Listening-In, Tuning Out

Abstract

During the 1930s and 1940s, Leonard Woolf appeared regularly on British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) radio, lecturing on topics as diverse as the British Empire, democracy, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and pedagogy. Focusing on his BBC broadcasts of the 1930s as well as several of his letters and essays, this chapter sees Woolf as an important public intellectual. His writings and broadcasts on BBC policies served to redefine the role of the public intellectual in British cultural life. If radio during this period was a site of ethical struggle, then Woolf's talks on the BBC and writings about BBC policy provided a sustained intervention within this debate. His work attempted to manage how people received information and gained knowledge, and in reality, it is possible to understand how both the BBC and Woolf shared a vision of broadcasting as a form of education.