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Summary: A classic exposure of nonsense and worse
Review: This book is worth having just for the chapter on Rousseau. Rousseau has got to be one of the most dubious figures in the whole Western tradition. But there is worse. Learn about it here: Rousseau refused to marry his mistress, even though they had four or five children together. Rousseau refused to RAISE those children: over his mistress's keen objections, he abandoned them all at the Foundling Hospital in Paris (where they surely died). And then he went out and wrote a book on how to raise children.Rousseau's entire life was this sort of dizzying, feverish, and insane posturing. The bits on Hemingway and Lillian Hellman are very good, and the chapter on the "gong-collector" Henrik Ibsen is great. Oh, and Karl Marx, too! The great socialist, who kept an unpaid servant all of his life.
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Summary: Paul Johnson exposes uncomfortable myths
Review: Mr. Johnson's book is an intelligible and entertaining read. His thesis is really to expose the hypocrisy of these major thinker's lives to much of their own ideas. Easy to love humanity, harder to love individual humans. Most failed miserably at the later. Much needed debunking for those enamored with the radicle left.
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Summary: Entertaining, but poor science
Review: I enjoyed his history of 1815 - 1830 very much, so I bought this without much thought, assuming it would show the genesis of certain ideas. It contains highly critical biographies of some people - Tolstoy, Hemmingway, Sartre, Brecht, and others, and says little about their ideas. Assuming that they were such bums as described, what point is proven? Where is a solid definition of what is meant by 'intellectual'? Where is a long list of those who fit and those who don't and why? How is it shown that the samples chosen for detailed study are randomly selected? And even if all this be true, once the unproven is discarded, all it says is that some people with very stong convictions tend to let those convictions blind them to truth and to common humanity. Rather tautological. Entertaining, but poor science.
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Summary: A Fine Book!
Review: This highly readable survey offers important and revealing vignettes of several of the most idolized thinkers of the past 200 years. P.J. brilliantly documents the tragic consequences of these intellectual pied pipers who placed ideas (whether utopian, hedonistic, positivistic, etc.) above people or the truth. The passage on Karl Marx, dead-beat dad and deliberate falsifier of facts, will be totally devastating to anyone dedicated to maintaining the myth of "scientific" Marxism. Mindless automatons beware! Johnson demonstrates why we should mistrust any moral leader who places concepts of "humanity" above individual human beings. I loved it!
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Summary: Intellectuals can be moral defectives
Review: Interesting study of nearly a score of great but, in several cases, deeply flawed intellects. Rousseau proved a barbarian, closer to Darwin's ooze than noble savage. This vermin dumped five of his progeny in orphan homes where the odds of dying early were astronomical. Shelley was a selfish freeloader, one step ahead of the debt collectors. His selfishness led to the death of one of his young children. Satre did well in German occupied Paris. In comparison, fellow leftist Marc Bloch served in the Resistence and was executed in 1944. A pseudo-feminist, Satre treated his women as sex objects to be discarded when he tired of them. Brecht treated his women similarly. A Commie, the evidence of Brecht's stupidity were the scores of corpses draped upon the wire along the Berlin Wall. Lillian Hellman was a compulsive liar. Hemingway was often a great liar. If I were to question Johnson's analysis, it would be that I think he overstates Connelly's influence. Johnson condemns Connelly as a guiding light for the moral decadence that rose to ascendence in the mid-1960s. Actually, Hugh Hefner, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Mick Jagger and the pampered university children of the 60s are far more to blame.
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Summary: Hear the sacred cows bellow!
Review: The previous reviewers neglect to relate Johnson's thesis in Intellectuals, that "lovers of mankind" often treat abominably the individual representatives of humanity with whom they have any dealings. He succeeds admirably in proving his point.
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Summary: Johnson is a schmuck.
Review: Johnson is a cloying, sanctimonious Christian "thinker" who simply dislikes and discards anyone whose life may not have been maintained along _his_ moral standards. He is a poseur, a journalistic pseudo-intellectual and has long been debunked. His books are largely erroneous in content and conclusion: There's nothing wrong with having an axe to grind, but he should expect the ringing of axes to follow _him_.
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Summary: Polemics at its worst
Review: Just finished reading "Intellectuals" for the second time. Still as shocked as I was first time out by the ridiculous hatchet jobs done on some of mankind's greatest thinkers. The whole exercise is that of a grubby tabloid hack looking for stains on the bedsheets. Who cares whether some arbitarily selected person was loyal to their friends or had some mistress? It really is sensationalism of the lowest order and very demeaning. Johnson's research may be sound in places but in others he clearly dosen't have a clue what he's talking about. He thus claims that Orwell joined the "anarchist" POUM in the Spanish Civil War (a very elementary mistake). Presumably Johnson didn't bother reading "Homage to Catalonia" (yet he uses Orwell's role in Spain as a stick to beat him with). As for claiming that Evelyn Waugh was an "intellectual", this has got to be a very poor attempt at a joke... Johnson's riddled-with-errors polemic against Chomsky is also laughable in the extreme. The fact that he can write (presumably without irony) that the US 'originally had a strong determination..to ensure that a democratic society had the chance to develop in Indo-China'(p. 340) and then doesn't even bother touching on Chomsky's work on this shows a writer determined to push through a personal agenda that says 'to hell with the facts'. As such, Johnson firmly aligns himself with all the other shabby little people who can't stand to see The Established Truth questioned by those pesky "intellectuals". Avoid this book unless you're interested in reading scurrilous and half-baked character assasinations that tell us little or nothing about the true worth of the great thinkers of the past and present.
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Summary: Very Fine book
Review: Johnson brings fresh analysis to topics I'd studied for years. His overview of Marx as an apocolyptic journalist is devastating, while those on trendy leftists like Lillian Hellmann are wickedly funny.
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Summary: Highly entertaining!
Review: While Johnson has taken an enormous amount of heat for this book, it has to be remembered that like any author, he has been selective in his choice of subjects to include. Naturally, he has left out those intellectuals whose lives aren't debauched enough to make for interesting reading. His point is not that these people are the worst history has produced, but simply that they aren't the glamourous, likeable, fountains of wisdom we want to believe them to be. Although many have taken this book to be a work of polemics, I do not believe Johnson takes that tone (although his motivation may polemical). We should read it as it is written: simply a report of the facts. The conclusions we draw are our own, not Johnson's
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