Intellectuals - Softcover

Paul Johnson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0297796275 ISBN 13: 9780297796275

Publisher: Trafalgar Square, 1989

Synopsis

Paul Johnson puts the private morality of some of our greatest thinkers under the spotlight. In this provocative book,Paul Johnson examines whether intellectuals are morally fit to give advice to humanity.How great is their respect for truth? How do they apply their public principles to their private lives? How loyal are they to their friends? These questions are asked in a series of case studies.Rousseau,Shelley,Marx,Ibsen,Tolstoy,Hemingway,Bertrand Russell,Brecht,Sartre,Edmund Wilson,Victor Gollancz,Lillian Hellman,Norman Mailer and others are revealed in incisive portraits,as intellectuals both brilliant and contradictory.

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Review

Conservative historian Paul Johnson wears his ideology proudly on his sleeve in this often ruthless dissection of the thinkers and artists who (in his view) have shaped modern Western culture, having replaced some 200 years ago "the old clerisy as the guides and mentors of mankind." Taking on the likes of Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, Lillian Hellman, and Noam Chomsky in turn, Johnson examines one idol after another and finds them all to have feet of clay. In his account, for instance, Ernest Hemingway emerges as an artistic hero who labored endlessly to forge a literary style unmistakably his own, but also as a deeply flawed man whose concern for the perfect phrase did not carry over to a concern for the women who loved him. Gossipy and sharply opinionated, Johnson's essay in cultural history spares no one.

Does it really matter that Henrik Ibsen was vain and arrogant, that Jean-Paul Sartre was incontinent? In Johnson's view, it does: these all-too-human foibles disqualify them, and other thinkers, from presuming to criticize the shortcomings of society. "Beware intellectuals," he concludes (though, given the subjects of his book, it seems he means intellectuals only of the left). "Not only should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice." Whether one agrees or not, Johnson's profiles are frequently amusing and illuminating, as when he suggests that the only proletarian Karl Marx ever knew in person was the poor maid who worked for him for decades and was never paid, except in room and board, for her labors. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author

Paul Johnson was born in 1928 and educated at Stonyhurst and Oxford. He was editor of the New Statesman and is currently a columnist for the Daily Mail and the Spectator.

About this edition

• Publisher: Trafalgar Square
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0297796275
• ISBN 13: 9780297796275
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 400