48 SOCIAL SCIENTIST west, the humanities have been the preserve of ruling-class culture, a privileged domain to which birth and connections gave one access: this is the face that Hardy's Jude sees as, excluded, he looks longingly towards the spires of 'Christminster'. But the ways in which the practice of the humanities in the west has been affected by the fact that it embodied and articulated the knowlege deemed appropriate for 'free* men—the 'liberal arts'—in a society in which the majority of people were unfree is, still, a separate story. Because one would have to be hopelessly romantic—or, better, blind—to suppose that the dominance of our own post-colonial ruling class is mediated through anything indicating a familiarity or even a passing acquaintance with the culture of the humanities. It is only too clear that science and even more technology is the core of a new kind of elitism. (As for the provincial elites, their dominance is increasingly mediated not through any ideologically engineered consensus—though archaic loyalties of caste and community have served well in their time, and it appears might still have some use left in them—but rather through naked force.) However, in such a situation, there is a historic responsibility that devolves upon the humanities—a responsibility that they are historically ill-equipped to fulfil. It is in the humanities alone that the implicit shapes of our possible futures can be conceived of and thought about, it is here that our nation can awake to self-consciousness. If we are not to go stumbling into the abyss that yawns beyond the glamorous hoarding superfluously announcing the advent of the twenty-first century, the practice of the humanities would itself hav^ to be humanised. It would have to be inflected (and infected) with that hunger for totality which is its raison d 'eire, even in these hard times.