In a profile of the historian Perry Anderson, which appeared in the New Statesman in 1999, Edward Skidelsky noted that Anderson’s exchange about British history with the historian E P Thompson in the mid-1960s was “as interesting and as revealing as the better-remembered ‘Two Cultures’ debate between FR Leavis and CP Snow” of a couple of years earlier. There, in an essay first published in the New Statesman, Snow argued that the country was suffering from a deeply ingrained, peculiarly British division between “two cultures”, the sciences and the arts. Scientists had the future in their bones, while writers were Luddites with a tendency to fascism. Since in Britain literature was on top and science, at best, on tap, the upshot was the decline of the British nation, which was going the way of the Venetian Republic.
The so-called debate or controversy between Snow and Leavis was no such thing. It was an asymmetric contest between an intellectual, the literary critic Leavis, and the ludicrous pretensions of the vulgar technocrat Snow. Anderson versus Thompson, by contrast, was a serious bout between two intellectual giants. To put Anderson’s brilliant “Origins of the Present Crisis” – the essay which sparked the debate after it appeared in the journal New Left Review in 1964 – alongside Snow’s The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959) is to compare a work of dazzling range and insight with one of plodding portentousness; the first glitters still, the other always groaned.
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