Intellectuals

Rating:
Summary: Amazing in its depth and relevance
Review: What Paul Johnson does, that many are afraid to do, is take a serious look at the lives of people who have shaped Western culture, and acknowledge their many short-comings. People from Hemmingway to Tolstoy are revealed to be quite human and undeserving of universal unqualified praise

Rating:
Summary: Johnson is a snob
Review: As stated below a real waste of research.Anyone who reads this book,MUST read Chrisitopher Hitchens essay on Johnson in "For The Sake of Argument"

Rating:
Summary: All that great research gone to waste
Review: Paul Johnson has attempted to analyze the lives of the most influential thinkers in modern history. His analysis centers on whether these individuals in their private lives lived up to the standards they argued for publicly. It has been a couple of years since I read this book, but I still recall the revulsion I felt when reading this uneven account. His research on the individuals, I must admit, is impeccable. His logical skills, however, are truly bordering on non-existent. In several sections, although his facts about the individual are accurate, he interprets them in a way that can only be politely called 'creative'. The real theme of this book, and the argument that Paul Johnson continually presents is the 'tyranny of ideas'. He honestly believes that ideas themselves are inherently damaging. As I recall, he refers to Rousseau as the intellectual father of modern day communism, and actually goes so far as to blame him for the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. He conveniently forgets that Rousseau's biggest influence on political thought is most likely found in the creation of the government of the United States. No mention of this is made. In fact, no attempt at an even account of any of these individuals is made. If a fact sheds a positive light on the person, it is discounted. If it seems to support one of his pre- conceived notions, it is focused on has having much higher import. It is a tabloid style approach to biography, and should be treated as such. If you are only interested in the seamy side of the lives of famous thinkers, this is the book for you. If you really want to know about the lives of these people, pick up an objective biography of each of them, and take the time to judge for yourself. This book is just well-researched anti-intellectual propaganda.

Rating:
Summary: Colorful Characters
Review: I'm still not quite sure what the point of this book was. Was it to A) present brief biographies of intellectuals showing them for the brilliantly egotistical, contradictory souls that they surely were, or was it to B) attempt to invalidate their publicly stated philosophies by showing that they didn't always live up in their personal lives? As an attempt at the first, the book is succesful and fascinating. As an attempt at the second, it is misguided and just stupid. If I say that it's not right to murder, and I then go out and murder people, does it make my statement any less true? Would any of our personal lives really hold up as squeaky clean under this type of scrutiny? Would the author's? It's still a very interesting and well written book though- thus the 4 stars....



Rating:
Summary: Rousseau was a jerk? Imagine that.
Review: The first thing worth noting is the silly review by Amazon's Gregory McNamee. His chosen examples of "foibles" noted by Johnson are Ibsens vanity and Sartre's incontinence. McNamee must not have read the book. Or maybe he skimmed the section describing how Rousseau fathered five children by his maid/mistress (whom he used and abused), wanted nothing to do with them so he had the kids sent to their deaths in an orphanage for waifs. Sure Marx avoided contact with the working class but he also lied, misrepresented, twisted and tortured the facts in order to make his case for Communism. And so it goes with many of the founders of the enlightment. This book is must reading for anyone truly interested in how these intellectual pioneers lived their lives and failed to practice what they preached.

Rating:
Summary: Johnson's books are a waste of good trees
Review: The born-again Catholic Johnson, once a poor editor of the poor journal New Statesman, has written a book which reveals only his own ugly mean-mindedness. Someone remarked to Napoleon, "No man is a hero to his valet." Napoleon replied, "That is not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is only a valet." Johnson cannot see any virtues, because he has none himself. He is of a piece with the other bullyboys of the right, Bill O'Reilly (the great defender of family values,now on sexual harassment charges), Rush Limbaugh, Kelvin McKenzie, Alistair Campbell, Bernard Ingham, Christopher Hitchens. All pose as iconoclastic, brave and outspoken; but all cravenly repeat the lies of power. All fawn on the rich swine who own the media pulpits from which they bully those who never have a chance to reply.


Rating:
Summary: Not his best book
Review: Paul Johnson is a writer who I have great respect for and have much enjoyed reading. This is the least successful of the four or five books of his I have read. His attack on the Western Intellectual tradition in the past two hundred years is in certain ways justified. But there are other great intellectual figures he might have taken whose contribution to our understanding of ourselves and the world is useful and great. If you want to write about Intellectuals in the past two hundred years you should write about Isaiah Berlin, Popper, Camus, Kierkegaard, Daniel Bell, Sidney Hook, Whitehead, and a host of other figures whose intellectual contributions were not necessarily diminished by their political positions.

Rating:
Summary: Professing Themselves Wise They Became Fools
Review: From repulsive Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the froth-mouthed, knife-wielding Normal Mailer, great historian Paul Johnson details the conduct of the deep thinkers of modernity. The point of Johnson's book is not to be petty toward the super intelligent. Nor is it that people should undercut and debunk principles, ideas and noble causes, but that ultimately people are more important than ideas.

The point is not to attack or reduce the super-educated individual's to underlying motives or subversive subtexts, but to demonstrate that in modernity the Intellectual has become self-appointed trader in ideas, a separate annointed secular priest caste attempting to shape a new mankind.

Meanwhile, the intellectual ignores the collected wisdom of the ages.

The Intellectual Class does not consist of modern-day Socratic types. They would hate Socrates and believe the western tradition is a cancer on mankind. The Intellectual Class is enlightened, and you poor souls are so dumb it makes these intellectuals hair hurt.

Unfortunately (for these imposters) and fortunately for the public, Johnson shows the inner barbarism and soul-destroying misery of geniuses such as Noam Chomsky and Bertrand Russell. These two clowns did nothing but beat up on America during the Vietnam war and the smart-set swooned. Meanwhile, thanks in part to their influential anti-war drivel, millions of innocent anti-communist Vietnamese, Laotions and Cambodians died after the American pullout of Vietnam. Some of these innocents died on high seas trying to escape an evil regime that the hallowed intellectuals praised.

Notably, Eastern Seaboard fancypants and darling of the liberal media historian Arthur Schlesinger, once called this book "cheap" in an article in the New York Times Book Review. It sounds like Johnson did the right thing and hit a raw nerve up at Martha's Vineyard.

Rating:
Summary: very opinionated - amusing but repetitive
Review: Just a word of warning to those who might suppose (as I did) that this book contains objective biographies of the intellectuals within. The blurbs on the book itself may lead you to believe this, but the official Amazon review above gives the real scoop.
The book IS interesting and well-written but it constantly made me yearn for an even-handed description of the lives of these thinkers... many of whom are the sorts of folks whose names are vaguely familiar (to the non-academic) & make one curious = "why am I supposed to know who this is? what have I forgotten since college?"
This is NOT the place to find out ... for that refer to an encyclopedia, textbook or even a reasonable biography, but this is an overlong OpEd piece bordering on hatchet-job.
However, you could quite enjoy the book if you fnd yourself annoyed by pompous liberal intellectuals and want to read an amusing skewering of their sacred cows. But as another reviewer mentioned, each essay is written in the same format - while they are witty and fun to read, by the middle of the book, you REALLY get the point that he set out in the inttroduction: "don't trust these intellectuals who will try to tell the world how to live when their own lives were horrible hypocritical messes" ...

Rating:
Summary: Slinging Mud at Pigs
Review: Johnson's "Intellectuals" is a series of readable bios of leftist demigods, strung together by a slightly forced thesis on the nature of the true intellectual. Other reviewers have commented on Johnson's highly selective rogues' gallery, but, after all, he is citing examples of an archtype he has openly defined, so he can get away with it.
While readable, amusing, and informative, we all know that left wing intellectuals are magotty pieces of human trash, and, of course, there's little to contradict this in Johnson's work. The mind of the leftist intellectual is warped by their desire to reconstruct reality to excuse their own animal predelictions. Consequently their philosophical systems have spiraled continuously toward anarchism interspersed with protectionism for their own elite community. I offer the platitude that "all intellectuals are in search of their own politburo."
While it would be nice to see how Johnson treats the "intellectuals" of the right, it is amusing to see some other reviewers claim bias in Johnson for excluding conservatives. I ask you, when has a leftist ever admitted such a thing as a conservative intellectual? The left thinks everyone to the right of Che Guevera is a slack-jawed mouth-breather. Consequently, the left has purloined the very term "intellectual," and like many a good term they have adopted (liberal, progressive, pacifist, etc), the left's use of "intellectual" has coated the word with their filth, unfit for use by anyone but themselves.
But I digress.
One curious aspect of Johnson's series of essays was in his chapter on Hemingway, which began with a long detour into Emerson. While Johnson paints it as "setting up his treatment of Hemingway," it looks more like an abortive essay on Emerson that was too good to delete and was subsequently pasted onto the Hemingway analysis. For that matter, it seems as if Johnson got rather tired of the whole project (not surprising given the material) and finished the book off with a mad sortie through the postmodernist types. A little slapdash, but he covered a mess of ground in a hurry!
Perhaps I am of the wrong generation, as I know of no-one who takes any of the figures in this book seriously. Rather, they are viewed as pink-panther cartoon beatniks; amusing, dangerous, but ultimately just silly - for all their self-absorbed sophistry they are separated from Joe-Sixpack by nothing but an enhanced vocabulary.
Johnson captures this perfectly, skewering the sacred cows of the intelligensia with fortitude and panache. An excellent book.