An Aristocracy of Critics Review

Some years ago, I came across a review for, and had recommended to me, a book called An Aristocracy of Critics.  I don’t remember what the book review said, but the person who recommended it described it as an examination of how Western culture became subject to a kind of elite class of critics acting like the landed gentry of cultural taste.  Given the ongoing discussion of the “culture wars,” and the increasing extent to which the ideas of culture, entertainment, and taste are intertwined with political platforms and positions, I’ve been intending to read this for a while.  Now, I finally got around to it, thanks to finding the book on sale for just four dollars (in hardcover, no less), but it wasn’t what I expected.  An Aristocracy of Critics is more a history book than it is a sociological commentary.

The subject is a peculiar committee assembled and working in the mid-1940s, just as World War II was concluded, with the purpose of conducting a philosophical investigation of the state of the freedom of the press.  What is a “philosophical investigation?”  Well, apparently it’s a bunch of college professors arguing in a room for three years, a total of seventeen meetings at some $4300 per meeting (inflation-adjusted), and coming up with a book-length report that manages to say very little of substance because they couldn’t come to enough of an accord to say anything definitive on the most important and contentious issues they were purportedly “investigating philosophically.”  That’s a story for another review, though, when we review the report itself next Thursday.

Granted, it’s a little challenging to separate the two.  As history books go, this one is exceptionally focused.  Aside from some biographical information about the committee members and a few individuals associated with its work, much of the text reads as an almost blow-by-blow accounting of the committee’s work.  It somehow contrives to be exceptionally focused on its topic, replete with specifics and thorough research, and simultaneously lacking in detail.  I never thought I would say this, but its almost like Bates sought to be too objective in his presentation, when this book begged for, if not analysis, at least more interesting details.  The back and forth of various revisions is one thing to document, but it would be far more interesting to know more about how the different people interacted with each other.  Arguments and debates are referenced, but not explored in a way that would provide the reader with real insight on how the committee came to specific decisions or conclusions.

History is so often fascinating in its own right, but that is less the case here, at least for me.  Oh, the context is interesting.  It reflects our own time in intriguing ways, foreshadows it in others, while also showing what made the first half of the twentieth century such a distinctive period.  The committee and its findings, as An Aristocracy of Critics demonstrates, were more a reflection of their historical context and its members’ than they were a defining pillar of those contexts.  The immediate post-war period in particular was a time of strong feelings of both optimism and pessimism, strength and fragility, with regard to humanity and the human condition.  The chairman of the committee could chair a separate committee on the drafting of a utopic world constitution while in other pursuits expressing the fear of rising tyranny.  The book’s strength is its ability to provide that context, with all its frequently glossed-over nuances, without becoming bloated or distracted.

For all its historical context, readers are left to perform their own analyses, which is a mixed blessing.  Most of the time, it’s what I prefer, getting the history and the context, while being allowed to come to my own conclusions.  However, between the recent time period, the tight focus on a relatively minor event, and a title like An Aristocracy of Critics, I rather expected Bates to include a bit more analysis of the committee, its conclusions, and especially its long-term impacts (the book does conclude with a bit of a retrospective).  For, despite the paucity of dramatic results or assertions, and the fact that most people today have probably never heard of the commission on the freedom of the press or its report, Hutchins and his fellow committee members did in fact have, and continue to have, a pronounced impact on the press and its relationship with the American people.  What made a small splash at the time produced pervasive ripples.  When people complain today about the decline of journalistic standards and objectivity in the modern media, they are largely echoing complaints leveraged by the committee’s report, and perceiving a delta from a state of affairs in the media which arose in part because of the report’s observations.

Like Bates, I’m saving much of my analysis of the committee and its work for next week’s review.  To be frank, most of us probably haven’t even heard of the committee this book discusses.  It’s not grand or famous history like the early days of the rocket and missile program, the lives of US presidents, or the Peloponnesian war.  It’s a quieter history, but perhaps no less influential in its way.  In a country with constitutional clauses specifically forbidding the creation of noble titles, Bates shows the foundations, or at least the articulation, of An Aristocracy of Critics.