GoKawiilRevisiting C.P. Snow's 'Two Cultures' and F.R. Leavis's fierce rebuttal
In 1959, novelist and scientist C.P. Snow delivered Cambridge's Rede Lecture arguing that science and the humanities had split into mutually uncomprehending intellectual camps, a phrase that entered popular language as 'the two cultures.' Three years later, literary critic F.R. Leavis attacked Snow's argument as shallow and even called him a 'preposterous and menacing absurdity,' sparking one of the era's most heated intellectual feuds.