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Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky Paperback – May 1, 2007
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"Johnson revels in all the wicked things these great thinkers have done...great fun to read." — New York Times Book Review
A fascinating portrait of the minds that have shaped the modern world. In an intriguing series of case studies, Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, Lillian Hellman, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, and Noam Chomsky, among others, are revealed as intellectuals both brilliant and contradictory, magnetic and dangerous.
- Print length416 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarper Perennial
- Publication dateMay 1, 2007
- Dimensions5.31 x 0.94 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100061253170
- ISBN-13978-0061253171
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Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and ChomskyPaperback
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Johnson revels in all the wicked things these great thinkers have done...great fun to read." — New York Times Book Review
“Here’s a book that should have a cleansing influence on Western literature and culture for years to come.” — Malcolm Forbes, Forbes
“So full of life and energy and fascinating detail, and so right for the moment, that anyone who picks it up will have a hard time putting it down.” — Norman Podhoretz, New York Post
From the Back Cover
A fascinating portrait of the minds that have shaped the modern world. In an intriguing series of case studies, Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, Lillian Hellman, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, and Noam Chomsky, among others, are revealed as intellectuals both brilliant and contradictory, magnetic and dangerous.
About the Author
Paul Johnson is a historian whose work ranges over the millennia and the whole gamut of human activities. He regularly writes book reviews for several UK magazines and newspapers, such as the Literary Review and The Spectator, and he lectures around the world. He lives in London, England.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Perennial; Revised edition (May 1, 2007)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 416 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0061253170
- ISBN-13 : 978-0061253171
- Item Weight : 10.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.94 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #95,895 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #49 in Sociology of Social Theory
- #88 in Philosophy History & Survey
- #295 in History & Theory of Politics
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About the author

Beginning with Modern Times (1985), Paul Johnson's books are acknowledged masterpieces of historical analysis. He is a regular columnist for Forbes and The Spectator, and his work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.
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According to the author, with the decline of clerical power in the eighteenth century, there arose in the last two hundred years a class of secular intellectual who assert that they could diagnose the ills of society and fundamental habits of human beings and cure them with their own unaided intellects and transform them for the better. They were not servants and interpreters of gods but substitutes. The purpose of the book is “an examination of the moral and judgmental credentials of certain leading intellectuals to give such advice to humanity”. As one can guess, all those examined by Johnson were deficient in such credentials.
The first to be examined was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, born in Geneva and lived in Switzerland, France, and Britain. His writings on political philosophy, economic theory and education had a great influence on the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe. Writers who claimed to be greatly influenced by Rousseau form an impressive list of Who’s Who. They included Goethe and Schiller in Germany, Tolstoy and Pushkin in Russia, Byron, Shelley and Keats in England, and John Dewey in America. Unfortunately, the personal behavior presented by Johnson showed Rousseau to be a despicable human being. He was mean and cruel to women, friends, and to folks who helped him. He even abandoned his own children. He was not trueful in his biography “Confessions”. Johnson was led to ask: “Rousseau’s reputation during his lifetime, and his influence after his death, raise disturbing questions about human gullibility, and indeed about the human propensity to reject evidence it does not wish to admit.”
Rousseau was the hero of the English poet Shelley. It turned out that as a person, Shelley was as despicable as Rousseau. Another English poet, Byron, though not selected on the list of Intellectuals, was mentioned in the chapter on Shelley. The reference to Byron was also far from flattery.
Two famous names Ernest Hemingway and Bertrand Russell filled two chapters of the book. Much of these pages dealt with their sordid relations with women. Hemingway hated his mother. He had several wives, all treated badly by him. Like Rosseau, he invented stories about himself. He failed on all three of the codes he created: honor, truth, loyalty. In his later years, he became aware of his inability to recapture his genius at writing. This led to accelerated circles of depression and drink. He ended his life by suicide, blowing his skull with a pistol. He was, in Johnson’s opinion, a man killed by his art.
There is not much to learn about Bertrand Russell’s philosophy in the book. Instead, there are page after page of how he mistreated his wives and his mistresses. It is not easy to keep track of how many mistresses he had. One gets tired of reading about them after a while.
Tales of romance continue in the chapter on Jean-Paul Sartre, French Playwright and a key figure in the philosophy of existentialism. Sartre’s main mistress was Simone de Beauvoir, author of “The Second Sex” and one of the early feminist activists. Sartre and Simone agreed that their relationship should follow the policy of transparency. Each was free to have other partners, called peripherals, and to let the other know about them. On at least one instance, such a policy led to tragedy. Her great peripheral, the American novelist Nelson Algren, in an interview he gave when he was seventy-two years old, revealed his fury at her disclosures, which included his name and letters appearing in her autobiography. He was so upset that he had a massive heart attack after the interviewer had left and died that night.
Other negative comments are prevalent in the Chapter on Sartre. He was described as “tried to make history from his armchair” and “a man whose mother has to pay his income tax” by Albert Camus. The film director John Huston portrayed Sartre in his autobiography as “a little barrel of a man and as ugly as a human being can be. There was no such thing as a conversation with him. He talked incessantly.” Among the comments by Paul Johnson are: “Sartre always preferred to write nonsense rather than write nothing”; “He sometimes talked when no one was listening”. “Sartre failed to achieve any kind of coherence and consistency in his views of public policy. No body of doctrine survived him.”
Tolstoy was introduced as a person who felt that he had “immeasurable grandeur” in his own soul and “retained the belief he was born to rule, in one way or another, expecting his wishes to be obeyed instantly”. A detailed account was given of the tragic relationship between Tolstoy and his wife Sonya. It is a very negative portrait of Tolstoy. According to the author, a main source is the biography by Ernest J. Simmon. I happen to have read Simmon’s book a long time ago, and the impression I got was much less negative. Indeed, my most vivid memory was the story of the green stick. Legend has it that the secret of universal happiness had been recorded in the green stick which was buried at the edge of a ravine in Yasnaya Polyana, the native estate of the Tolstoy family. Tolstoy began searching for it when he was young. He was still in search of it when he left home at the age of 82, dying alone at a train station. This moving story of the green stick was not mentioned in Johnson’s account.
Other “Intellectuals” chosen by Johnson included Henrik Ibsen, Karl Marx, and several others whom I have not heard of before: Bertolt Brecht (German playwright and poet), Edmund Wilson (American writer), Victor Gollancz (British publisher and humanitarian) and Lillian Hellman (American writer). Their “moral and judgmental credentials”, or lack of them, together with a chapter entitled “The Flight of Reason”, in which many more are briefly introduced, including George Orwell, Norman Mailer, Noam Chomsky, constitute the remainder of this 342 page book.
There is no one from Asia. Lu Zun, a Chinese writer who had a significant influence on Chinese youths who led the May 4 movement in 1919, certainly fit the type of intellectual Johnson was writing about. Perhaps Johnson had not heard of him. This is not surprising. For someone schooled in the West, it is only to be expected that he/she is not as knowledgeable with Asian history as with European and American history.
In conclusion, if you hope to learn a lot about the thoughts/writings/doctrines of the individuals profiled in this book, you will be disappointed. The aim of the book is to examine the moral and judgmental credentials of certain secular intellectuals who claimed they are the best qualified to teach humanity how to behave. From this perspective, shedding light on their personal behavior is more relevant than explaining their intellectual accomplishments. The reader has to decide whether the author has accomplished this mission fairly.
"‘[Woman] is generally stupid, but the Devil lends her brains when she works for him. Then she accomplishes miracles of thinking, farsightedness, constancy, in order to do something nasty." "It is impossible to demand of a woman that she evaluate the feelings of her exclusive love on the basis of moral feeling. She cannot do it, because she does not possess real moral feeling, i.e. one that stands higher than everything."
"We used to think Hitler was wicked when he wanted to kill all the Jews. But Kennedy and Macmillan not only want to kill all the Jews but all the rest of us too. They’re much more wicked than Hitler... I will not pretend to obey a government which is organizing the massacre of the whole of mankind… They are the wickedest people that ever lived in the history of man." "Kennedy and Khrushchev, Adenauer and De Gaulle, Macmillan and Gaitskell are pursuing a common aim: the ending of human life…To please these men, all the private affections, all the public hopes… [are] to be wiped out for ever."
These are just some of the outrageously wrong and silly statements from intellectuals that show how often they exult in themselves and their crusades – at the expense of the truth.
Rousseau's praise of himself as "the best friend" ever are shown to be laughably inaccurate once you read the chapter on him. Leo Tolstoy wasn't a very nice man and held disgusting views on women. Bertrand Russell lied about his own position on war – he had advocated a preventative war against the Soviet Union, but said he hadn't – and then spouts hyperbolic nonsense (nuclear deterrence is the same thing as "organizing" the deaths of all us humans – or wanting to organize those deaths?) about people he disagreed with.
Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do." This book is a powerful confirmation of those words. The rationalizations the book's intellectuals have cooked up often defy belief and reveal much about them and their ideologies.
For example, Marx received lots of money from his friend Friedrich Engels over the years. "For the last fifteen years of his life... Marx... enjoyed a certain security. Nevertheless, he seems to have lived at the rate of about £500 a year, or even more, justifying himself to Engels: ‘even looked at commercially, a purely proletarian set-up would be unsuitable here’" (p. 75). I think something that Joshua Muravchik noted in his book Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism (which, sadly, Paul Johnson doesn't really do here) is very relevant:
"No one knows how much money passed between the two friends. Between 1850 and 1869, Marx’s requests [for money] and Engels’ invariably compliant responses flowed back and forth in a constant stream of letters. Biographers have tried to add the sums involved, but a good deal of the correspondence does not survive, so they are working from fragments. Even these incomplete records show transfers of £33 in 1851, £41 in 1852, £57 in 1853, £12 in 1854, £10 in 1856, £70 in 1857, £61 in 1858, £52 in 1859, and £159 in 1860.50 Throughout this era, the average individual in Britain lived on £27 per year.51" (p. 80 of Muravchik's book).
"As Engels’ fortune grew, so did his generosity, but Marx always adjusted his standard of living to a level above what he received. Thus he was never out of debt, and he never stopped asking Engels for more. Even when he was living well, he had little trouble finding room to expand the ambit of his mendicancy. When his oldest daughter married and moved to France, Marx asked Engels to pay her rent, pointing out, as if it explained all, that nonpayment of rent was taken seriously in France." (p. 79 of Muravchik's book).
When we combine these lengthy quotations with the fact that "apart from his intermittent journalism, the purpose of which was political rather than to earn money, Marx never seriously attempted to get a job" (Johnson p. 74), how can we escape the conclusion that Marx is rationalizing? Marx surely could've cut down on his "adjustments" to his living standards. But there was little incentive to do that.
There is a big focus in this book on the personal lives of intellectuals, and I'm not as dismayed by this fact as some other people seem to be.
First of all, on innumerable occasions, intellectuals have criticized countries for not living up to their ideals, complaints about slavery in America being a classic example – and usually not showing a similar focus on slavery elsewhere around the world (see Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals for more on the history of slavery and how criticizing others for failing to live up to their ideals can easily go wrong).
If intellectuals can't be criticized for failing to live up to their ideals – and not because of things every "human being" does, but often VERY BIG wrongs they commit (e.g., lying about their positions like Bertrand Russell, making falsehoods in their autobiographies) that not everybody does – then where is the outrage among our negative reviewers when thinkers dish out denunciations of others when they fail their ideals?
Second, there are quite a few attacks on the ideas they had (e.g., the trashing of Marx and Engel's sources, the demolition of Noam Chomsky on pages 339-340, the analysis of Henrik Ibsen's saying that "the minority is always right," the slamming of Rousseau's "General Will" on pages 24-25).
That's quite aside from the implicit criticism of intellectuals' ideas. The elementary and often shocking errors of thought you'll see in this book – both in intellectuals' private lives, public statements, and in their ideas – can't help but lower your respect for their thinking and supposed wisdom.
There's a basic reason why intellectuals have been groundless time and time again that I think is fairly evident in the book: human nature is awful. We're not as smart as we think we are, and it's hard enough for us to see when we're wrong as it is. Imagine how much harder it is to see our mistakes when we think ourselves intellectuals, and have the rhetorical skills to conceal from ourselves and others what we're doing.
So in a sense, the negative reviews complaining about the emphasis on personal fallibility miss the whole point. If intellectuals are not only fallible, but horribly fallible – in ways that non-intellectuals like me can easily demolish – then intellectuals are overrated. We should be much more skeptical of intellectuals' abilities to find the truth and of their statements, if they make horribly silly and basic mistakes of thought so often – mistakes many normal people wouldn't make.
I feel I'm being unclear so hopefully this example will clear my point up. The statement "Adolf Hitler and Abraham Lincoln were imperfect, fallible human beings" is true, but very misleading because obviously Hitler was much worse than Lincoln. Saying "intellectuals are only human" is true, but ignores that, as this book and others have demonstrated, they have too often revealed themselves more fallible than normal people. The point is not to say that intellectuals are Hitlers or don't have good intentions, but simply to clarify my and the book's point that intellectuals are very overrated, especially when it comes to mitigating social and economic problems.
Nevertheless I do think the book should've been longer, with more commentary on their ideas. I think there should've been an analysis of right-wing intellectuals (the book focuses on left-wing ones), although the very big names in this book (e.g., Karl Marx, Jean-Jacques Rousseau) make up for that. On rare occasions it dragged on for me, and in some sections I wished there were more details. So it got four out of five stars.
For more on intellectuals, definitely read Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals and Society: Revised Edition, and follow that up with Daniel Flynn's Intellectual Morons.
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With the exception of Orwell and perhaps one or two others, these were people who promulgated great formulaic visions for the world, but who generally made a moral and personal mess of their own lives.
Johnson says a dozen or so citizens chosen at random would be at least as likely to provide moral and political guidelines to live by as did these overly-vaunted thinkers of yore, such was the deep hypocrisy and folly that marked most of their do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do lives.











