Stability and Subversion: Thomas Hardy’s Voices

Abstract

Studying and working at a British university in the last thirty years it has struck me, though it is no very difficult insight to achieve, that the primary intellectual concern of modern times is political. A majority, perhaps, of all students everywhere have been inclined to set aside their books for the other pursuits of youth, of course — in late eighteenth-century Cambridge the estimate was made that for every reading Man there were a hundred Men tout court — but in every age there is the thing that moves people to seriousness and action, that is the dominant metaphor, the current Grand Narrative to live by. And for most students and other intellectuals the serious matter in our age has become politics. An argument can be generated more quickly on this topic than on most others, feelings more quickly aroused. Solemnity and a sharp drop in the sense-of-humour quotient are the likely result of prolonged discussion of political matters in university, as in other circles. The Left look sharply about them for evidence of a sinister and designing Right; the Right keep their heads down; the Centre, the liberally-minded well-disposed ordinary men and women of the campus or the Clapham omnibus, likely themselves to be accused of fascism if they speak up for anything as mildly non-Left as the Right-to-Life campaign or against anything as sacred as the single-parent family, remain the way they prefer to be — quiet.