Part History, part biography, mostly tabloid but still very entertaining, this compendium of short biographies includes characters like Karl marx, Ernest Hemingway, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau who invented or embellished new ways of thinking but were deeply flawed as people. It might have been subtitled "The Hypocritical Bastards".
More character assassination than biography, each profile contains a short explanation of why the person is famous followed by extensive examples of their lies, hypocrisies, plagiarism, cowardice, vanity, whore-mongering, philandering, adultery, bigamy, heartlessness, cruelty, alcoholism, drug addiction, personal shortcomings, and various crimes against humanity often perpetrated against family members and close friends.
A commonality of "Intellectuals", according to Johnson, is that they're willing to discard all knowledge that came before, destroy the world as it is, and recreate it in the way they see best. According to Johnson, intellectuals (at least these intellectuals) reject the "vast corpus" of inherited wisdom and revealed religion and then refashion the rules of life out of their own heads. Johnson says that the 1930s awakened a "...seething mob of intellectuals anxious for a tabula rasa on which to write anew the foundation documents of civilization..."
For example:
On education, "It is a curious delusion of intellectuals, from Rousseau onwards, that they can solve the perennial difficulties of human education at a stroke, by setting up a new system".
On religion: "Shelley clearly wanted a total political transformation of society, including the destruction of organized religion".
"...Shelley believed that society was totally rotten and should be transformed, and that enlightened man, through his own unaided intellect, had the moral right and duty to reconstruct it from first principles."
Tolstoy "...believed throughout his life that he could seize upon any discipline, find out what was wrong with it, and then rewrite its rules from first principles".
Henry James receives a brief mention but does not get a full chapter in the book because, as Johnson writes, unlike the others, he rejected the notion that the world and humanity could be transformed by ideas conjured up out of nothing. For James the inherited wisdom of civilization was the only reliable guide to human behavior.
As to their personal defects:
Shelley was a "...thin-skinned person who seems to have been totally insensitive to the feelings of others (a not uncommon combination)".
Hemingway was a hopeless, abusive alcoholic.
Rousseau gave all his children up to the orphanage where most of them soon died despite his conviction that he knew better than anyone in the world how children should be raised and educated.
Sartre preached deeds over words but in fact all he contributed to the Nazi resistance in Paris was words. He also took copious stimulants including cigarettes, pipe tobacco, wine, vodka, whiskey, beer, amphetamines, aspirin, barbiturates, coffee, and tea.
I found this book interesting, compelling, and fun to read.
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Teresita Melendrez
Buen servicio
Reviewed in Mexico on May 4, 2020
Teresita Melendrez
Reviewed in Mexico on May 4, 2020
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Gerard
Intellectuals have feet of heavy clay
Reviewed in Australia on November 3, 2020