An Irish Clerisy of Political Economists? Friendships and Enmities Amongst the Mid-Victorian Graduates of Trinity College, Dublin (Scholars and Rebels in Nineteenth Century Ireland) (Book Review‪)‬

Eagleton, T. Scholars Et Rebels in Nineteenth Century Ireland. Blackwell. Oxford, 2000. Pp. 177. ISBN 0-631-21445-3. Terry Eagleton, the Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University and irreverent commentator on all things post-modern, has written an astonishing book on that remarkable community of intellectuals that raised Trinity College, Dublin, and indeed the town of Dublin itself, to its cultural and scholastic apogee in the second half of the nineteenth century. The work is the final part of a trilogy of books by Eagleton on the main cultural currents of Irish history, the first two of which were Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995) and Crazy John and the Bishop (1998). The intellectuals he examines in the final part of this series include, amongst others, William Wilde (Oscar Wilde's father), Jane Elgee (Lady Wilde), Charles Lever, William Edward Lecky and Samuel Ferguson, and, which will be of slightly more interest to the readers of the hermetic articles of staid economic journals, that curious melange of nineteenth-century Irish political economists, Isaac Butt, T.E. Cliffe Leslie, John Elliot Cairnes and John Kells Ingram. Eagleton is interested less in tracing the individual theoretical contributions of these scholars, and more with delineating their activities as a community or clerisy and, through this exercise, meditating on the role of the intellectual in society. To this end, he draws upon Antonio Gramsci's celebrated notions of the 'traditional' and 'organic' intellectual to portray the Irish intellectual community as being torn between old and new visions of the intellectual's function; that is, between the 'traditional' intellectual's search for transcendent values through disinterested inquiry and the 'organic' intellectual's employment of knowledge as a 'practical, emancipatory force' (1999:2). Eagleton argues that, as the nineteenth century progressed, Irish intellectuals shifted their allegiance between these two visions (in either direction) in response to the rising threat of Gaelic nationalism. He therefore, not surprisingly, depicts the intellectual as having a social purpose, opening his work with the following striking definition: 'Not all intellectuals are intelligent, and not all the intelligent are intellectuals. The word "intellectual", like "hairdresser" or "chief executive", denotes a social function rather than a personal quality' (1999:1). Such epigrammatic agility and felicity of style is a feature of the book, and Eagleton may be seen as sustaining that great English tradition of writing on literary, cultural and sociological matters--including all of those fertile 'isms' of disreputable European origins that recently nearly brought this tradition to an end--in a way that any educated reader, with a little effort, can comprehend. My only complaint is that, as with most writers in the field of cultural studies, he is not above affronting the senses by employing the occasional jarring neologism and, which is only slightly less pernicious, rushing forward from one observation to the next without spelling out their implications in a declaratory manner. It is indeed becoming increasingly apparent to me that closure of argument is left to the reader in cultural studies, and this perhaps explains why Eagleton's chapters end abruptly and the book itself has no concluding chapter.