Writing a long-ish piece during the week, which I think is probably headed for the bin as it ended up being about something completely different from what it started out being about, I found that I wanted to characterise Charles Murray as an inegalitarian anti-elitist, Ivan Illich and Jacques Ranciere as egalitarian anti-elitists, F. R. Leavis as an inegalitarian elitist and Badiou as an egalitarian elitist.

Murray and Leavis are inegalitarian because they think that there are some people who could never have made much of themselves intellectually: they would confirm Larkin in his dread that “how we live measures our own nature”, certainly with respect to the life of the mind. A weak egalitarian stance (which I favour) would refuse to make final judgements about what people were capable of, particularly pre-emptively (as in the 11-plus). A strong egalitarian stance (which I find more difficult) would assert that everyone could always have developed otherwise, circumstances permitting. Partly this is an argument about constraint versus plasticity, partly it is an argument about the pertinence of counter-factuals: it’s arguable that how one has lived becomes one’s own nature, to the point where it is difficult to imagine having been or become otherwise.

Murray and Illich are anti-elitists because they regard the formation of special groups with their own interests, expertise and technical jargon as inimical to democratic conviviality. Murray I suspect has a public choice theorist’s take on this, according to which the market combines the functions of the general intellect and the general will; no separate magisterium, with its own notions about what is good for society, can be tolerated. Although “natural” differences in intellect can lead - under “meritocratic” conditions - to the formation of “cognitive elites”, this is a bad rather than a good thing: better the aimless wisdom of the crowd than the purposeful cleverness of the think-tank. With Illich it is more a question of realising the polymorphous worker envisaged by Marx: no-one should be rendered incapable in principle or in practice of participating in the work of another. This results in a quite dramatic restriction of what a “doctor”, “teacher” or “intellectual” can be allowed to become: epistemic power must always remain in the hands of everyone, and must never come to be wielded by an exclusive minority on behalf of others.

Leavis is an elitist because he is an inegalitarian: he thinks that there are certain necessary (cultural) functions that only a minority of people will ever be capable of carrying out, and that they should do so on behalf of society as a whole. This is a form of “representative” elitism, where elites are not self-serving oligarchies but privileged public servants: their privilege is to be tolerated because (in a sort of cultural “trickle-down” theory) it brings benefits to society as a whole that would be unobtainable otherwise. Badiou is an elitist because truths individuate subjects, a process which entails a rupture from the democratic conviviality of what “everyone” says and knows, but an egalitarian because his subject is generic: anyone (n’importe qui) can be seized by a truth (or it is not a truth). These two “elitisms” are clearly very unalike: Leavis’s is institutionalised, making the elite an organ of the state, Badiou’s demands the creation of a “new body” which resists integration into the existing state apparatuses. Both however exhibit a marked disdain for the levelling presumptions of “democratic materialism”.