John Carey, the Merton Professor of English at Oxford University, has performed a remarkable feat. He has written a book called The Intellectuals and the Masses¹ without once discussing Karl Marx. It seems not to have occurred to the Merton Professor of English at Oxford that the writings of Karl Marx had something to do with the tradition of thinking about modern cultural life in terms of “intellectuals” and “the masses.” The literature that derives from Marx in these matters is, except for some superficial references to the Frankfurt School and the usual obeisances to Walter Benjamin, of no apparent interest to the author of The Intellectuals and the Masses, either. If he has ever heard of the work of Max Weber or Joseph Schumpeter, he has chosen not to disturb his readers by mentioning what, if anything, he may have discovered in it. And it goes without saying—about a book of this kind, anyway—that nothing in the vast bibliography of American social thought in the twentieth century is allowed to violate the serene parochialism of the author’s inquiry.

What is more surprising, however, is that Professor Carey is no better at identifying the specifically British antecedents of the intellectual inquiry he has embarked upon in The Intellectuals and the Masses. Indeed, the number of essential figures and ideas it has not occurred to Professor Carey to discuss in relation to his ostensible theme in The Intellectuals and the Massescomes close to constituting the