Intellectuals

Rating:
Summary: Breezy, humorous, quirky revelations
Review: Johnson wields his sword yet again. For years, the The Left has held an almost universal hold in public intellectual discourse. The result is a monochrome landscape in which only "correct" attitudes are permitted. Those thinking otherwise are dismissed out of hand. The current totalitarian nature of academic intellectual life - "non-progressive" ideas are not tolerated -is a fitting conclusion. Perhaps the rampant rise of anti-Semitism among the Left is yet another sad ending.

That said, this is not an intellectual study per se. It IS a very entertaining series of intellectual biographies of many of the major icons from the past 300 years. The question of whether one's personal foibles affect the veracity of their political ideology is an old debate. What one can say with assuredness is that intellectuals have given rise to some of the most heinous movements in the history of mankind: communism, socialism, fascism, tribalism and religious bigotry. The result of all these various experiments in tyranny were as grim as they were predictable.

Concerning the role of intellectuals, a casual study of Africa reveals that the overwhelming majority of future dictators were from academia, and their heroes were Western intellectuals. Like many featured in the book, few had any practical experience outside the world of ideas. Yet - and this is the point of the whole exercise - they and their Western counterparts were more than willing to tell the rest of us how to live. Worse, the solutions almost inevitably involved violence (Marx's secret obsession). Elaborate abstract schemes for implementing these plans percolate to the top every few years and when they prove uttery unworkable they are quietly discarded.

The essays vary in quality and detail but all are easy to digest. For a counterpoint to the prevailing winds, read this book.

Rating:
Summary: Not his best work.
Review: I loved Johnson's first book, "The Offshore Islanders". I also found his "A History of Christianity" both interesting and valuable. But this one really disappointed me. It came across as superficial, petty, and just plain "shoot from the hip". And I kept wondering how Johnson's own life as an ordinary human being, combining both brilliance and flaws in his makeup (as we all do), would read if it were written up in this same way. I also wondered how my own life would look in print, if Johnson were to report on it in as vicious and uncharitable a way as he has portrayed those of his victims in this book, and shuddered.

Not recommended.

Rating:
Summary: Beware Intellectuals!
Review: Paul Johnson takes on a line-up of first class intellectuals spanning three centuries, and declares: Beware Intellectuals.

By shining a bright light on the dark side of these very public figures - on their greed, their lust and promiscuity, their deceit and arrogance, and especially the despicable way they treated those around them, including and especially their spouse and children while proclaiming selfless love for humanity, Johnson made a strong case on how only human these luminaries truly were. And posed the question as to how fit intellectuals really were in preaching to others how they should manage their affairs.

You will find an idol or two of yours deflated as you read Johnson's well-researched book. Some would argue that the merits of a man's ideas are independent of the man himself. This is certainly true with scientific ideas (or theories), which can be empirically validated. Albert Einstein, Edward Teller, or even James Watson were not necessarily what one wants for close friends, but one would not reject the theories of relativity, thermonuclear reaction and the double-helical structure of DNA for the personal failings of these scientists. On the other hand, one must wonder aloud the value of the social theories proclaimed by the intellectuals who somehow saw their theories fit for the masses but not for themselves!

Perhaps this book is one-sided. It mostly picked on the leftists. I am afraid the raw statistics are also quite one-sided. It is the vision of the left to see themselves as an anointed group who are destined to "run things" to make a better world. Regardless, I am inclined to think that the intellectuals on the right are just as hypocritical, if fewer in number.

One key point well argued in this book is that the talent of people in one area, which renders them famous, does not give them license to mentor mankind in all affairs. One sees this folly everyday with many Hollywood and other media celebrities.

"Intellectuals" is a joy to read. While Johnson harshly critiqued the dark side of these intellectuals, he also presented them in the proper historical context and gave due to the epochal importance of their work where it was appropriate. Johnson's writing style was graceful and engaging. Like a good historian, he was meticulous with facts and data, which, though selected to support his thesis, were factual nonetheless. This book, besides being informative, has given me quite a refreshed perspective on intellectuals. It is one of those books that you read and think about again and again because it is rightly provocative.

Rating:
Summary: Slightly spiteful
Review: I enjoyed this book, but by the same token I found it slightly spiteful. It points out that all the intellectuals covered in the book did not live according to their own tenets, or highlights other weaknesses in their make-up. But is this really important in appraising their works/ideas? Personally, I don't think it is all that important, and I therefore felt that the book was almost tabloid-ish in its approach. But despite this I think it is well written (in typical Johnson fashion) and worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: Highly Readable, Highly Enjoyable, Highly Flawed
Review: First of all let me state that I really like the polymath approach that Paul Johnson takes on many of his books. There are few people that are as widely read as Johnson. I have read most his books, even ones that are out of print, and I will do so in the future.

Being enjoyable and being interesting is not the same thing as being both right and historically accurate. Johnson plays fast and loose throughout this book with his highly selective retinue of "intellectuals." Also it does not mean that one should unduly discount Johnson because in some cirles he is the doyen of the new conservatives. Most of his opinions are not ideology driven, they stem from a deep attachment to the principle that people are more important than ideas (the very foundation of liberal democracy). Unfortunately he seems to forget this at times and he defends some rather odious individuals (his defence of Richard Nixon in "Modern Times" is one glaring case in point).

The salient themes raised in "Intellectuals" can be grouped as follows:

1) Biggest problem is the age old fallacy that fault of the man makes fault with idea. The two do not follow: just because someone is morally decrepid does not NECESSARILY make their ideas decrepid. If such a thing were so it would logically mean that people who were "nice" people also always had "nice" ideas. So while Johnson's speculations are great to read, you will never be able to pillory the ideas of Marx because he was personally fiscally irresponsible.

2) Intellectuals are now the high priests of thought and of moral prescriptions for behaviour (taking over since the Reformation for the other discredited religious preists). Unfortunately Johnson unleashes his argument before he even defines what makes an intellectual. This problem of operationalisation is the one major hiderance in most of Johnson's books: if we do not know what it is that makes up an intellectual, how can we really know the real thing?

3) Intellectuals pay more heed to the "big idea" and reason than they do to actual empirical results and as a result are more ready to sacrifice individuals to an idea. Marx & Rousseau are the archetypical examples, but even people like Lillian Hellman and Noam Chomsky are more willing to defend the the use of force by decrepid autocrats and dictators than to defend the use of force by western liberal democracies. On this point he is "bang-on" and should cause people to pause to consider. It also puts him squarely in the English Empiricist camp rejecting the jaded claptrap of post-modernism.

4) As a carrollary to the above, Johnson also sees that "intellectuals are more interested in the love of mankind as a whole than they are in the love of the individual in particular". As a result you get Rousseau sleeping around with everything that has legs and money and then dropping off his ... children at the local 18th Cent. orphange where the death rate was over 90% and; Marx loving the proletariat but not having two cents to rub together to feed his family (a sponger with clearly no sense of personal responsibility) and rejecting his own role in the birth of his son.

5) "Intellectuals engage in mendacity to a degree unknown to the common man." This is where Johnson's research becomes selective and shoddy. He is rendering some very harsh judgements about certain people --- and doing it catagorically. Except in a few cases where the historical detail is widely know, it is supremely disingenuous for Johnson to render harsh judgement in cases where the jury is still out; Rousseau & Marx are well known but Hemmingway, Edmund Wilson, and Hellman are cases where such catagorical opinionising not based upon firm historical fact detract from the scholarly qualities of Johnson's journalism.

His pantheon of Intellectuals is highly selective and seems to reinforce his own conceptions of the personal failings of intellectuals. One could easily find examples of intellectuals manifesting sterling moral qualities. Whatever happened to Einstein or Orwell (two glaring oversights by Johnson of intellectuals with outstanding moral probity).

His selective approach, at a certain level, betrays a certain ideological slide towards the currently fashionable, anti-rational "conservatism". In this sense Johnson's prose skirts dangerously close to advocating a "big idea." In so doing it also, arguably puts him squarely in the very camp of intellectuals he publically excoriates.

But let's face it the man can write good history... and maybe writing good history requires historical license to produce prose this good.

Rating:
Summary: Negative ratings are the best recommendation!
Review: Paul Johnson makes the case that "intellectuals" are the high priests, the prophets of the modern era. Like the religious leaders of the more distant past, they are smart, ambitious, driven personalities that choose or invent a dogma early in life and then become trapped by their own belief system. In this, they are no different from Oral Roberts or the Ayatolah Homeini or so many other religious zealots.

That Johnson is on to something is proven by his chapter on Marx, Das Kapital and, by extension, the masses that even today follow that peculiar brand of irrational belief system we call Marxism. Marx called his religion "scientific socialism," but he turned the scientific method on its head by fishing for and, whenever convenient, inventing flimsy evidence for the consumption of eager disciples and clergy while at the same time studiously ignoring any disproving evidence. Today, people who are otherwise quite smart still believe in Marxism and in Marx, its Prophet. They discuss His every Word just as Jewish scholars might debate the Genesis myth of creation, or Christian theologians argue the finer points of St. Paul's letter to the Ephesians.

As these intellectuals progress through their life the tension between the ideological cage they have built for themselves and life's realities produce telling episodes. Johnson's insistence in looking into their personal lives for hints of the success or failure of their belief system is fully justified. After all, they are utopians; do they make even the flimsiest attempt to live the utopia they wish to impose on us mere mortals? Sometimes, like in the case of Tolstoy, they seem to try and fail; in most cases there is no evidence that the thought ever crossed their minds.

The tone of some of my fellow reviewers is an indication that Paul Johnson has hit his target. He was aiming at their belief system, always the most tender part of our egoes.

The ancients said, "in vino veritas." Johnson adds, "in drugs veritas," "in sex veritas," "in money veritas." I think it's fair. And if you don't agree, Johnson's book is at least more fun than any prime-time soap opera.

Rating:
Summary: A waste of perfectly good trees
Review: In this startling book, Paul Johnson claims to find fault with the work of many famous writers because, he says, their personal behaviour was less honourable than the ideas they created, developed or otherwise espoused. Well, gee, Paul, that's an interesting tactic. On that basis, Christianity is to be despised because Jesus was rude to his mother (or because He felt that His father, who after all ran the show, wasn't there when He needed Him.)

Or you could take the same argument and reverse-engineer it, as it were. You could say that, because Adolf Hitler was kind to animals and scrupulously courteous to women, that therefore Nazism can't have been such a terrible thing after all. OK, granted that Hitler took a while to marry Eva Braun, so he was a bit of a cad about that, not to mention that nasty business with Geli Raubal. But Josef Goebbels and Hermann Goering were happy family men, weren't they? Not to mention Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz during its period of greatest expansion. All great believers in hearth and home. It really clears things up when you look at it that way, doesn't it?

One curious fact about this, as I say, startling book is that a striking number of the Intellectuals here displayed with their moral pants down are, goodness me, left-wing intellectuals. In fact, there's scarcely a conservative to be seen. Hmmm. It does rather make you wonder about Winston Churchill, who was a lifelong Tory who, yes, helped to save Britain during the Second World War (for which I am grateful to him, seeing as my mother lived through the same) but who also happened to believe that Arabs were inferior races who didn't deserve to be treated as human. He also drank like a fish. Blimey. And yet Paul had made everything seem so clear. Now I don't know _what_ to think!

The thing about this book that - now that I've mentioned it - is actually startling, is that such an asinine, transparently foolish thesis got as far as being taken seriously by a publisher in the first place. Johnson is a right-wing bigot whose intelligence has long been corroded by his inability to appreciate any idea that refuses to serve naked power. Incapable of refuting the arguments of Marx, Rousseau and anybody else he disagrees with, he footlingly attempts to play the man instead of the ball by discrediting the personal lives of better thinkers than him. Thankfully for the rest of us, Christopher Hitchens beat him at his own game years ago, in a review of this book that told some stories about Johnson's own personal behaviour that it would be impolitic to repeat here (though you can read them yourself in Hitchens' collection "Prepared for the Worst".) In the meantime, this is the usual collection of sloppy invective, gasbag harrumphing and hawkish platitudes that Johnson-watchers have learned to expect.

I don't believe that there's a single "intellectual", of any stripe, from Gandhi to Stalin via Noam Chomsky and Norman Podhoretz, who hasn't done something that even their most faithful admirers couldn't find objectionable. Thing is, Paul, ideas have a life of their own. It doesn't matter a jot that the person who first had the idea farted in bed or borrowed a lot of money. A good idea is a good idea, and part of the responsibility of being an intellectual is to sort out the good ideas from the bad - and, in so doing, to determine the truth.

Think how many birds might have found perfectly good nests in the trees that were chopped down to print this drivel. Ah well.

Rating:
Summary: ...
Review: I'd heard of Johnson from Chomsky's "Deterring Democracy" where he is quoted as saying that Reagan was a "cowboy" and "manly" after invading the rickety island of Grenada...I feel that this book is a sign of its times; East Germany and the "Socialist Bloc" came crashing down while it was written, glastnost was big, Reaganism was seen to have "worked" (Bush numero uno had to deal with the fallout, but that was what he was there for)...the fact is Johnson thinks all leftists after Marx were socialists, and socialism is the same as Marxism-Leninism...any book were the POUM militia is labeled "anarchist" (they were really Trotskyite) flaunts the author's bad scholarship and unwillingness to read Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia", which dicusses the diferences between POUM and the anarchist CNT-FAI. I knew I was in trouble when the man did not have an introduction (which would have given the game away), and just launched into Rousseu's life...as other reviewers have written, a person's private life has nothing to do with their philosophies or intellectual work; a good example from science is Richard Feynman, who made great advances in the field of quantum mechanics while schtupping a married woman! Stephen Hawking also did great work in Feynman's field while running off with his nurse! I find it really funny that Paul decided to go after Tolstoi; when I went to private Christian schools, they had us read Lev Nik'itch's work, namely because he was against the Orthodox Church (as bad as Catholicism according to Baptists) and the Tzar. The short bit on Chomsky is a laugh; Johnson uses the same old attacks as every other Noam-debunker (Chomsky supported Pol Pot, they say) and then claims the prof is "inacessible." Paul could have written Chomsky at MIT, but preferred not to, knowing full well that Chomsky would trounce him. Marx also comes in for a beating, namely on the grounds of being a crummy father and an unfaithful husband (the latter could also be said of Johnson.) In short if you support state power and corporations, you are not seen by Johnson (Rand, Burke, Adam Smith, Buckley, etc.), but IF YOU DON'T, in you go. Johnson's motto: Thinking is Bad. Martin Luther: same motto expressed, except in German....

Rating:
Summary: Beware Intellectuals
Review: In this lively entertaining biographical study of 12 leading thinkers of the past three hundred years, British historian Johnson
has a number of aims. First and foremost, he seeks to cut down the reputation of these particular individuals by showing their foibles and hypocrisy. In this he succeeds marvelously. Second, he seeks to prove a thesis that the profiled persons are part of a larger class of intellectuals who all display common traits and by discrediting the profiled 12, he aims to discredit the others by extension. In this, he is less succesful.

Johnson defines the term "intellectual" as used in this book,at its core as, among other things, a thinker who believes in the power of ideas to effect human society. Further refining this notion, he particularly singles out those who believe in "ideas rather than people." That is to say, intellectuals favor theory over the wealth of human experience. Along these lines, the intellectuals he profiles all have the trait of regarding truth as inferior to the promotion of the ideas or theories in which they believe. While demonstrating the "intellectuals lack of regard for truth and empirical experience, Johnson shows how almost to a man (and in the case of Lillian Hellman a woman) these people were awful in their private lives. The common theme is selfishness and self-centeredness. Johnson makes an excellent case that the twelve intellectuals he profiles are hypocritical and in some cases even venal persons. He further makes a case that intellectually, their ideas are largely bankrupt.

The twelve he profiles in detail are Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Brecht, Russell, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Gollancz and Hellman. He goes on to briefly profile a number of modern figures including Mailer and Chomsky. What each of these individuals have in common is that they are, to some extent or other, of the left That is to say, to some extent or other, each opposed, usually to a radical degree, the existing social order. The 20th century figures almost uniformly were involved with the communist party. Anyone familiar with Johnson knows how contemptuous he is of the left, particularly the radical left. He makes a strong case against these leftists. Virtually none of them lived anything resembling the life they espoused for the masses. Johnson shows in great detail their cruelty to the people close to them, their prejudices, their disregard for higher truth, their self absorption and in some cases, dangerous flirtation with mankind's basest instincts.

After reading the book, however, I am left with a few questions. First, why is Johnson's definition of intellectual limited in the fashion it is. If Johnson's definition is accepted , then his case is strong, but what about other thinkers and philosophers who do not fit in to Johnson's narrow parameters? Just by way of definition, none of the thinkers associated with the American revolution are profiled. Were Jefferson, Hamilton and Madison not intellectuals? I suppose they fall outside Johnson's scope because they were men of action who actually made a revolution and created a new system of government. But to me, they are intellectuals. What of Locke and Hobbes? What of Bentham and Mill? What of Keynes? These are all intellectuals whose ideas had a substantial impact on the development of Western civilization. The founding fathers in particular were astute judges of human nature and never allowed "theory" to get in the way of workable ideas. This is why the American experiment succeeded so marvelously. I happen to know for a fact that Johnson agrees with this assesment. But they are not intellectuals to him. I think the book would be stronger if Johnson explained why he does not classify thinkers he admires as
intellectuals. As it stands, the book is an excellent expose of these twelve figures and exposes them as frauds by any definition so the book is worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: High-brow gossip column?
Review: First off, you should know that this is an incomplete review. Why? I only made it to page 107. Why? I was in the mood to read a book discussing intellectuals in a way that was....intellectual. This was not the book I should've picked out.

The first chapter starts out with the social philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Without so much as stating a thesis or goal, Johnson launches an attack. Doesn't even wait untill you're into the book (ideally meaning the 20th page or so). The second intellectual was Percy Shelley...same treatment from Johnson. Next Marx and Ibsen, same formula. So what is Johnson's goal?

First, it will be obvious to anyone familiar with Johnson that he has a definite bias to the right (the counterpart of Howard Zinn) and one has to ponder whether he would feel the same enjoyment- it does come through in his writing- if he were dissin' on de Maistre instead of Marx?

This means that the inferred objective- remember, Johnson states no thesis- of exposing hypocritical intellectual figures is simply a subterfuge. I will admit, sometimes Johnson has good points as when he rightly criticizes Marx for distorting figures that differ from his ideology while at the same time, professing science. Yes, exposing flaws that affects an intellectuals professions to the public (as it is a 'public' role)is the kind of thing the historian/journalist should point out. But more often than not, Johnson is criticizing Rousseau's private tempermant and Shelleys sexual ethics.

Let's be honest. The politician is judged by how she fulfills her 'public' duty, the novelist and philosopher are judged by the work they write for 'public' consumtion. If you really care if the characters in the above professions cheat on their spouses, get drunk or don't believe in god, then and only then should you think about reading this book. Better yet, go to the supermarket and just buy the National Enquirer!