Intellectuals

Rating:
Summary: informative but sensationalist
Review: I want to start out by saying that I agree with all the criticism by my fellow reviewers regarding his selection of leftist intellectuals -- I'm sure you could write about just about any intellectual and unearth some unflattering details about their personal lives. Though I found the writing biased, to be fair to Johnson he also can be very illuminating at times -- even when he disagrees, he does a strong job of summarizing and encapsulating the views of many well known thinkers (everyone from Rousseau to Brecht to Russel). As I was reading some of the more salacious material, I find myself wondering, do I really need to know this? That one had chronic bad breath, another never based, more than one had problems with their penises -- parts of these articles could be printed in Cosmo! Though there's no doubt they were entertaining descriptions, I'm not sure it's fair to condemn them for their all too human foibles and dalliances. Many would fall under such close inspection. One picky criticism -- no need to use the world "adamantine" in so many descriptions -- I started to think he was picking intellectuals based on the ability to fit this adjective in.

I guess I've been a bit harsh. I did learn a great deal about the personal lives and the major ideas of these intellectuals. I wish Johnson hadn't been quite so savage in dissecting their personal lives. And the writing is very good.

Rating:
Summary: Hm.
Review: The reviewer below who counted Socrates as a ridiculer of the gods, of religion, and of myth apparently hasn't bothered to read such works as The Republic, Gorgias, Crito...hell, Socrates seems pretty reverent and conservative in all of his dialogues. I wonder if the said reviewer has been getting his (dis)information from Aristophanes...

Anyway, Johnson's book. I noticed that he doesn't include any ideological thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson, John Stuart Mill, John Locke, etc. My speculation is that he just wants to stay away from more traditional heroes...I mean, he could easily have scraped up some dirt on ML King, Jr., or, God forbid, even a conservative intellectual (few though they are) like Edmund Burke.

Prejudices aside, his thesis is bunk. A man's lifestyle or character don't affect the legitimacy of his ideas; and furthermore, leftist ideals are potentially just as damaging as traditional ones; ideas must be weighed on their *inherent* advantages and disadvantages, not on their perversions.

For a far more eloquent, even-handed, and necessarily complex criticism of Promethean intellectuals like, say, Percy Shelley, I recommend Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein." (Then, of course, you'll have to have read a thing or two about the man's life; and needless to say, you won't quite get the complete picture from Mr. Johnson.)

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Work Warns Us That Intellectuals Are Dangerous
Review: From Karl Marx to Tolstoy to Bertrand Russell to Jean-Paul Sarte to Hemmingway, Paul Johnson demonstrates the folly of many leading intellectuals. The proof is in the pudding, and reasonable philosophies come from reasonable people. The problem is amplified because modern society has been absorbing these approaches to life and society that failed the very authors who espoused them.

The old saying bears true of many leading intellectuals: "He is so smart, he is stupid." So many of our leading intellectuals lived anything but functional lives, and their philosophies exist to multiply their own person dysfunctionality. It is about time someone with intellectual sense exposed these men and women for the confused but brilliant people they were. Like Joe Friday on Dragnet, it's about time their own personal lives were reviewed with, "Just the facts, mam."

Unlike many modern intellectuals, Johnson is one of the few who is capable of seeing the big picture. Philosophy is about life.
If the philosophers themselves lived tortured lives, perhaps it is time we stopped blindly accepting their decreed wisdom.

Those who espouse Judeo-Christian ethics will eat this book up; those who prefer ANYTHING but Judeo-Christian ethics will despise this work. Despite the fact that the author freely interprets, the facts are brutally clear.

Rating:
Summary: Deserves ZERO stars, but anyway...
Review: I read---or tried to read---the audiobook version of this work by Mr. Paul Johnson. I took an immediate dislike to Johnson's analysis when I read the title of the first chapter: "Jean Jaques Rousseau; An interesting Madman". I knew it would be only downhill from there.

I gave up trying to finish this ludicrious [book] after I realized that his thesis was fatally flawed...and his assertion that "Intellectuals" as a class (and I agree with other critical reviewers that only left-wing/liberal/progressive Intellectuals seem to be meant by Mr. Johnson)...who "feel free to reject all of established tradition and supplant traditional religion and morality" arise at the dawn of the 18th Century.

Um, in a word, no. "They" arise with SOCRATES, who criticized and ridiculed traditional Greek religion and its pretensions at offering moral prescriptions. Socrates viewed the traditional Greek religion as superstition and full of irrational tales edifying to no one. Hence SOCRATES conceived of PHILOSPHY as a counterweight to religion and myth. If anything, 18th century men like Denis Diderot, et. al. in their harsh criticism of the Christian religion of their time, were as such merely giving new expression of an old Socratic ideal and praxis.

With Popes like the Borgias in history to reckon with, Catholic Paul Johnson sure has a lot of nerve, I can say that!

I became so disgusted with this systematic exercise in "character assasination-parading as history" that I eventually just stopped listening (I was having too many angry arguments with my car's audio cassette player) and turned the book back into my local library unfinished. Do not waste your money on a book like this....

Paul Johnson's INTELLECTUALS are for Limbaugh-esque Dittoheads who fancy THEMSELVES to be...well, Intellectuals!

Rating:
Summary: Intellectuals or "The imperfections of real human beings"
Review: Oh my.

This book had so much potential. Yes, It truly did. Here was an opportunity to study some of the most important and influential minds in the history of the world, and explore the relation of their social inadequacies to their convictions, and it fails in the worst possible way.

A few things become readily apparent before even reaching the first personality listed: Johnson's selection of "intellectuals" are liberal, and mostly atheist, something which quickly makes sense when you realize that Johnson himself is a Catholic, and frequently writes on Christian matters.

Secondly, what is most disturbing about this book is Johnson's seeming obsession with the sex lives of each individual. In actuality, the sex lives of each take up a good portion of Johnson's critiques, a fact that is made even more interesting when you consider that Johnson himself is an admitted adulterer.

As you read on you begin to get the feeling that Mr. Johnson is trying to prove that even the know-it-alls couldn't keep their zipper tucked. What this has to do with most of the "intellectuals" political or artistic interests is beyond me.

Which leads me to my next point, some of the individuals chosen had no place in this book. Shelley, Hemingway, Baldwin, Sartre, and Hellman were hardly fit for critique considering the stances that they took and promoted.

Sartre was an existentialist who favored and favored the free will of the individual, and I cannot not fathom what his "perversions" had to do with his philosophy of existentialism. If Johnson was trying to show that such non-theist beliefs only promoted sexual immorality, he failed, for even Christianity is unable to sustain that conviction in its own believers.

As for Hemmingway, he was surely not an intellectual, and Shelley's actual life was hardly contradictory to the political stances he took on. One wonders if it was Sartre's, and Shelley's atheistic approach to life which inspired Johnson to add them to his text. After all, here was a chance to show that even atheists possess some of the very same character flaws that many Christians are unable to overcome.

Even in his critique of Bertrand Russell Johnson fails to realize that Russell's philosophy was altered throughout his life, a very noble trait in my opinion. And Russell wasn't looking for God throughout his life, he was searching for his dead parents, as he often did in his garden at home as a child.

In the pages on James Baldwin, Johnson shows his complete and unadulterated ignorance to the plight of the African American during the civil rights era. It's much more feasible to suggest that Baldwin's homosexuality played a bigger part in awarding him a spot in this book.

Others, like Marx were comparable shooting fish in a barrel.

It is very simple to comprehend what Johnson's intentions with this book were: The secular left is nothing but an out of touch gang (much like the criticism leveled against Christian thinkers) of non-God fearing members, and their beliefs and progressive stances are destroying the fabric of our society. We should all get back to worshipping and fearing God as a whole, and let the pursuit of business and the status quo dictate our lives.

This is the current propaganda being dealt by the conservative right, not only in this country, but obviously in England as well.

What Johnson fails to understand overall is that, yes, indeed many individuals who are radical, and progressively minded are that way due to the experiences they have had in their life, and their disenchantment with how the world works.

Art, philosophy, and political stances are generally formed form awkward, eccentric personalities, and we generally depend on these personalities to come up with ideas. Whether we accept them, or make sense of them is up to the individual, and society as a whole. To say that intellectuals are the driving cause behind the world's problems is boring at best.

If it weren't for liberally minded individuals blacks would still be drinking form their own assigned fountains, and women would still be assigned to the back row of the Coliseum.

There's good ideas and there's bad ideas, and taking a group of individuals and insisting that they have bad ideas, and grouping them in with an imaginary group of "intellectuals" is laughable, and displays nothing but a naive, biased agenda.

Johnson's entire thesis makes very little sense. He basically states that we should be suspicious of intellectuals because they try to tell us how to live our lives. Really? Actually, when I think about it, isn't that what religious conservatives try to do? Is Johnson therefore not undermining his own personal agenda by stating such?

This same critique can be leveled against religious believers. So basically, we should be suspicious of every human being's beliefs, right?

Sounds good to me.

If anything the wrong book has been written. What we need is an account of prominent religious figures on how their message, and philosophy are trying to tell us how to live our lives. After all, intellectuals are not a group, they are individuals, and as you can see by reading this book, unlike the dominant portion of Christian thinkers, they, for the most part, differ in their stances and philosophies.

What really needs to be questioned is not an individual's search for truth or meaning, or the development of convictions based on ones experiences in society, but why such a powerful and passionate philosophy like Christianity is unable to consistently cause its believers to refrain form "immoral activity." And exactly why an inordinate amount of pedophilia exists among Catholic priests., in relation to their religious convictions.

These are the real questions to be asked about a group of particular thinkers, not why some independent thinkers come up with "naive" ideas.

And that seems to be Johnson's biggest mistake in writing this book. He fails to realize that these are individuals, and attempting to fit them in with a comparative group of believers like Christians, he is trying to perpetrate guilt by association when there is none to be made.

What you quickly witness in this book is a member of the religious right trying to create the same atmosphere of suspicion among liberal thinkers as has been created among Christian, conservative thinkers, but in the end the philosophies differ too much from individual to individual for this to be done.

Finally, Johnson's attempt to relate each thinkers personal failings with their overall philosophy never gets off the ground and seems almost abandoned shortly into the book.

Again, what Johnson's non-intellectual insight fails to realize is that what a person devises as a philosophy, and what they choose to do as an individual are separate, and say nothing about the idea itself.

If a murderer stands up and says that murder is wrong, it doesn't mean that it is unrealistic to refrain from murder because he or she was unable to. If anything what Johnson does succeed in promoting is the unrealistic notion that human beings are anything but perfect, and no doctrine can curtail what a person as an individual decides to eventually do.

We cannot expect those with convictions, and philosophical suggestions to lead saint like lives in order for their ideas to be believed.

He should keep that in mind as a Catholic, and as an admitted adulterer.

Although this books thesis is absolutely absurd, and displays a hypocrisy of the highest degree and a naiveté that even Amelia Bedelia could not touch, it is worth reading for the introduction to each individual alone.

If you are a status-quo loving non-intellectual, conservative thinker, then this book will make you squeal with delight. But if you are a more complex observer of history, and of life, then this will seem much like tabloid journalism, and conservative propaganda.

Either way it is not boring, and the idea had potential, but does nothing to add insight to each particular thinker or artist. The only tidbit of knowledge that can be gleamed form this book overall is that we should always be suspicious of anyone's absolute claims, but I think most of us already knew that.

This book was simply a means by which one could air the dirty laundry of their opposition, however fragmented, and varying they might be.

After all, wouldn't the world would be a much more interesting and progressive place if we a were all homemakers and business men?

Rating:
Summary: An attack on delusional arrogance
Review: This is a funny and truly provocative book. By "intellectual", Johnson means scientists or artists who go well beyond their abilities and try to design new codes of behavior, new systems of government and new moral rules for the humankind. That is, people who, just because they are good at doing something, think they get the moral right (and duty) to tell the rest of the world how to conduct their affairs.

Through several biographic essays, Johnson shows just how dangerous some intellectuals can become, and at the same time he shows us the low level of their ethical record. Undoubtedly, he exaggerates at some points, and in some other his gossipy is too much, but beyond that, his thesis is valid and solidly grounded. I agree with the central idea: that being a good poet, playwright or mathematician doesn't mean that one is qualified to give opinions about every possible subject, the more politicized, the better. Johnson correctly rejects utopianisms and Messiah-like behaviors. Of course, the bad moral credentials of these people does not diminish the quality of their work in the least, but the book rightly states that arrogant intellectuals are also capable of saying and doing stupid things. Don't buy it? Check out newspapers and magazines and see European and American "intellectual celebrities" talk about complex conflicts in other parts of the world, of which they know nothing but nonetheless give radical -and frequently imbecile- opinions.

Rating:
Summary: No Thinker Should Fail to Read This Book
Review: Paul Johnson's thesis was not, as suggested in the 'Editorial', that all great thinkers have had feet of clay, but that their ideologies do not stand up to the tests of time, common sense and personal practice. As the ideology of Marx claimed more than 22 million lives through the pogroms, gulags and purges of Stalin, how could anyone argue that a close and critical examination of the life of Marx, and its interplay with the communist philosophy he promulgated, is not important? I don't understand also where one reviewer draws the conclusion that Johnson is a 'Christian.' His religion is never mentioned, and is irrelevant in any event, as he uses empirical methods of analysis. The portraits are not only entertaining, THEY'RE A GREAT SHORTCUT TO ACQUIRING A WORKING KNOWLEDGE OF THE CORPUS OF MODERN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY. This is why the book is so great -- I was born too late to be intimately familiar with the works and philosophies of many of these people, yet I don't have time to read the massed collections of their works. From the remove of history, most of what Johnson concludes about them is true, but it is not a facile conclusion. I agree with his thesis that people are ultimately more important than ideas. If one agrees with this, one has to conceed the efficacy of examining the person behind the idea. And these 'intellectuals' are hillarious, pitiful and crazy. A great book for any political bent.

Rating:
Summary: The Delusion Spread
Review: Paul Johnson, a former British Liberal, driven to the middle-Right by the Looney Left in England, has done a fine job of displaying what I call the "Delusion Spread" (DS) as it relates to the intellectuals he profiles in the book. Johnson looks at them in the "Emporer has no clothes" fashion currently practiced by Bill O'Reilly on the Fox Network's "O'Reilly Factor."

The DS is the difference between how we see ourselves versus how those closest to us see us. How would they describe us and is it consistent with how we view ourselves? I maintain that those of us who see ourselves the most like our closest friends and family (see us) would probably qualify as the more emotionally healthy. In contrast, those who view themselves the most differently are probably the most delusional. Exaggerating to make the point, if someone proclaims they are Napoleon then they run the risk of getting locked up or put in the soft room until thorazine is administered. This is the delusion spread. In this book it's evident that these intellectuals see themselves as morally superior to the common man, the human litter, etc. Paradoxically, as much as they see themselves as enlightened they concurrently feel above the need to observe values they proscribe for others i.e. for society at large, and this fact is infused into the reader chapter and verse.

This book is an indispensible commentary on the irrationality of the human condition. It gives insight to the reader as to why the spontaneous ordering of free market's yields superior outcomes, for society, as opposed to the coercive utopian theories which require mass groupthink, total equality, and gulags for the "irrational" non utopians among us. Add this book to your library.

Rating:
Summary: Good book to have on your shelf
Review: 400 pages of pure judgement. However it is a good book to have on your shelf, if you have an academical interest. This book is probably of most value in combination with other more positive books on the discussed intelectuals, since the object of Mr Johnson's book was apparently to show the dark side of these intelectuals.

Rating:
Summary: GROTESQUE IRONIES
Review: To me, this is not about politics but about psychology. These people all had a nasty shadow side that they tried to compensate for by telling others how to live -- a Jungian analysis of their lives would be very interesting. Unfortunately there is very little analyses but lots of facts and irony, which no doubt contributes to the book's readability. One alternates between feelings of revulsion and amusement and as such the text reads like a thriller. My favourite part is Mary McCarthy's statement on Lilian Hellman: "Every word she's ever written is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'" and the drama that followed. The greatest of ironies is that some of these repulsive characters are still idolised after their theories have been proven to be flawed, destructive or downright murderous, and after their sickening personalities have been so brilliantly exposed.