Richard Hoggart and UNESCO

It might nevertheless be expected that I would have revealing insights to share with the reader on Hoggart’s contribution to specific debates of ideas within UNESCO. This cannot be the case, for I was but an ex-graduate student in social anthropology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, with scant experience of professional life and only slight acquaintance with the topics for which my mentor was responsible. Such debates probably took place, but I was not a party to them. This no doubt handicaps my present piecing together of now distant memories (I kept no diary at the time) and is clearly a lacuna, given the purpose of the volume to complement or shed light on the positions Hoggart has taken as a public intellectual and commentator in Britain. That being said, in the perspective of the long passage of my own professional life within UNESCO until 2002 and beyond it since, I can share with the reader some of Hoggart’s deontological positions that have become reference points for many colleagues in my generation of international officials. I shall therefore explore three sets of principles I see him as having inculcated: principles regarding the use of language, the intellectual debate, and the ‘fine fictions’ that underlie the corporate ideology of the organisation. Then, somewhat riskily perhaps, I shall extrapolate from my memories of these positions to imagine how Hoggart might address certain issues that are much debated in the cultural policy field today. Before doing so, however, some further introductory remarks on a more personal note.