In 1932 German intellectual life was the best in the world. The country had won a third of all Nobel Prizes since 1901. Then came Hitler, and soon Einstein was at Princeton, Hannah Arendt in New York, Bertolt Brecht in Hollywood, Walter Gropius at Harvard etc. Britain is still profiting from that same exodus: the writer Judith Kerr and architect Richard Rogers were refugees from fascism, as were Lucian Freud, Eric Hobsbawm, Ernst Gombrich and countless others before them. Today the dominance of English helps sustain the US and UK as the two intellectual superpowers. Eight of the world’s top 10 universities in the Shanghai rankings are American; two are Oxbridge.
Those ten will remain great, but broader intellectual supremacy by any country is always unstable. Good thinkers will move for money, a welcome, freedom of inquiry and the company of other minds. The US and UK are losing dominance in all those things. We’re moving into a multipolar intellectual world.
British dominance has been extraordinary. This is a mid-sized, modestly well-off country with mostly mediocre schools, yet as the biologist Richard Dawkins noted in 2013: “Trinity College, Cambridge, has more Nobel Prizes than any country except USA, Britain, Germany and France.”