Product Description

Do the private practices of intellectuals match the standard of their public principles? How great is their respect for truth? What is their attitude to money? How do they treat their spouses and children - legitimate and illegitimate? How loyal are they to their friends? Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, Lillian Hellman, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, Kenneth Tynan and many others are put under the spotlight. With wit and brilliance, Paul Johnson exposes these intellectuals, and questions whether ideas should ever be valued more than individuals.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #127472 in Books
• Published on: 1990-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 400 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Veteran political commentator, scholar and former editor of The New Statesman Paul Johnson has collected all the nasty, cruel and disgusting episodes in the lives of the mighty dead in order to question their "moral and judgmental credentials to give advice to humanity on how to conduct its affairs."

Intellectuals, according to Johnson, often possess a defining set of characteristic traits; they are lying, cheating, hypocritical, megalomaniacs who combine an abstract love of humanity with an exploitative, selfish and cruel treatment of those who were closest to them. Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Lillian Hellman, Norman Mailer and Kenneth Tynan are put under the spotlight and damned as moral exemplars and truth-tellers while Edmund Wilson, Evelyn Waugh and Orwell provide the necessary foil of intellectual integrity.

This is a voyeuristic, gossip-mongering, ruthless and completely compelling book that leaves a bad taste in the mouth if you consume it at one sitting. Fortunately--since it's a collection of short biographical essays or exposès one can dip in where one likes. Intellectuals is well researched and has the polished concision one might expect from a veteran journalist and scholar. It also has the advantage of dealing with subject matter that is fascinating in itself--the extravagant personalities and spectacular immoralities of some of our most revered figures. Intellectuals doesn't always work as dispassionate intellectual history--for instance the overview of intellectual trends since the 1960s in the final chapter "The Flight of Reason" seems forced--but as a set of exposès it is splendid. --Larry Brown

About the Author
Paul Johnson was born in 1928. He edited the New Statesman in the 1960s and has written over forty books. His Modern Times, a history of the world from the 1920s to the 1990s, has been translated into more than fifteen languages. As well as a weekly column in the Spectator, he contributes to newspapers all over the world.

Customer Reviews

excellent expose of hypocrisy
This is a short biography of several intellectuals (Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Brecht, Russell, Satre, Gollancz, Hellman, Wilde, Connolly) and a few others (Wilson, Waugh) , specifically seeing if their lives qualified them to say what they said. For example, did Marx know what the conditions of the working man were like? Did Rousseau treat his children well?

This is a good book. Johnson shows, time and again, how some of the people whose ideas most affected the modern age were basing their thinking largely on their own egos and a "creative interpretation" of the evidence.

He defines "intellectual" as someone who effectively rejects the whole of human knowledge to that point and assumes that they can do better. So it is not surprising that the people he surveys are egocentric, deeply troubled, and do not live up to what they preach.

A good quote from the book:

It is a fact, and in some ways a melancholy fact, that massive works of the intellect do not spring from the abstract workings of the brain and the imagination; they are deeply rooted in the personality.

It certainly highlights all the more clearly how distinctive Jesus and his followers were in the history of people with radical ideas, and how little basis there is for accepting so much of the modern worldview.

However, I can't help feeling that Johnson himself falls into some of the traps he highlights in his selection of intellectuals. By having all people who hold fairly similar views, he strengthens the case for anything opposing it, specifically his own.

good expose of hypocrisy
This is a short biography of several intellectuals (Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Brecht, Russell, Satre, Gollancz, Hellman, Wilde, Connolly) and a few others (Wilson, Waugh) , specifically seeing if their lives qualified them to say what they said. For example, did Marx know what the conditions of the working man were like? Did Rousseau treat his children well?

This is a good book. Johnson shows, time and again, how some of the people whose ideas most affected the modern age were basing their thinking largely on their own egos and a "creative interpretation" of the evidence.

He defines "intellectual" as someone who effectively rejects the whole of human knowledge to that point and assumes that they can do better. So it is not surprising that the people he surveys are egocentric, deeply troubled, and do not live up to what they preach.

A good quote from the book:

It is a fact, and in some ways a melancholy fact, that massive works of the intellect do not spring from the abstract workings of the brain and the imagination; they are deeply rooted in the personality.

It certainly highlights all the more clearly how distinctive the few people with good ideas who live them out are and how little basis there is for accepting so much of the modern worldview.

However, I can't help feeling that Johnson himself falls into some of the traps he highlights in his selection of intellectuals. By having all people who hold fairly similar views, he strengthens the case for anything opposing it, specifically his own. That doesn't weaken the force of his argument though.

Grotesque Ironies
To me, this is not about politics but about psychology. These ... people all had a nasty shadow side that they tried to compensate for by telling others how to live -- a Jungian analysis of their lives would be very interesting. Unfortunately there is very little analyses but lots of facts and irony, which no doubt contributes to the book's readability. One alternates between feelings of revulsion and amusement and as such the text reads like a thriller. My favourite part is Mary McCarthy's statement on Lilian Hellman: "Every word she's ever written is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'" and the drama that followed. The greatest of ironies is that some of these repulsive characters are still idolised after their theories have been proven to be flawed, destructive or downright murderous, and after their ... personalities have been so brilliantly exposed.