Guy Ortolano: The Two Cultures Controversy. Science, Literature and Cultural Politics

In 2009 C. P. Snow’s seminal lecture on “The Two Cultures” celebrated its 50th anniversary triggering a number of publications, among them Guy Ortolano’s book. The historian Ortolano sets the lecture, its context, and F. R. Leavis’s 1962 attack “Two Cultures? The Significance of C. P. Snow” within the framework of a number of related post-world war debates ascribing the intensity of the dispute to a controversial inter - pretation of the present and the history of the Industrial Revolution. According to Snow, Western societies are losing ground in industrial progress because of a growing gap between the underprivileged sciences and the politically dominating arts, whereas Leavis sees the lack of humanity in contemporary culture caused by a “technologico Bentha - mism”. Ortolano detects a number of common points between Snow and Leavis as a possible further source for the tension – e.g. a basically liberal, anti-Marxist, anti-Tory outlook, and the rise from a lower middle class social background to a professional status. Quantitatively, Snow, scientist, administrator, novelist and man close to and part of the corridors of power, is paid far more attention than Leavis, the controversial and self-styled renegade Cambridge don.

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