Intellectuals

Rating:
Summary: Very entertaining
Review: I liked this book a lot. Mostly from an entertainment standpoint: all individuals the author writes about are very prominent in our culture, and it is about this type of a glorious and/or glorified person that I, as an avid reader of the tabloids (hush, don't tell anyone I said that), am interested--somewhat morbidly--to know the details of the personal life. Do they live what they preach ? Are they as ridiculous as I am? What are the bathroom details of the famous? This book offers a rich feed to these natural cravings, that I believe, every regular joe has, whether he admits it or not.

Having said that, I think, there's another aspect to this book: to ridicule the prophets and, by implication, their prophecies. In that respect, this book is a ridiculous piece of right-wing ad hominem, if there ever was one. In other words, when all else is said, what does it matter if men whose philosophical contributions, rightly or wrongly, have become an inalienable part of our civilization, had elimination problems?

So, if you feel you belong to The Moral Majority and are into family values, I would heartily recommend this book--you're sure to enjoy it, and it'll give you a plenty of public-discourse ammunition with which to combat such liberal abominations like teaching kids the laughable "theory" of evolution and other such satanic lucubrations of the people who, as this book makes abundantly clear, may even have suffered from constipation!

A note to the immoral minority: the book is easy, highly entertaining, well-written, and I had a good time reading it.

Verily I say unto you: you will enjoy it, whoever you are.

Rating:
Summary: Delightful demolition job
Review: The reviewers who don't think Johnson "defined" what an Intellectual is haven't read the book very carefully. For Johnson, an "intellectual" is pretty clearly anybody who thinks s/he can jettison all the received wisdom of the past, particularly of inherited religious tradition, and reinvent society from the ground up using nothing but the unaided power of the human mind -- his or her own.

Just how good the unaided human mind is at reinventing society is illustrated in this volume by a close look at the personal lives of several icons of the secular left. And sure enough, they turn out to have botched it completely; lovers of humanity that they were, they seem to have been incapable of dealing fairly or decently with any actual, individual human beings with whom they came in contact.

Many of the same points could have been illustrated by a look at the life of Ayn Rand -- who shares many of the premises of the Left, would count as an "intellectual" by Johnson's standard, and botched her own life just as badly and thoroughly as anyone in this volume. (And readers of Jeff Walker's flawed _The Ayn Rand Cult_ might well wish Johnson would write a sequel devoted to the major personalities of the "Objectivist" movement.) But Johnson was clearly out to topple the idols of the Left in this book -- and it's about time.

By the way, Johnson explicitly acknowledges several times that few lives could stand up under the close scrutiny he gives to his selected "intellectuals." But most people don't lay the claims for themselves and their ideas that these "intellectuals" do. It is their claims to greatness he is concerned to attack, not their petty immoralities; their immoralities just show that they couldn't live up to their grandiose self-billing.

In particular, Johnson's own extramarital dalliance was just that -- a moral failing on his part that he acknowledges and does not regard as exemplary or even defensible behavior. Unlike the characters he dissects in this book, he does not expect moral standards to be altered to suit his own tastes, whims, and weaknesses -- and he does not present his own mistakes as the messianic Path to Tomorrow. There is no hypocrisy in that.

Rating:
Summary: it's an interesting, indeed
Review: As the old Chinese saying goes, everyone would look down upon these people if they want to be literati. Indeed, people have prejudice against literati. Many people regard the Literati as the Literary Prostitute! Naturally, it is unfair! Intellectuals are human being too; to err is human. I can'nt understand why non-intellectual is allowed to err, is allowed to lie his wife, to be a jerk; but a writer, a scholar, a philosopher is not allowed? Is a sage really a deity? The more important is, a intellectuali is always in self-examination. Maybe TOLSTOY is a good example. He had undergone a long and even painful process of temper- ing in his life. That is a great characteristic for human being. The most important is, intellectuals offer us their works so that we, readers, can gain a good deal of enlightenment---from moral to appreciation of the beautiful. But, Paul Johnson's INTELLECTUALS is a good book. It broadens my outlook---Oh, I see, so it's human being!

Rating:
Summary: Listen to the Liberals Squeal!
Review: This book offends Liberals according to an old formula; For every lie they have told about a Conservative Icon, it tells a truth about a Liberal Sacred Cow. Naturally they hate it.

In point of fact the book is a well written account of the intellectual dishonesty that the Liberal Left has practiced for most of recent history. It is both more entertaining and more informative than the average Liberal tract, not that that is saying much.

Try it. If nothing else, it will infuriate all the Liberals who see you reading it, which must be counted as a plus.

Rating:
Summary: "Spanker" Johnson and the private lives of intellectuals...
Review: As a number of people have noted, a hatchet job on selected intellectuals of the Left. Christopher Hitchens called it "...a foul-minded assault on the Enlightenment...", and the description still stands.

But have I missed it, or has no one noted Johnson's own prediliction for being spanked, as noted by his dominatrix Gloria Stewart, after she got fed up with listening to his Family Values tripe? I wonder if any second edition of _Intellectuals_ would have to be set up as an autobiography... ?

Rating:
Summary: More Rotten Right-wing Rubbish from "Loonybins"
Review: Paul Johnson...let us consider Paul Johnson. Long before the former editor of The Newstatesman had his Road to Damascus conversion, he must have realised that his true calling in life was to be a rather tiresome and bigoted polemicist, attempting to pass himself off as a historian. During his stagger from Left to Right, a ferocious resentment and jealousy of better minds than his seems to have sustained him. And hey ho, now he produces a squalid little polemic against the "Left" as his revenge. Satre was a pevert? Marx was given to drinking? Well darn, if a thinker is motivated by conservative or secular impulses, then that at once exempts them from the hatchet job. Intellectuals is the work of a bitter and mediocre man. Sure it is subtle, but it carries the same logic of hating the thinker, the humanist, she or he who scorns aboriginal predjudices and reaction. Johnson's charalatanism goes along the road that ends with books being tossed on bonfires.

Rating:
Summary: I would give it Zero stars if I could
Review: First, I'd like to say that every chapter of this book is appaling in its fierce determination to hopelessly weaken the left.

What Mr. Johnson doesn't realise is that all these petty flaws in these people have absolutely no importance. Mr. Johnson may have succeeded in proving that these men were jerks in their private lives, but he is seriously mistaken if he believes those flaws should discredit any great ideas that these men have put forth. Mr. Johnson's view that the private life of a man is as important as his public life is a typically American concept. Mr. Johnson does not understand that these men are considered great for their ideas, and that we don't care about whether they cheated on their wives or whether they were jerks to their children. I don't idolize Rousseau's private life, in fact I ddespize Rousseau's private life. I have no trouble admitting that he was a jerk. But that does not keep me from thinking that the ideas that he introduced into the world were great.

Last, and perhaps most importantly, Mr.Johnson needs to learn what an intellectual is. I was especially appalled by his remarks on Sartre and Chomsky. He attacked Sartre and Chomsky on the grounds that they were not specialists on politics and said that they should both stick to their respective fields. At this point I was so furious that I felt like throwing the book out the window. But I controlled myself and I decided to write this review instead. The definition of an intellectual is someone who "intervenes in something that does not concern him", that is to say that one cannot be an expert on the subject in question. Such is the case with Sartre and Chomsky. They were not specialists in politics, but they realised the injustices in the world and felt the need to say something, to speak out against these crimes. And that's what they did. Mr. Johnson, if you do not understand what an intellectual is, please refrain from writing a book with that as your title.

Rating:
Summary: Dem darn intelectuals!!!
Review: Mister Johnson proply puts dem there satan worshiping fancy book learning intelectuals in there place. You ain't needing no high scool education to know that Sartre's bowel problems are god's just riteous punishment for confusing people's heads with too many fancy thoughts. Mister Johnson puts them god hating thinkers in their place, just like my catholic church did in the old days with galileo before the librals took over. Just the other day some guy was telling me something about Sartre and using big words and making my head hurt and I told him "Oh yeah, smart guy, how do you explain Sartre's poopy problems"? I totally stunned him with the brillian logic that I got from Mister Johnson's book. After he just stared at me in total shock for about 30 seconds, he walked away. Mister Johnson has given ammo to us common folk to beat those commie lovin intellectuals in any argument. Thankyou Mister Johnson.

Rating:
Summary: A scathing look at those would tell us how to live
Review: This book is an entertaining and scathing attack on a group of popular left-leaning intellectuals who are often trotted out by some liberals again and again as symbols of the highest in human thought and deed (Rousseau, Marx, Russell etc.). Johnson pays them their due: Hemingway IS a great writer; Ibsen IS a great playwright, etc. However, Johnson cautions that talent (especially the ability write well, as many of those he profiles are authors) should not be equated with moral, spiritual, or even intellectual superiority. His point is simply that these people, though they could articulate their ideas well, often lived miserable lives, mistreated others, and/or ignored their own philosophies. Admittedly, these acts of hypocrisy are hardly confined to those philosophers and artists on the left, but it is the intellectuals described in this book that are the ones who are so often used to refute conservatives, especially when those on the right are being accused of being narrow minded, heartless, and moralistic. How many Christians have been told by their non- (or better anti-) religious friends to read Russell's "Why I Am Not a Christian" or told that, as attributed to Marx, "Religion is the opiate of the Masses", when the discussion turns to matters of faith? Johnson demonstrates that these liberal intellectuals and/or their followers were (and are), for all intents and purposes, doing what moral conservatives are often accused of doing, trying to change the world by imposing, through their exalted position as intellectual elites, their morality and philosophies on others. (Marxism and humanism are two notable examples.) Ultimately, Johnson asserts that these people were no more or less qualified than any other sensible, intelligent person to tell people how to live their lives (maybe even less so because they were often out of touch with the lives of ordinary people).Of course, the same could be said of intellectuals on the right, but, as Johnson tends to be conservative, it's the liberal elite who gets skewered. It's about time!

Rating:
Summary: Dishonest. And hypocritical.
Review: Knowing something of Shelley, I can say that Johnson's Shelley chapter is valueless as history or biography. Shelley was not faultness, but he was rather admirable, sensitive, generous and kind man, who was loved by people around him, and who had a tragic life. Having read the Holmes biography I can see the distortions and the omissions in Johnson's use of his source. (For example Shelley took his family to Wales after a man was imprisoned for distributing one of Shelley's poems, which Johnson reports. But Johnson does not mention another fact from Holmes: that Shelley sent regular payments, that he could ill afford, to sustain the man throughout his imprisonment, because Johnson wants us to think that that Shelley abandoned the man. But there are many other examples of similar distortions: Johnson's "errors" about Elizabeth Hitchener, the end of his first marriage, the death of his daughter Clara and many other things.

My judgement is that the errors and ommisions can only be the result of Johnson's preparedness to ignore or conceal the truth when the truth doesn't fit the picture he wants to paint.

Johnson _may_ also have referred to the FL Jones Oxford edition of Shelley's letters, but Holmes is very obviously the primary source. A friend who has met Holmes reports that Holmes was quite scathing about Johnson's misuse of his book.

I don't know all that much about the other figures in "Intellectuals", but if a man tries to mislead me about something I do know about, then I tend to doubt what he says about things I don't.

"Dishonesty" and "vindictiveness" are what I condemn about the one chapter of Johnson's book I'm competent to judge. Given that chapter, I wouldn't cite "Intellectuals" as an authority on any matter of fact.

Wheels