression that Carey wants to make us think that every artistic or cultural endeavour that is avant-garde or new has somehow only one purpose: annoy the masses! Or that ecology, because it was already a concern for Hitler and British intellectuals of the same period, is somehow a dictatorial fad. Or that popular culture is better than highbrow, intellectually demanding, culture (even if he is a staunch opponent of the opposite, being well known for his ideas that there is no better or higher art. See John Carey, What Good Are the Arts?).

Reading this book in 2020, It is striking how many of the complainings (about ecology, overproduction, “cheap” entertainment, education, newspapers) of the early 20th century intellectuals sound like regular complainings of today. But back then, only intellectuals were really concerned about that reality. Today we are all grappling with it, struggling to find solutions. We are amazed how Wells and Orwell “predicted” our future.

And what about the masses? Social media ,and especially Facebook and the comments sections, tell us a lot about how people act when in crowds and behind a screen. It is now easy to witness how anti-intellectualism, low educational standards, bad quality mass entertainment and consumerism of the last 50 to 60 years have wrecked havoc in our societies. I’m not saying we should apply the methods exposed by long dead intellectuals in Carey’s book (frankly many seemed to be suffering from borderline personality disorders), but we sure could think more about what we are becoming, maybe be more demanding of ourselves. It is a shame Carey never asks the question.
Is today’s sadly famous saying “My ignorance is worth as much as your knowledge” acceptable? Have the fears of the nasty, condescending intellectuals come true?

Don’t get me wrong, the book is worth reading, is very entertaining and makes the reader reflect on the thematic in light of today’s dystopian world. It could have been more balanced though.

[Sadan · Rating 3 out of 5]

The lucid and coherent writing style of Carey rendered my reading experience of this informative book more or less diverting ( I guess he didn't want to commit the sin of the intellectuals whom he criticizes for using a nebulous writing style with the aim of obfuscating the intended meaning).

However, the last chapters of the book mostly rephrased what had already been mentioned in the previous ones ( but surely with more illuminating details on each and every intellectual).
The book accounts for the origination of the development of the great chasm that now exists between the intellectuals and the so-called "masses". Carey propounds the population boom of the late 19th and early 20th century as one of the fundamental reasons for the emergence of the feeling of discontent in the intellectuals. The education of the mass population inflamed this feeling of dissatisfaction mainly because the unequivocal distinction that existed between the educated and the uneducated was now muddled and the intellectuals felt like they had nothing new to offer.
Nietzsche appears as the savior of the intellectuals against the prevalent vulgar and democratic sensibility of the time. By adhering to the Nietzschean idea of Übermensch, the intellectuals create a newly-established line between themselves and the not-sufficiently-educated class. They achieve this aim by clinging to the idea of the "natural aristocrat" and making generalizations about the less-educated population. Carey proposes that the concept of the "mass" is a construct that endues the less-educated class with non-human qualities. Newspapers, mass media, suburbs, clerks, women, and advertisements are among the many things that are blamed for the emergence of unrefined mass culture. These ideas are thoroughly examined in the writings of intellectuals such as Gissing, Wells, and Lewis. The last chapter of the book testifies to the impact of these ideas on Hitler's political measures and shows how ideas expressed in literary works can have real-life ramifications.

[Pieter · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this study of mainly British literature (1880-1939), Mr Carey cites from numerous works of famous authors to prove that most of them had an aristocratic opinion on the masses. He refers to ‘The Will of Power’ of Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Crowd’ of Gustave Le Bon and ‘Revolt of the Masses’ of José Ortega y Gassett as the fertile soil in which these ideas could flourish. It involves writers like Wells, Shaw, Flaubert, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliott, Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, W.B. Yeats, Aldous Huxley, G.B. Shaw and many more. In short, the ‘fine fleur’ of late 19th and early 20th British literature. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (author of Sherlock Holmes) must have been one of the few sympathisers with the common people, according to Mr Carey.
Although it seems obvious to link elitism to the right, many of the authors were no conservatives at all: Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw to name two. Also the new left Frankfurter Schule is opposed to mass culture. When we look at the current political scene, it is striking that patriotic politicians like Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen better appeal to Joe Sixpack than the social democrats do.
One last remark, after WW II Andy Warhol created pop art (i.e. popular art) in order to bridge ‘high art’ and ‘popular culture’. Mr Carey seems to have value this in order to connect artists tot he common people. Being a frequent visitors of musea, it appears to me that the modern ‘clerks’ still prefer Leonardo, Michelangelo and Monet to post modern experiments. Mission failed as far as I can see.

[Mizrob A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Intellectuals believe in giving the public what intellectuals want; that, generally speaking, is what they mean by education.'

Carey tries to show, to some degree successfully, how some 'humanities' people of the early 20th century hated humanity or the 'masses'. The work includes some case studies. In some parts the author overstretches his arguments, but the basic arguments seem sound. He shows by extensive quotations (though there are dangers of selective quotations) how early 20th century intellectuals riled against the masses, the spread of education and schooling, looked at people who tried to educate themselves with derision, etc. And how this to some degree helped to create the postmodernist style of writing, because the humanities elite wanted an exclusive lingo separate from the masses.

Here are some excerpts:

"Since for Bell what makes a civilization civilized is the presence of people able to view artworks in the approved way, such details as the form of government remain subsidiary. There is absolutely no reason, according to Bell, why tyrannical and despotic regimes should not be perfectly civilized. ‘To discredit a civilization it is not enough to show that it is based on slavery and injustice; you must show that liberty and justice would produce something better.’ ‘Better’, in this context, means, we note, more adapted to supporting people like Bell. This is the vital criterion. Liberty and justice are not good in themselves."

"Both Lawrence and Nietzsche are in an awkward position when discrediting ideas, since they are, of course, expressing ideas themselves. Their arguments reflect their frustration, and their urge to escape the limiting conditions of their merely human state. As supermen they can expose the inbuilt fallacy which disqualifies all human thinking, but they can do so only by human thinking. Reason, said Nietzsche, ‘is a mere idiosyncrasy of a certain species of animal’, and does not relate to any reality. Nevertheless, reason was all he had to use. Lawrence’s dissatisfaction with logic, like Nietzsche’s, arose, too, from a suspicion that logic would not warrant his conviction that he was a natural aristocrat."

"‘It is better,’ he concludes, ‘in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.’ This appalling sentence leaves out of account, we notice, the effect of evil on its victims. A murderer, like Greene’s Pinkie, could hardly be said to make things ‘better’ for those he kills, even if he enhances his own spiritual reality. Eliot disregards such side issues, because he is intent upon the spiritual aristocrat, apart from and superior to the mass. Nietzsche, in the same vein, declared that the criminal ‘has this advantage over many other men, that he is not mediocre’.
The image of the Catholic that attracts Greene is never that of a church member subsumed into a body of believers, for that would reduce the convert to a mere recruit. When he went to Mexico in 1938, it was in the hope of finding evidence of Catholics being persecuted, and though he was disappointingly too late for any real atrocities, his artistic fascination with victims and outsiders remained a powerful element in his Catholicism. As a fugitive, hunted down by the pack, or as a rebel, cast out by God, the Catholic acquires the glamour of singularity – a glamour not available to mere faithful sheep. This meant that Greene had to seek an accommodation with Catholicism which would give him the special status of renegade. He made no secret of the fact that he was not convinced of God’s existence, which placed him on the perimeter of Catholic Church membership, and in his later years he discontinued going to confession or mass.31 So, despite his Catholicism he remained ‘On the dangerous edge of things’ – like a Nietzschean solitary on his mountain peak, except that in Greene’s version there would be gunmen among the pine trees, closing in.
Even among intellectuals who have not entered a recognized church, we can observe a tendency to invoke God when they are driven to justify belief in the superiority of intellectuals and the artworks they prefer."

"Before leaving Nietzsche we should note, briefly, two more consequences of his difficulties in the area of logical demonstration. One was that he renounced logic. The laws of logic are universal and reduce everyone to the same level, so they are, Nietzsche decides, just a stratagem of the rabble for getting on top of and humiliating the truly superior man. To obey one’s instincts is noble, but to obey logic is to give way to the mob. Logic destroys the real, sensual world and substitutes for it an unreal grey world of mental concepts. Nietzsche’s second answer to logic leads on from this, and is that the body is wiser than the mind. ‘Listen,’ he instructs, ‘to the voice of the healthy body.’ We should, he advises in Ecce Homo, trust only thoughts which have come to us in the open air, while using our muscles. This health-and-fitness fetish, so powerful in Nietzsche, and so important to his Nazi followers, contrasts pathetically, as has often been pointed out, with his own chronic ill-health, nervous prostration, myopia, ghastly digestive disorders and so on.
The same contrast between ill-health and worship of the healthy body is apparent in D. H. Lawrence, Nietzsche’s major English disciple. All Lawrence’s central concepts are derived from Nietzsche. ‘My great religion,’ he wrote in a famous letter of January 1913, ‘is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true.’ This could be a summary of Nietzschean doctrine, and its key word, ‘blood’, is from Nietzsche, who wrote in The Will to Power that the only nobility is of blood. Nietzsche explains that he does not mean by this aristocratic lineage. Precisely what he did mean – and what Lawrence means – is hard to define. However, ‘blood’ for both of them evidently includes instinct, bodily sensations and masculine sexual urges. It is in these that real wisdom inheres."

[Simon Bostock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this twenty years ago, so memory is a bit fuzzy. Looking back, I don't remember any argument
That's not a bad thing. Not at all.

But the fascist tendencies of the authors he talks about are often illustrated by personal effects and records of conversations. I think we've all probably had a moan about overweight tourists and Ashford, Kent.

I liked it. But I'm not sure if there's a convincing thesis here.

The New Criterion invokes Godwin's Law. They go too far. But the basic idea of the book is that modernist intellectuals suffered a snobbery bordering on fascism. So, perhaps, New Criterion doesn’t go that too far?

[Rob M · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really fun, short, and well argued thesis. The author constructs a powerful case for the violent egomania of the early 20th century British intelligentsia, hanging them from gallows constructed from their own remarks and works.

This book seems to be written for the purpose of warning aspiring young intellectuals against egomania. Carey proves that even the most dignified, learned and inspiring writers can harbour inhuman and irrational passions and should thus be treated with caution rather than reverence. For all his damning analysis, I sense that only a deep passion for his subjects could have allowed Carey to produce such a richly argued study.

The short postscript condemning "theory" as anti-popular, elitist claptrap hits is great too. This enlivening book could well have been entitled "Fuck off Theodore Adorno".

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

Silly book, hadn't the time or the patience to read to the end but I think I got the picture. Some writers said some douchey elitist things, so ALL writers/intellectuals/modernists (all basically interchangeable apparently) = Hitler. He literally makes that comparison. Awesomely poor academic rigour too: lots quotes taken totally out of context, confusing what a character says for what a writer ardently believes, summing people's opinions up for them when they've been awkward enough not to state it themselves... Dude seriously has an agenda, and he'll be damned if anything will get in its way. Not to say that elitism isn't present/a problem in some of these areas, or that some modernists ended up tending towards towards fascism, but this book is ridiculous)

[Paul Howlett · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lot of the discussion in this book confirmed the odd suspicion that I have had in the past about these modernist intellectuals , an excellent introduction can be found on the "In our Time" Website
with the author in discussion , (under The culture section of the archives"Literary modernism) http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00547fv

[Rodney Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Thoroughly Good Read

Unusually for a book of this kind, never did I want to jump ahead, so gripping and appropriate were the examples cited. I most heartily recommend Prof Carey' book.

[Marion Husband · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this, very inspiring and interesting and made me think a great deal about my own writing. He writes like George Orwell, with the same clarity and pointedness

[David Withun · Rating 4 out of 5]

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