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seize the rare moments when they are called upon to behave as revolutionaries. The discouraging conclusion to be drawn from Mr Kendall’s book is that there is no simple way out of this dilemma; it is built into the situation. A self-sealing sectarianism is no solution. Nor is areaction of simple rebellious rejection of all politics and ‘bureaucracy’. Being a revolutionary in countries such as ours just happens to be difficult. There is no reason to believe that it will be less difficult in future than it has been in the past.
(1969)
    1 Kenneth Newton,
The Sociology of British Communism
, London, 1969.
    2 Walter Kendall,
The Revolutionary Movement in Britain 1900–21
, London, 1969.

CHAPTER 4
Intellectuals and Communism
    The love affair between intellectuals and marxism which is so characteristic of our age developed relatively late in western Europe, though in Russia itself it began in Marx’s own lifetime. Before 1914 the marxist intellectual was a rare bird west of Vienna, though at one point in the early 1890s it looked as though he would become a permanent and plentiful species. This was partly because in some countries (such as Germany) there were not many left-wing intellectuals of any kind while in others (such as France) older pre-marxist ideologies of the left predominated, but mainly because the bourgeois society to which the intellectual – satisfied or dissident – belonged was still a going concern. The characteristic left-wing intellectual of Edwardian Britain was a liberal-radical, of Dreyfusard France a revolutionary of 1789, but one almost certainly destined for an honoured place in the state as a teacher. It was not until the first world war and the 1929 slump broke these old traditions and certainties that the intellectuals turned directly to Marx in large numbers. They did so via Lenin. The history of marxism among intellectuals in the west is therefore largely the history of their relationship with the communist parties which replaced social democracy as the chief representatives of marxism.
    In recent years these relations have been the subject of a vast literature, mainly the work of ex-communists, dissident marxistsand American scholars, and chiefly consisting of autobiographies or annotated who’s whos of prominent intellectuals who joined, and mostly left, various communist parties. David Caute’s
Communism and the French Intellectuals
1 is one of the more satisfactory specimens of the second type, for it accepts – indeed it argues strongly – that the reasons which led intellectuals into communist parties and kept them there were often both rational and compelling, and controverts the characteristic 1950s view that such parties could attract only the deviant, the psychologically aberrant, or the seeker after some secular religion, the ‘opium of the intellectuals’. The greater part of his book therefore deals not so much with communism and the intellectuals as with the intellectuals and communism.
    The relations of intellectuals and communist parties have been turbulent, though perhaps less so than the literature would suggest, for the prominent and articulate, with whom it mainly deals, are not necessarily a representative sample of the average and the inarticulate. In countries like France and Italy, where the party has long been and remains the major force of the left, it is likely that political behaviour (e.g. voting) is much stabler than the turnover of party membership – always rather large – would indicate. We know this to be so among workers. Unfortunately the difficulties of finding a workable sociological definition of ‘intellectuals’ have so far deprived us of reliable statistics about them, though the few we have suggest that it applies to them also. Thus party membership at the École Normale Supérieure dropped from 25 per cent after the war to 5 per cent in 1956, but the communists obtained 21 per cent