On a defensive note

A few weeks ago I was both inspired and irritated by Stefan Collini's review in the LRB of John Hall's intellectual biography of Ernest Gellner (unfortunately the article is only available online to LRB subscribers): Inspired because reading it made me want to know more about Gellner's "critical rationalism" (of course I had heard of him, but he's not exactly amongst the usual suspects cited in your run-of-the-mill textbook, anthology or Super-Extra-Short Introduction favoured by the discerning academic publishing house these days), irritated because Collini made Gellner appear like some kind of intellectual klutz insensitive to the higher forms of theoretical thinking (such as Oxford linguistic philosophy).

I reckon it's the weather: The London Review has been unusually mean and cantankerous recently.

So I was glad to find R.W. Johnson write in defence of Gellner in the latest LRB:

[Gellner]generated, to a degree unequalled by any other social scientist I have met, a feeling of "look, what we are doing is trying to figure out how the modern world works and this is a deadly serious task, in fact it is the most serious thing there is." He was never really off duty. Collini sounds a little too English to feel quite comfortable with that Germanic intensity and seriousness.

Granted, in the day and age of the Guttenberg-syndrome, references to "Germanic intensity and seriousness" may sound a tad inappropriate (if not ironic), but of course one can always go back to one's roots.

A critical comment

I am rather irritated by Colin Burrow's review of David Lodge's A Man of Parts, his biographical novel of H.G. Wells, in the new LRB (16 June). It is quite obvious that Burrow likes neither novel nor author, but what bugs me most is the way he uses this vehicle to slip in a few other pet hates - from Rebecca West's odd metaphors to popular neuroscience:

[Wells] was very interested in the mechanics of the human brain. Were he alive today, he would be happy to believe that the mind is the same as the brain, and would present TV programmes in which he wired himself up to a brain-scanner in order to show bits of his cortext lighting up when he thought of Rebecca West.

Flippant, dumb and utterly gratuitous.