Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (P.S.)

The prime characteristic of an "Intellectual" in Johnson's thinking is someone who values ideas over people. Many very intellectually able people are not intellectuals in Johnson's meaning of the word and therefore are not included in this book. What Johnson does in "Intellectuals" is take a hard look at the life behind the ideas of many of our great intellectuals. From Marx and Tolstoy to Satre and Russell and many more, the lives of these intellectuals are examined. It's not a pretty picture. As Johnson says "Intellectuals have the arrogance to believe that they can use their brains to tell humanity how to conduct its affairs. In doing so they turn their backs on inherited wisdom and the religious background that have traditionally defined the aims of society." He adds that while intellectuals are always talking about their love for the "workers" and "humanity" most hated their fellow man and had no contact with ordinary people.

These intellectuals have some serious problems. They are all egoistic and mendacious. Many hated women and even their own children. Many had an inflated sense of self-importance and were very good at self-promotion. Many were greedy and an amazing percentage of them were members of the Communist Party or sympathers with it--some even after Stalin's atrocities came to light.

This is a fascinating look at the lives behind the ideas that have shaped so many people.

Every bed-wetting, sanctimonious liberal needs to read this. Really teaches you what is behind the words of some of the "great" minds of Western thought, and helps you undertand personal context that can color writing.

It is not easy to read Paul Johnson - not always. In this book, he is acrimonious. All heroes, people whose work was (and still is) important to the society, are destroyed - or something like that. Reading Intellectuals we know things we never could imagine, and perhaps do not need to know...but that, after all, it is interesting. Intellectuals and heroes are people like the rest of us, are not them?

Another fascinating book.

It traces the history of IDEAS and the different people who shaped the way we think.

A very good introduction for me to epistemology.

Everyone should read this. I'm thinking people who gave it less than 5 stars were butt-hurt by some of the portraits - maybe of Marx. Johnson deftly puts together nearly everything known about the personal lives of some of our species most influential modern thinkers - and the portraits make them human, very human. You'll laugh and you'll learn a lot - and you will never see these folks the same way again, especially Marx.

A toxic, partisan book in which "intellectual" is a dirty word, and secular liberals and radical thinkers are blamed for fostering "the permissive society" and the decline of Western civilisation. Forget about social trends and zeitgeists - it is these naughty men and women who have led us all astray.

Johnson's ad hominem approach is as self-serving as it is unconvincing: pick apart the less than exemplary personal lives of handpicked, exemplary thinkers, artists and philosophers, in order to condemn their ideas and, moreover, make breathtaking generalisations about the role of liberal elites in society. Thus, Rainer Werner Fassbinder wasn't just a drug-addled, sex-crazed, workaholic film director (the Fassbinder biography Love Is Colder Than Death is a terrific and salacious read); he "turned himself into not only the leading but also the symbolic film maker of the permissive age..." Oh really? All it takes is to go ad hominem with another less sexy luminary - say Steven Spielberg, who has made a far greater impact on Western culture than Fassbinder - to watch Johnson's arguments fall into a heap.

In Johnson's world, "the association of intellectuals with violence occurs too often to be dismissed as an aberration", whilst Cyril Connolly was an "upholder of civilized values [who] had laid the egg of permissiveness". Naughty boy, Cyril! Johnson's claim in the Acknowledgements that he tried to make Intellectuals "factual and dispassionate" is disingenuous at best and downright mendacious at worst. This is a man with an agenda, who cannot be trusted or taken seriously.

An eye opener about intellectuals, and how amazingly different their personal lives can be from the "virtues" they espouse. Anyone who can get to the end of this book and have any regard for Rousseau, Brecht, or various of the other lot are dwelling on ideology, and not on virtues of any kind.

This book was required for a class that I never took, but I always heard good things about it so I picked it up and read a few months after graduating. Although I don't have much to say about the style, I think that the content was very helpful in attaching a personality to some of the minds that have had a great deal of influence on how we think and function today. It also helped me to understand myself and underscored the importance of a more holistic view of personal growth and development. Otherwise I could just a smelly, caustic, tom-cat of a punk :)

Any book that dishes the dirt on J-P Sartre is fine by me. SIMONE. SIMONE. SIMONE. What were you THINKING?

An easy read, and certainly interesting! But I don't think that the Author is a big fan of intellectuals! Am a little perturbed as to his generalization that intellectuals are to be kept at an arm's length! (So he doesn't consider himself an intellectual??)