Customer Reviews

Modern Times Revised Edition: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (Perennial Classics)

5 star:		(76)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

Paul Johnson is opinionated and a good writer and this history is very readable. "National Review" named it one of the top 100 books of the century and, although I'm not a political conservative, I found myself in agreement with much of what Johnson says.

"Modern Times" begins with the end of World War I and focuses on the personality of actors on history rather than impersonal trends or philosophies of history. Johnson sums up his own philosophy with a quote from Alexander Pope: "The proper study of mankind is man." His opinion of the 20th century cast of characters is scathing more often than not.

He trashes Woodrow Wilson -- a sound judgment in my opinion -- defends Harding, claims Coolidge was a good President, is lukewarm toward Hoover, considers Roosevelt frivolous and empty-headed, favors Truman, and adores Eisenhower. Churchill is his great hero. The totalitarians -- Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler -- are depicted as venal gangsters. Johnson is unflinchingly anti-Communist throughout, an opinion that proved sound when the rot of the Soviet Union and its satellites became obvious in the late 1980s. (The first edition of this book was published in 1983.) Nehru, Gandhi and many other third world personalities get tossed into the category of lawyer/politicians with little to recommend them as leaders of countries.

Fault can be found with Johnson; minor errors of fact and questionable statements dot the book -- and he rushes breathlessly on without defending many of his opinions. However, if he argued them all out the book would be 10,000 pages long and dull as an airline steak knife. It is perhaps his tendency to be provocative that makes this history interesting -- as so many others are not.

I found particularly informative Johnson's description of how the Cold War started and his view that Hoover and Roosevelt's policies prolonged the Great Depression rather than eased it. Many other interesting gems are hidden in "Modern Times." Read it. If you're a liberal you'll be infuriated now and then, but this is an intelligent and stimulating book about 70 years of the most violent and eventful century in the history of mankind.

Smallchief

The liberal view of history is so widespread that any deviation is subject to immediate criticism. Johnson goes after modern cultural icons with vigor, examining and reassessing all the way. He has perfected a writing style that is highly readable and entertaining with common components: Broad assumptions, intricate details supporting his idea and unique, incredibly interesting biographies of those that made a difference - known or unknown.

The 20th century IS the collectivist century. Every variant of collectivism from communism, fascism, tribalism, socialism and religious classism has been tried with catastrophic results. The eagerness with which "leaders" (most from academia) experimented on whole populations is truly horrific. Glowing theories always gave way to human suffering. Millions have been sacrificed in the name of collectivism just this century - USSR, China, Germany, Cambodia, Turkey, Africa...

Oddly, speaking ill of this most anti-democratic "theory" is seen as somehow impolite. Johnson records the fight and the fighters (on both sides) of this battle. Naturally the US and Britain emerge with glowing marks - and why not? Those two have saved the world many times. Germany would have won WWI and WWII without US intervention. Europe would be one vast socialist graveyard without the opposition of Truman. Korea, Japan and parts of South America would be "Peoples States" without our help. Relativism has spread to almost all facets of human existence with perhaps the most dangerous one being that all cultures are morally equivalent. This book aptly demonstrates that this has not - and is not - true.

Johnson's Modern times is a must read: full of interesting information and reasonings, entertaining, and highly controversial. Since History is told from a conservative perspective in this book, many will find it provocative, maybe even unfair. And, these kind of critics might be correct in some aspects. Yet Johnson's book deserves to be read because it provides very bright ideas which must be taken into account when discussing about the history of the 20th century. For example, it is very interesting Johnson's analysis on why the allies threw the bomb on Japanese cities and what was the real dimension of the tragedy beneath this. Moreover, Johnson helps us understand difficult periods of the century like the rise of the nazi regime and the success of Khomeini in Iran. Finally, though it is true that some won't like the way Johnson treats popular personalities like Gandhi or Freud, He deserves to be recognized for his effort to bring ethical considerations when thinking about the lessons of history. Ah, by the way, this book must be read closely after or before reading Hobsbawm's book on the same subject! (because Hobsbawm provides the left-wing point of view).

I am an historian, with nearly a Ph.D in the subject. I teach history at the community college level. I have 100's of history books, many of the 20th century. Johnson's book is highly moralistic and interpretive, more so than most history books, and frankly, more so than professional historians (which Johnson is not) would prefer. But it is a brilliant interpretation of the 20th century, one with guts. But it's not the popular interpretation because historians are affected by ideology just like everyone else.
There are some tremendous anecdotes in the book, some information that mainstream histories do not, and never will, provide. That, in itself, makes the book unique and worthwhile. Every chapter is rich, full of interesting data, and intelligent interpretation. I don't agree with all of Johnson's interpretations; but he is always provocative and he makes the reader think. That, along with his emphasis on the decline of moral responsibility, is why a number of people don't like the book.
Americans need to read the chapter "America's Suicide Attempt"--the history of the '60s we still don't get. "The Collectivist Seventies" explains a lot to those of us who lived through the malaise of that decade. "Caliban's Kingdoms" and the "Bandung Generation" are masterful exegeses of non-Western history. Again, I don't agree with everything here; but I do appreciate the fact that Johnson provides information and ideas that are never found in mainstream histories produced by professional historians who are writing to gain praise from their peers. They can't write this because, as Johnson argues, the 20th century (including academia) accepted that "God is dead." And to a conservative Catholic (which I'm not, but Johnson is), that propels the entire century. And that's also why this book is reviled in many quarters. Reader, be aware, this is a book that argues, implicity and sometimes not so much so, that atheistic, relativistic ideas underlie most of the barbarities of post World War I 20th century. Given Hitler and Communism--both Darwinian motivated--it's hard to argue against the point.
The book is thick, and even with Johnson's capable prose, not an easy read for a novice. But there's no better explanation, that I've read, of what happened--and why--in the 20th century.

Paul Johnson is an historian, wether Ph.D. or not. He does his homework and researches well his subjects. But he's thankfully free of the cliches of the profession, and so he is brave and bold when it comes to assess the facts he's described. In this extremely useful and refreshing book, Johnson says things most historians are not willing to tell, or tell while blushing. The distinguishable truth of the last century is that the demise of several basic certainties, i.e. the existence of God, the absolute nature of morality, and the value of the inidividual, borught about only death, war, tragedy and the worst and most horrifying massacres of history, performed by the most perverse and distorted political regimes man has ever known. And you don't have to be a religious nut to believe this.

Johnson's history is great to read. It includes illuminating anecdotes and profiles of many of the main characters in the wonderful yet terrible century just finished. We get to peer through the mist of ideology and legend and see what kind of people ruled our world: pure evil people like Lenin (who couldn't stand peasants and workers), Stalin (a crazy whacko with a small soul and a big killing instinct), Hitler (ditto), Mussolini (another lunatic, only also stupid); Mao (a vulgar looney with an incomparable talent to come up with the most idiotic ideas, which only caused hunger and misery), the host of African dictators, which must have made their peoples deplore the day the hated Europeans left, and Latin American morons like Peron, who managed to destroy a first-class economy and transform his country into a poor state (and still they love him and the hooker whom he married).

There are also fascinating portraits of other, imperfect but less evil politicians of the century. I realized I knew absolutely nothing about people like Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. There is the frivolous and unlikable Roosevelt, the corrupt (and also frivolous) Kennedy, etc. Churchill comes up, of course, as an admirable and brave man, always a step ahead everybody else even when he made mistakes, and De Gaulle, an arrogant man but a good statesman.

You will hardly agree with everything Johnson says, but his book is always thought-provoking and interesting. This is and will remain an important book to read.

Modern Time, a work of astounding breadth and clarity, identifies three seminal intellectuals at the beginning of the twentieth century-Marx, Freud, and Einstein-whose ideas directly and indirectly lead to communism, totalitarianism, and Nazism, three forms of government that rejected personal responsibility and the Judeo-Christian morality of the West. Marx said, according to Johnson, that society shaped people. Freud said our childhood shaped us. Finally, numerous intellectuals used Einstein's theory of relativity, much to Einstein's chagrin, to diminish the achievements of Western Civilization before the twentieth century and to advocate moral relativism as a new pseudo religion. Johnson then shows how this line of thinking lead to the death, enslavement, and impoverishment of billions of people across the world.

The book covers not just the superpowers but the explosion of the third world, with its copycat Hitlers, Stalins, and Maos. Most enlightening of all, the phalanx of intellectuals the wealth of the West made possible actually aided and abetted the corruption of the Soviet Union, Red China, fascist Germany, and all their dreadful imitators (for additional insight on terrible consequence of intellectuals, see Johnson's book, The Intellectuals). Worse, this scourge of our times has attacked every institution that lead the West to rule the world, from Christianity, to free enterprise, to democracy.

While Johnson finished the book more than a decade ago, his insights clarify the world today, from the chaos of the Middle East to never-ending butchery in Africa and juntas of the Western Hemisphere. Unlike far too many modern historians (who all too often merely illustrate Johnson's theme), Johnson makes bold and accurate declarations time and again and provides an avalanche of facts to make his case.

Johnson is at least honest - he makes his ideological slant very obvious. His programme is laid out most succinctly in the final paragraph where he lists "the underlying evils" of the twentieth century. They are: "the rise of moral relativism, the decline of personal responsibility, the repudiation of Judeo-Christian values, not least the arrogant belief that men and women could solve all the mysteries of the universe by their unaided intellects". In essence, this book is an ambitious interpretation of world history using the four fallacies listed above as the main criteria for explaining the prosperity or demise of nations. Regardless of whether this appeals to you or makes you wince, some words of caution are indeed necessary.

To picture the world through a sharp contrast of black and white has its pros and cons. Where the outrage is clearly warranted, the fervor of his opinion is admirable and infectious. But the clarity of his dualistic viewpoint comes at the cost of oversimplifying history in many areas. As far as I can see, his outline of European history is more or less right. In fact, had he confined himself to the European/American theater, the book would have been more successful. When the author turns his gaze on other nations beyond the pale of the Judeo-Christian world the result is more dubious. Scrutiny of his chapter on Japan produces the following:

"But until the twentieth century there were few references of any kind to bushido." (pg.181)
A: Nonsense. Excerpt from the notorious "Hagakure" (1716) by Tsunetomo Yamamoto: "Bushido to wa shinu koto to mitsuketari / I've discovered that Bushido is the act of dying". This followed by the most radical code of ethics ever uttered by the mouth of man. Also note that this book is in itself a rebuttal to an earlier Confucian definition of Bushido. Unformulated Bushido probably goes back much further.

"But the internal disputes of the missionaries had led Japan to reject Christianity." (pg.177)
A: Try instead the mass persecution of Christians in the early 17th century culminating in the War of Shimabara (1637-8) led by the "boy messiah" Amakusa Shiro.

"... [Japan is] in some respects closer to the society of ancient Egypt than to that of Post-Renaissance Europe." (pg.177)
A: This is a ridiculous comparison. The only reason he invokes this ludicrous analogy is to say that the Tenno was regarded as a living-god. That much is true, but the most cursory glance at Japanese history will show that the Emperor had no power since the samurais took over (end of the 12th century) until 1868. Not much of a pharaoh then.

"Nor did Japan's long isolation imply serenity. Quite the contrary." (pg. 178)
A: From the foundation of the Edo Shogunate in 1600 to its collapse in 1868 the era is known as the Era of Great Peace for a very good reason. Aside from some peasant uprisings (notably that of 1617-8), the persecution of Christians, an odd rebellion by a radical Confucian (1837), there was an utter lack of wars. This in marked contrast to Europe.

"Western importations from mid-nineteenth century onwards left the social grammar of Japan quite untouched." (pg.178)
A: If the eradication of the privileged Samurai class doesn't count in the Civil War of 1868, then I don't know what does.

"The town itself was an import. Even Tokyo was, and until very recently remained, an enormous collection of villages." (pg.182)
A: In the seventeenth century, the population of Edo (old name of Tokyo) numbered over 1 million out of ~30 million as a whole. This would make it one of the largest (and the most overcrowded) cities (let alone villages) in the world...

This also casts a shadow over the rest of the book: how much of it is true and how much is twisted to conform to his thesis? For example, the chapter called "The European Lazarus" focuses the limelight on European prosperity and its Catholic leaders Adenauer, de Gaulle, and de Gasperi. He underscores with little subtleness the link between Christian leaders and a nation's prosperity: that the lack of moral relativism leads to a better society. The damning evidence against this thesis is precisely in the most conspicuous deficiency in his world history: the Lazarus of the Far East. The history of how impoverished nations became indurialized democracies ought to be interesting. Yet the author merely glosses over it in the final chapter. The reason? Possibly that the prosperity of the Far East democracies is largely outside of the Judeo-Christian world and rather inconvenient for his thesis.

What he does say about ethics in the Far East can be summed up by this indictment on Japan "It failed completely to absorb the notions of individual moral responsibility which where the gift of the Judaic and Christian tradition ..." (pg. 177). This is depressing. To claim that the Judeo-Christian tradition alone has a monopoly on moral responsibility is highly contentious. It almost seems that Johnson in his eagerness to dismantle the moral equivalence of multiculturalism, is swinging to the other extreme which multiculturalism was originally meant to mitigate: cultural imperialism.

Love it or hate it, the book at least presents a thoroughly entertaining account of the world, even if you don't share his view. His strength, in my opinion, is in the fulmination against totalitarian regimes. But then again, you could get a concentrated dose of his anti-totalitarian ardor in his more historically accurate 'Napoleon'. I would recommend that book over this one.

The very fact that this book has become an institution suggests that many readers saw what they wanted to see reflected in his book. Unfortunately, this revision of world history is more propaganda than history. If you are willing to delve into this tome - and especially, if you sympathize with his Catholic viewpoint - I urge you: be on your toes. Check the facts.

Paul Johnson's "Modern Times" is a masterpiece of History and Literature. As we move into the 21st century it is imperative that we understand the last century. No study of the last hundred years can be complete without reading this scholarly and well-documented survey of the bloodiest century man has known. More than an able historian Paul Johnson is a fabulous writer. His telling of fact reads like the best novels. This indispensable work is the definitive history of the 20th century.

At a time when most people get their history from movies and TV, with all the confusion, fragmentation and distortion inherent in these media, Paul Johnson offers an alternative: in lucid, nimble prose he presents modern world history, from the 1920s to the 90s, as a fascinating, if sobering, narrative.

He seeks out the hidden connections and inner workings of historical events that have been obscured by too much detail and partisanship even to the observant contemporary reader who "witnessed" these events. To be sure, his representation is not "value-neutral". He makes no bones about his distaste for left-wing intellectuals with ambitions to remake the world; but he is equally hard on right-wing extremists. In fact, totalitarianism of the left or right, social engineering on a grand scale, moral relativism and decline of personal responsibility are, in his opinion, the decisive influences on the history of the 20th century.

Under the heading "The first despotic utopias" he gives us illuminating portraits of Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler. These men found countless imitators in Eastern Europe, Latin America, Asia and the Middle East, and, after decolonization, in Africa. He decries attempts of some churches to transform religious energy into secular utopianism. The magnitude of Stalin's tyranny was scarcely grasped in the world outside Russia. Scientists and writers accepted Stalin's propaganda with the greatest credulity:"They wanted to be duped". The ruthlessness and folly of Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini culminated in a mutual corruption process: if one of the dictators got away with a bold scheme, the others imitated it. This led to bloody territorial wars, large-scale social engineering coupled with genocide, mass resettlement of ethnic groups, and slave labor.

Stalin's ability to pose as a moderate fooled Churchill and Roosevelt. The Cold War dates from the immediate aftermath of the Yalta Conference, when Eastern Europe and most of the Balkans were lost to totalitarianism. Churchill made his "Iron Curtain" speech under Truman's sponsorship in 1946. Proxy wars erupted in Korea, the Middle East, and Vietnam, triggering an arms race. Colonial empires unravelled. The colonies were cut loose without adequate preparation, which led to the rise of Third-World dictators. The beneficiaries of decolonization were the vote manipulators: professional politicians who saw the res publica in terms of votes, not in terms of justice. "Charismatic personalities" assumed leadership: Nehru, Sukarno, U Nu, Nasser, Nkrumah, Idi Amin. The Cold War extended to Africa.
In China, Mao conducted politics as theatre, in a manner reminiscent of Hitler, with an elaborate cult of personality at its center. Again, western intellectuals were fooled.


In the U.S., failure to distinguish between image and reality led to regrettable missteps. Well-intentioned programs backfired: Johnson's War On Poverty actually destabilized poor black families further by making it profitable for them to split up. The law of unintended consequences also asserted itself in the vast expansion of education, which resulted in a huge surplus of intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals, all critical of authority. This led to the social and political upheavals of the Sixties and Seventies.

In the 80s, state-directed collectivism was replaced by free enterprise in Europe, America, and Mexico. Strong leadership in Britain and the U.S. (Johnson credits Thatcher and Reagan) led to the dissemination of free-market concepts in Eastern Europe and the eventual collapse of the Soviet empire.

If the title "Modern Times" strikes a Chaplinesque, vaudevillian note: there is enough absurdity and pathos in our modern history to suggest such a view.
Boundaries between conviction, opinion and partisanship are fluid, especially in contemporary historiography; but the discriminating reader will know the difference.

The first thing to remember when reading Johnson is to forget about meaningless ideological terms like "conservative" and "liberal" (especially when used by Americans they come to mean the opposites they originally meant). The one thing that Johnston makes clear in his book is that ideology has been the bane of minkind in the 20th Cen. and the major cause of most man-made calamities. As such Johnson is asking us to return to a non-ideological world bounded by reason and common sense.

The book however is not narrative history writ large; it is more a moral history of the 20th Century with several leading theses which Johnston returns to with ever increasing import and relevance. The greatest of these is that ideology has been the waster of mankind and the destoyer of moral integrity.

The greatest challenge he sets up for those who see the world in ideological opposites is the notion that there is really no functional and moral difference between Fascist, Nazi and Communist regimes (at least in what kinds of states they produce) --- all of them in practise have lead to dictatorship, a loss of basic freedoms, and, in their most striking characteristic, mass murder perpetrated by the state. He is most likely right in this assertion and no doubt historians looking back within the next 20 years will probably see the advent of ideological states of the extreme left and right as a symtomatic of the 20th century and make no real distinction between them, functionally they are the same (much in the same way as we now make little distinction between individual barbarian tribes who attacked Rome).

That these ideological excesses were perpetrated by the state because of some notion that the developments in science imbued, coloured these ideologies with the notion of the attainability of absolute truth once the underlying truths of "history" were found, that is another question. It is also one that Johnston comes most close to proving, since it is clear that ideologues with no understanding of such concepts such as natural selection --- Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin --- really believed that there were such things as "superior" forms of government and "superior" races of people. A conclusion that could not be reached by anyone with even rudimentary understanding of Darwin's tracts and the elementary genetic theory only then emerging.

So there is at least as much worship of anti-rationalism in the thought of Stalin (class enemies are everywhere), and Hitler (man finds his ultimate expression only when he submerges himself in the mass of the State) as there is in the notion that the world can be understood in terms of scientific determinism.

The one really strange (frankly wierd in my estimation) is the sometimes emergent thesis that the power of the state to kill and take away rights has been a function of the growth of science and ideology which "disregards the traditional Judeao-Christian notion of individual responsibility."

Although Johnston asserts this from time to time he never really goes beyond to prove it. Among other things he never defines what this notion of "personal responsibility" is, where it comes from and how it manifests itself. If we do not know what it is, it is difficult to know if we have lost it. Also how does it explain the excesses of China and Japan in the 20th Century, two states with no Judeo-Christian tradition (or have they always been barbarian states?). The power of the state to wield total power has been greatly enhanced in the 20th Century, and therefore its power to kill, horrendous societies and mass killings have however been with us before the 20th Century: how would one explain such horrors as the slaughter of the Cathars, of the Crusades, the Mongol invasions, the horrible excesses of the Hundred Years War and the slaughters in Chin Dynasty China? They have also been with us in the present where as in Bosnia and Kosovo individuals from two Judeo-Christian faiths receive absolution of personal responsibility directly from their respective Judeo-Christian faiths!

In all of the cases above, horror and state enforced mayhem either existed in Judeo-Christian societies or existed in areas where Judeo-Christianity never reached. That Johnston does not deal with these issues is I think, an even deeper knowledge that Johnston knows this point, although interesting, is ultimately nothing more than conjecture.

The true brilliance of Johnston is really in the details. His ability to look at different issues in a new light is really amazing. His style is novel, quirky, and always refreshing to read. Whether you agree with him or not he forces you to think: "there is no moral difference between murdering a person because of their class or because of their race" --- statements like this strongly underline his main idea that Racist ideologies of Hitler and Mussolini are really even more disfunctional varients of communism.

After reading Johnston one realises that notions of mutually exclusive ideologies contain within then an underlying logic of increasing state power beyond the reasonable limitations of Parliamentary Democracy -- as such Naziism and Communism are both sides of the same coin --- Jonstone does us a favour by pointing this out for us in cogent, intellectual, and ripping read.