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A Biography of Christopher Hitchens As a Public Intellectual

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A Biography of Christopher Hitchens As a Public Intellectual The Public Intellectual: Continuity as a Pre-Requisite for Credibility? A Biography of Christopher Hitchens as a Public Intellectual. MA Thesis in European Studies Graduate School for Humanities Universiteit van Amsterdam Author: Glenn Walters Student number: 11108304 Main Supervisor: Dr. Guido Snel Second Supervisor: Dr. Alex Drace-Francis June, 2016 1 Table of Contents x. Introduction .................................................................................................................. 3 xi Theoretical Framework ........................................................................................................... 3 xii Methodology ......................................................................................................................... 6 1. Chapter One: Christopher Hitchens’ Life and Writing Career .......................................... 9 1.1 Autobiography and Hitch-22 ................................................................................................. 9 1.2 Early life, Oxford University, and the International Socialists .............................................. 10 1.3 Bohemian Bloomsbury and The New Statesman ................................................................. 13 1.4 America and The Nation ..................................................................................................... 17 1.5 Vanity Fair and the 1990’s .................................................................................................. 20 1.6 Later Career and American Citizenship ................................................................................ 22 2. Chapter Two: Criticisms of Hitchens and Attacks on Credibility .................................... 25 2.1 Attacks on Personal Integrity .............................................................................................. 25 2.1.1 Friendship with Edward Said .............................................................................................. 27 2.2 The Political Flip-Flopper .................................................................................................... 29 2.3 Accusations of Imperialism ................................................................................................. 31 2.4 The Left Wing Apostate ...................................................................................................... 33 2.5 A Note on Aesthetic Rupture .............................................................................................. 38 3. Chapter Three: Re-establishing Hitchens’ Credibility as a Public Intellectual ................ 41 3.1 Reconsidering Hitchens’ Personal Integrity: Did Hitchens Have a Case Against Clinton? ...... 41 3.1.1 Sidney Blumenthal .............................................................................................................. 42 3.1.2 Friendship with Edward Said .............................................................................................. 43 3.2 A Political Flip Flopper or Contrarian? ................................................................................. 45 3.2.1 Hitchens’ Marxism and Attraction to Revolutionary Dynamism ........................................ 47 3.2.2 Opposition to Totalitarianism and Conflation with Religion .............................................. 49 3.3 Imperialist or Internationalist? ........................................................................................... 52 3.4 The Left Wing Apostate? ..................................................................................................... 56 3.5 A Note on Perceived Aesthetic Rupture .............................................................................. 60 4. Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 63 4.1 Deconstructing Contrarianism ............................................................................................ 63 4.2 Assessing Public Intellectuals .............................................................................................. 67 5. Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 70 2 x. Introduction This thesis is ostensibly a consideration of the life and works of the late Anglo-American polemic, journalist, author, and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011). Hitchens’ life and politics were seemingly characterised by discontinuities: From gadfly to imperialist, or internationalist to left wing apostate; critical and chronicling discourse is littered with allusion to rupture and contradiction. A polarising figure, detractors frame the dialectical Christopher Hitchens as incoherent and thus lacking credibility as a public intellectual. It is consideration of this concept which forms the corpus of this thesis. The following investigation of Hitchens’ life and intellectual output and will inform a second layer of enquiry. By using Christopher Hitchens as a case study, broader questions will be asked and answered about the role and nature of public intellectuals: what characterises public intellectuals?; how do they engage the public sphere?; should they perform a specific role?; can public intellectuals traverse British and American public spheres?; and, crucially, what is the relationship between consistency of political ideology and credibility? xi Theoretical Framework Scholarly theory of public intellectuals and the contexts in which they operate provides the framework for this investigation into Christopher Hitchens. Born in Portsmouth, England in the years following the allied defeat of Nazi Germany, Hitchens grew into a tradition of western European public intellectuals that had arisen as an oppositional class, fighting ‘retrograde and repressive ideologies,’ which had come into focus during the anti-Semitic Dreyfus affair that occurred at the turn of the twentieth century.1 Unlike the philosophes of the eighteenth century (the intellectual forefathers of Julian Benda and Emile Zola) who ‘frequently acted as individuals,’ the public intellectuals of post-Dreyfus Europe formed a self-conscious societal group.2 These twentieth century public intellectuals were distinguished by non-academic specialisation: They had the ability to speak authoritatively 1 Jules Chametzky, “Public Intellectuals: Now and Then,” Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (2004), Vol. 29, Accessed 30 May, 2016: 212, http://jstor.org/stable/4141851 2 Chametzky, “Public Intellectuals: Now and Then,” 212. 3 on a broad range of societal issues; people such as Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre in Europe, or Norman Mailer and Noam Chomsky in America. Christopher Hitchens began his career in England before moving to America in 1981 on the cusp of what many scholars view as an epoch change in public intellectualism. Michael Ignatieff writes in his article Decline and Fall of the Public Intellectual that on Sartre’s death ‘a chapter which had begun in Paris in 1733, when Voltaire published his letters concerning the English Nation, came to an end,’3 prompting Ignatieff to ask in 1997 ‘who is left to speak for the public.’4 The end of the Cold War blurred oppositional ideological lines and for many marked the death of the public intellectual. This pessimistic outlook for the prospects of the public intellectual was captured in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man. If human social evolution was to end with the apparent hegemony enjoyed by western liberal democracy, the public intellectual would surely be doomed to become an anachronism. Other scholars accept that the time of the authoritative generalist is over, but that public intellectualism continues to exist, only in different forms and with an uncertain future. Patrick Baert and Josh Booth emphasise the role of the ‘digital age’ in the ‘motives and means by which intellectuals engage their publics.’5 The post-modern technological revolution facilitates a ‘democratisation’ of the public sphere,6 although intuitively this could also engulf public intellectualism in the perceived dumbing down occurring in wider society. Barbara Misztal also sounds a warning in her analysis of increasing academic specialisation and the rise of think tanks in the intellectual space. These experts and knowledge brokers may have a limiting effect on the role of other public intellectuals, ‘and their monopolisation of the public forum could represent a threat to the quality of public debates.’7 It is in this intellectual landscape that theorised a changing role for the public intellectual that Hitchens career unfolded, and it is this landscape that thus provides the theoretical framework for this thesis. But what are public intellectuals and what do they do? There is much scholarly opinion on the matter. Jules Chametzky offers a compact definition that public intellectuals are ‘those who attempt to influence social and political events and reality directly with their ideas.’8 3 Michael Ignatieff, "Decline and fall of the public intellectual," Queen's Quarterly (1997), Vol. 104, accessed 30 May, 2016: 394-403, http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA30102430&v=2.1&u=amst&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w 4 Ignatieff, "Decline and fall of the public intellectual," 394-403. 5 Patrick Baert and Barbara Misztal, “A Special Issue on Public Intellectuals,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society (2012), Vol. 25, accessed 30 May 2016: 91, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23279949
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