Reflecting on his experience of delivering the BBC Reith Lectures the previous year, in 1993, Edward Said contrasted the Arab world’s assumption that “London [the BBC] always tells the truth” with British critics who insisted that because he was “active in the battle for Palestinian rights”, he should be “disqualified for any sober or respectable platform”. “It was often said by complaining journalists and commentators that I was a Palestinian,” Said wrote, and that to be so was “synonymous with violence, fanaticism, killing Jews … Nothing by me was quoted.” The Sunday Times misrepresented Said as “anti-Western”, despite him engaging extensively with European thought, and relocating to the US; critics incorrectly accused him of citing only leftwing thinkers, despite the French conservative writer Julien Benda forming a crucial part of his argument. His critics’ accusation was, Said argued, a confession. It was they who were ideologically blinkered by the UK’s pseudo-intellectual class, “the insiders, experts, coteries [and] professionals who … mould public opinion, make it conformist [and] encourage a reliance on a superior little band of all-knowing men in power.”’
Republished by Fitzcarraldo Editions as Representations of the Intellectual, Said’s six BBC lectures and the introduction he wrote in 1994 remain prescient. As the British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad puts it in a new preface, western intellectuals today are “far more likely to serve the status quo than to challenge it”, drawing a line from German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s involvement in drafting the Nazis’ Nuremberg laws to Russian far-right thinker Aleksandr Dugin’s close relationship with Vladimir Putin to Christopher Hitchens and the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, who supported the invasion of Iraq.
Said maintains that an intellectual should “represent reality for a public” but “never function as a representative of any given system or authority”. Hammad commends this noble ideal, though notes that the “abstract universals” upon which it relies are “being blown out of the water” by the Israeli and US governments. The “post-war order” – always rigged in favour of the west – is collapsing, says Hammad, and the public sphere has been hollowed out as a means of making it harder to combat authoritarianism. As a result, intellectuals cannot assume any baseline principles for engagement with their opponents: they have fewer platforms on which to express their ideas, and those that remain (such as the Reith lectures) do not feed into any wider political debates or media culture.
Certainly, reading the lectures in 2026, the more pessimistic passages stand out, such as Said’s insistence that the intellectual remain an outsider, even if they often feel “powerless” in the face of “an overwhelmingly powerful network of social authorities – the media, the government and corporations, etc. – who crowd out the possibilities for achieving any change”. Said argues we cannot speak of “the intellectual” as a universal type, instead locating them within their national context. I will therefore respond to his lectures by looking at the British public sphere, which so surprised Said with its mendacity, where collusion between media, government and corporations has installed a succession of unpopular administrations pursuing disastrous domestic and foreign policies that appear to be leading the country headlong into the arms of the far right. They have also created an ecosystem that has no use for intellectuals – the cases for austerity or genocide were made primarily by politicians, op-ed writers and talk show panels bombarding the public, in line with Steve Bannon’s strategy of “flooding the zone”.
A perennial question.
The question of what an intellectual is has been discussed for decades, if not centuries. Said defined it as someone whose entire being is staked on their unwillingness to accept “what the powerful and conventional have to say”, and their willingness to say so in public. The intellectual should take up the task of representing the suffering of their own people without hypocrisy or cowardice. As examples of such intellectual hypocrisy, Said noted the 19th-century liberal thinkers Alexis de Tocqueville, whose assessment of US democracy criticised its treatment of indigenous people and Black slaves, but whose writings on French colonial policies in Algeria demonised Muslims and justified imperialism; and John Stuart Mill, whose “commendable ideas about democratic freedoms in England … did not apply to India”.
In centres of Western power, the intellectual’s job should be to question received ideas, argues Said. For him, this meant the generalisations about Islam and its supposed incompatibility with democracy or human rights that prevailed in the Anglosphere after the cold war, and which intensified during the war on terror, with catastrophic results. Said lived to see the worst of this, dying in New York in September 2003, two years after 9/11. His analysis has only grown more relevant since, with the suspension of democratic norms in the US and UK after 9/11 crystallising in Biden and now Trump’s facilitation of the Gaza genocide; Trump’s use of ICE to deport immigrants and summarily execute citizens; and Trump’s abduction of another country’s leader for the express purpose of taking its natural resources, for which the American and British right-wing media scramble to manufacture consent. Democracy and human rights were only their concern insofar as arguing for them to be imposed on the Middle East was a precursor to stripping them away from their own citizens.
Said identified the structural threats to free thinking in nominal democracies – a “system that rewards intellectual conformity” through an honorary degree, prizes or an ambassadorship, or even just keeping your lucrative income as a political commentator, working its propaganda on them more insidiously than any dictatorship (presumably Said kept this potential compromise in mind when he accepted awards from Harvard, the New Yorker and elsewhere.) McCarthyism was an egregious exception to this, as whole careers were built on “proving the evils of communism, or repentance, or informing on friends and colleagues” (like George Orwell, a secular saint for a certain brand of pro-war centre-right thinkers). Otherwise, the media has tended to marginalise and sometimes censor certain viewpoints without governments needing to intervene, especially as it has come under the control of the wealthy: the British public sphere has increasingly become a hostile environment for critics of British foreign policy, or of anyone who calls out the corrupt relationship between the press, government and corporations: think of Peter Oborne resigning from the Telegraph after he was not allowed to criticise HSBC, or more recently, Gary Lineker being hounded out of the BBC after expressing support for the Palestinians.
The intellectual is synonymous with developments in information sharing. Said correctly identified a shift in the nature of the western intellectual with the advent of mass media, which allowed intellectuals to talk directly to the public. Said dates this to 1968, with the spread of television – a strange choice, given that radio broadcasting was commonplace long before World War II. In the UK, it goes back earlier to 1922 and the BBC’s foundation, with its high-minded intention to “inform, educate and entertain” the British public. The first Reith Lectures went out on the radio waves in 1948, delivered by one of Said’s inspirations, British philosopher and aristocrat Bertrand Russell.
The institutions of broadcasting allowed the public intellectual to develop in very particular ways, create an environment in which they could discourse on a wide range of subjects, interact with people in different fields and even experiment with form. In his memoir about his time working for the BBC, novelist Rayner Heppenstall discusses various writers, artists and philosophers given platforms on the station – TS Eliot, Graham Greene and Muriel Spark among them. They soon made the transition to television; by the late 60s, they were not just giving lectures, but writing TV plays or devising their own formats that let them communicate their ideas in inventive, memorable ways: John Berger’s innovative art history series Ways of Seeing, novelist BS Johnson’s hilarious one-off documentary on Samuel Johnson, Black British intellectual Stuart Hall deconstructing racist tropes on the BBC. Over time, thanks in large part to the lie that the market will determine what people want, as well as various governments since Thatcher’s laying waste to the BBC, there is little more option for the intellectual now besides constant debate – usually paired with a very rightwing voice such as that of Matthew Goodwin, Douglas Murray or Melanie Phillips.
A problem here is that claims of marginalisation and censorship, however dishonest and made in bad faith, have been one of the far-right’s biggest weapons in getting a foothold in liberal discourse, then taking over their democracies and dismantling their limited, hard-won freedoms, or persuading nominally centrist parties to do it for them. Pretending that their views could not be heard anywhere in mainstream discourse when they dominated every newsstand in the country, while insisting on being allowed to take part in a debate from which their ideas had never been excluded, was their strategy, with the bonus of debasing the mere concept of intellectual bravery. It has reaped richer dividends than they ever could have imagined, ever since Nick Griffin went on Question Time in 2009. The triumphant crowing about how Griffin’s dismal performance destroyed the British National party (BNP) was inaccurate – the BNP’s support went up after the broadcast, and once the party collapsed over internal disputes, the stage was set to get Nigel Farage, who branded himself the respectable face of the far right, appearing on Question Time 38 times between 2000 and 2024. Meanwhile, the BBC censors the Reith Lectures of leftists to be gentler on Trump, who is currently suing the corporation for $5bn (£3.7bn).
The questions were never asked: what is the purpose of such “debates”? Who sets their terms, and who decides who wins? What if the victory is simply to be in them? It certainly was for the far right, who used them to personally boost their profile and income from their ersatz controversies and cohere an audience around shared grievances. As what Stuart Hall called “the great moving right show” has progressed, the far right has taken advantage of the conservative and liberal tendency to portray itself as objective and to portray the left as biased by virtue of identity, to cast groups such as Palestinians or trans people as unreliable narrators of their own oppression. Once the far right has taken power, they have no further need for debate – and so, consign the whole charade to irrelevance.
All this paints a far bleaker portrait of the intellectual environment than Said’s lectures – and I haven’t even mentioned the effects AI is having on information or art, nor even the unlikelihood of someone as radical as Said being asked to give the Reith Lectures now, or the censorship of Rutger Bregman’s criticism of Trump in last year’s series. However, it reaffirms the question Hammad asks in her preface: “How from the rubble shall thinkers make the world anew?” The first step is for anyone in the public sphere to take the genuine risk of calling out the lies being orchestrated by far-right politicians, the media that has pushed their agenda, the cowardly individuals who have kept quiet (or worse) and the institutions that have fallen in line. This act of clearly, constantly stating what is happening will likely mean losing income and status, and possibly more as we lurch ever further and faster into fascism, but intellectuals now may have to appeal to the future to vindicate them, as did some of their predecessors nearly a century ago.
We already have means of building a better, more inquisitive and interrogative alternative to the billionaire-owned mass media and government-controlled broadcast networks – even if on a shoestring. It was depressing, if grimly inevitable, that establishment voices got in on the relatively cheap and accessible medium of podcasting, but the way it has allowed a far wider range of people to discuss ideas and histories in-depth without having to go through any gatekeepers point towards Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s idea, cited by Said, that “all men are intellectuals, but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals”. Said makes much of this argument, calling on people motivated by “love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture” to share ideas on a wide range of political and cultural matters, ignoring the professionals who insist these be left to them.
From there, the colossal work of rebuilding a public sphere adequate to our political conjuncture remains. UK writers Dan Hind and Tom Mills have done extensive work on reforming the British media, particularly the BBC, suggesting that it be mutualised to create more space for people from all walks of life to explore ideas in depth, rather than having to cram them into unenlightening slanging matches. For all that’s changed, Said’s principles for a worthwhile intellectual life – in particular, remaining independent despite the financial temptations offered by governments or institutions, and being relentlessly honest, whatever the risks – are as vital as ever.
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