In praise of meritocracy
HAS THERE EVER BEEN A MAGAZINE quite as meritocratic as Encounter? To write for this Anglo-American monthly, which flourished from the 1950s to the 1980s, the sole criterion was to be a first-class writer or thinker on either side of the Atlantic, and to be anything but a card-carrying communist — the magazine’s reputation never entirely recovered from the 1967 revelation that it was secretly funded by the CIA. Nevertheless, to be commissioned to write for Encounter was a true accolade: it meant being elected to the most exclusive club in the English-speaking intelligentsia.
Take an issue more or less at random: July 1961. The political spectrum extends from the reactionary high Toryism of T.S. Eliot to the fashionable leftism of Mary McCarthy, from Malcolm Muggeridge’s irreverent take on the monarchy to Hugh Trevor-Roper’s takedown of his rival A.J.P. Taylor’s history of the Second World War. The writing throughout is erudite yet urbane; the editing excellent; the readership presumed to be interested in everything from the Cuba of Castro to the France of Jean Genet and Jean-Paul Sartre.
Also in this July 1961 issue is an essay by C.A.R. Crosland: “Some Thoughts on English Education”. Anthony (“Tony”) Crosland was the brightest of the club: Roy Jenkins and R.H.S. Crossman. Only Crosland, though, could claim to be the Labour Party ideologue. As the author of (1956), he had provided the blueprint for a modern social democracy: non-revolutionary (at least in the Marxist sense) but radically reformist.
