Intellectuals

Rating:
Summary: A rather interesting read
Review: First, the problem with this book. As has been mentioned by many reviewers (both here and elsewhere), this book is effectively concerned with left-leaning intellectuals, and not merely intellectuals generally. Johnson may have been better served focusing on some others of a more conservative bent, but then again, perhaps not. I rather doubt Michael Oakeshott was living the swinging lifestyle, and the oddites of the Objectivist Ayn Rand are well-known. Burke may make for an interesting story (though not a scandalous one), but might be questionably an "intellectual" (more a thinking practitioner). And Strauss is a whole complexity in and of himself....

Johnson's book does a wonderful job of poking some holes in the grand histories of various intellectuals, from Rousseau to Hellman. With many of them, it's rather enlightening - while preaching love of humanity and so forth, these people tended to use and abuse those around them in almost aristocratic fashion. Collecting the various unpleasantries about these high figures, Johnson in a way makes them more human. This is not necessarily a good thing for them, as they tend to be rather horrid human beings.

This book's strength is it reminds the reader to be cautious regarding those considered "intellectuals" - indeed, it fosters some useful skepticism. Even the highly educated can tend towards a herd mentality - Johnson's book does a good job of illustrating that. It is a good and enjoyable book, especially worthwhile for those in/interested in academia and some of its major figures. Recommended.

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: Pulls punches on Chomsky.
Review: I think Christopher Hitchens was half-justified in his attackagainst Johnson for trying to link the work and ideologies of the said 'Intellectuals' with their private misdeeds. But Johnson does the occasional decent job of exposing the hypocrisy of these producers of moral swarf. For instance, he points out that Sartre never so much as lifted a finger or even spoke out against the anti-Semitic atrocities that were occuring in Germany under Hitler's facist regime. Yet Jean-Paul Sartre later in life was one to frequently mention and write about the crass vulgarities of anti-Semitism.

And then there are other times when Johnson's method of trying to prove that his subject's moral high ground is below sea level doesn't work. His chapter on a mendacious Ernest Hemingway does nothing to erase the fact the he was probably the best American writer next to F. Scott Fitgerald to encapsulate post-WW1 sentiment, with a brilliant ideosyncratic prose style. Because Hemingway wasn't ... like Sartre, Johnson's chapter on Hemingway won't alter his place in literary history.

Johnson saves his weakest attack at the very end of the book for MIT linguist Noam Chomsky. Because Chomsky is 'an old-style utopian, rather than a new-style hedonist intellectual', Johnson refrains from making ad hominem personal attacks on him. Instead, Johnson offers a brief biography followed by a tepid elenchus of Chomsky's position on Vietnam. Johnson claims that Chomsky was opposed to the war in Vietnam by virtue of his linguistic theories on syntax. That isn't true at all. Apparently, Johnson hadn't read the book Chomsky wrote in '69 outlining his opposition to Vietnam: 'The New Mandarins'. Johnson, however, correctly decribes the bizarre wayward opinions Chomsky took in the late 70's on the massacres the Khymer Rouge committed in Cambodia, before eventually concluding that 'the American Devil made them do it'.

A facinating look into the lives of the thinkers that have shaped our thought in the last 200 year, even though some of the arguments are meaningless.

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: One of my favorite books
Review: Intellectuals
I notice many of these reviewers complain that author Paul Johnson unfairly criticizes only intellectuals from the left. I must point out that he has a perfectly valid reason for doing that.

He defines Intellectuals as not thinkers in general, but those special thinkers who "[lay] claim to guide society," "assert that they [can] diagnose the ills of society *with their own unaided intellects," and "devise formulae whereby not merely the structure of society but the fundamental habits of human beings could be changed for the better."

This excludes those who want to preserve traditional ideas and institutions rather than radically alter them in the name of improving society--in other words, religious or politically conservative minds are not Intellectuals. I suppose if Johnson had dug even harder, he might have found some characters who are nominally associated with the right but who have some radical ideas or personal flaws he could critique--Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, for instance, or from the modern era, Ayn Rand--but the intellectuals he does cover illustrate his point that we should "beware intellectuals" well enough, thank you.

Rating:
Summary: Moral Compass not Moral Vacuum
Review: It is a fallacy to warrant that a philosopher's inability to practice their own teachings-in the tradition of St. Francis or the ascetic Spinoza-invalidates those teachings. History's most gifted intellectuals have traditionally professed moral theories and systems of ethics so comprehensive that practically no mortal could ever hope to reach such heights. Rather, these systems are to be used as the North Star by which each person guides their vessel of life-slowly finding themselves adrift they nudge and tack until back on course.

Mr. Johnson is bent on smearing the names of history's left wing idealists. The pattern of each essay is the same. Mr. Johnson begins with the generic praise for each intellectual for their influence on modern life followed quickly by attacks on their financial and social debauchery. Interestingly, he never really discusses how we see the manifestation of those influences.

Socialist thinkers are most to his liking for this campaign. In our time of economic conservatives and right-wing religious fanatics running a substantial portion of government at all levels, it seems to me that the same book could have been written to show that these groups too profess only to proceed in the opposite direction. Laissez faire economics is marred by corruption and manipulation and the religiously zealous consistently bake intolerance into each message they deliver.


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: 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.

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: 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.