Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky Revised Edition

The trail of the intellectuals is filled with radicalism and perversion. It is very interesting to see the men and women behind the theories and ideas that have greatly influenced culture in the past few centuries. Intellectuals may be brilliant in art or have a certain area of expertise, but when an intellectual begins to express influence in an area outside of where he or she has proven his or her mastery of a subject, beware. "A dozen people picked at random on the street are at least as likely to offer sensible views on moral and political matters as a cross-section of the intelligentsia. But I would go further. One of the principal lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity, is-beware intellectuals. Not merely should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice. Beware committees, conferences and leagues of intellectuals. Distrust public statements issued from their serried ranks. Discount their verdicts on political leaders and important events."

In his Republic, Plato had Socrates arguing that in order to create an ideal city-state of perfect justice either philosophers must be kings or kings must become philosophers. In other words, the only rulers of a truly just state must be philosopher-kings. Only the philosopher has the inner vision required to rule justly.

The example of history seems to have shown that rule by philosopher-kings is more likely to be the worst and most tyrannical form of government. There have been few, if any, actual kings who have been philosophers or philosophers who have been kings, to be sure, but governments ruled by an inner vision of perfect justice have proved to be devastating in terms of human lives and freedom. The history of the twentieth century ought to have proved that beyond any doubt.

Despite the example of history and common sense, there remains a class of individuals who believe that they and they alone, possess the inner vision needed to reform or remake society into a utopia of perfect justice. These individuals have seldom possessed political power, but through their writings and thoughts have had an enormous influence on the society around them. These individuals are often referred to as intellectuals.

Paul Johnson profiles a few of these overly influential people in his book Intellectuals. As Johnson notes at the beginning, there have always been people who have held themselves as having a special capacity to determine proper behavior and beliefs and to use this capacity to enlighten their neighbors. These intellectuals, generally priests or teachers were limited by tradition or official doctrine. A preacher could try to create heaven on Earth, but his view of Heaven was determined by scripture or tradition. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the influence of religion in the West declined, and the cleric was gradually replaced by the secular intellectual.

These secular intellectuals were quite different from their predecessors. Rather than upholding traditional rules and authority, these new intellectuals sought to tear down the old to make way for a new world based upon their inner visions of justice and reason. It is these people that Johnson writes about. He begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and continues with such diverse individuals as Percy Byshe Shelley, Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others. These individuals have been very different in their ideas and lives, yet there are some striking similarities, as Johnson notes. These intellectuals all believed that they should not be bound by the same rules as others. Instead, they needed complete freedom from mundane cares to work out their ideas. They professed to be great lovers of humanity, yet didn’t seem to like the people around them very much, often using their associates as tools.

Some might object that Paul Johnson spends too much time on his subjects’ scandalous private lives. One might argue that a thinker ought to be judged by the quality of his ideas rather than the sordidness of his private life. To a great extent, this is true, yet a person’s private and public life cannot really be separated that easily. The private lives of these intellectuals were either a reflection of their philosophy, in which case that life shows the real-life effects of that philosophy, or they were unable to live up to the ideals of their philosophy, which implies that perhaps no human being could live up to such ideals.

Most of the people profiled by Johnson might be considered somewhat “left wing” in their politics. This might be because of Paul Johnson’s own political prejudices, but I think that it is also likely that the sort of person who wishes to remake civilization according to his own wishes is far more likely to be drawn to progressive politics. A conservative intellectual, would perhaps, be more inclined to defend and preserve traditional institutions rather than tear them down to be remade. One exception to this rule might be the example of Ayn Rand. She was not a defender of tradition despite her defense of capitalism and she sought, through her Objectivist philosophy, to undo the past two-thousand years of “altruist” Judeo-Christian ethics, so perhaps she fits the pattern of the intellectuals better than it might appear at first glance. It is a pity that Paul Johnson did not include her with the intellectuals since the unrealism of some aspects of her philosophy and her wretched treatment of most of her associated made her a better example than some of the people he did include.

I have no complaints about Intellectuals, however. It is a book that anyone who believes that the right sort of ideas or the right sort of people could usher in a perfect world would do well to read this book.

The violent collapse of the ecclesiastical caste precipitated by the French Revolution has given rise to the secular intellectual armed with their scintillating rhetoric and dazzling display of scholastic aptitudes; these social, cultural elites have become guardians of cultures and devised moral and ideological innovations, thus replacing the ancient regime of the priestly caste. Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals lays bare the human frailties of these beneficent intellectuals - ranging from Jean-Jacque Rousseau to Leo Tolstoy, to Henrik Ibsen to Ernest Hemingway, and to Noam Chomsky - and invites us to question the duplicity of these intellectuals that contradicts what they preached for the sake of humanity.

Intellectuals have traditionally proclaimed themselves to be liberals, torch-bearers of fraternity, equality, liberty since they became new potent oracles of societies dictating modes of life and modus operandi of political, social, and cultural systems. However, they are actually bound to the canons of external authority and to the inheritance; that is, the intellectuals are and were by no means free spirits as they profess themselves to be. They are the substitutes for the pagan gods and the elites of Prometheus, who stole the numinous fire for humankind into the bargain under the pretext of shaping our attitudes and institutions and of prescribing us panacea for the social ills.

However, many notable intellectuals that have influenced the arts and shaped our modes of thinking were deficient in rectitude toward their kin, families, friends, and others in their everyday life. To illustrate, Rousseau was an absolute egoist, a brilliant self-publicist, tending to equate hostility to him with hostility to truth and virtue as such. He disdained women of low birth, such as seamstress, chambermaids, and shop girls, while he claimed to love people of all walks of life. In fact, this trait of egoism can be also found in the figure of Percy Byssche Shelley, a great English poet known for his proclamation that “the poets are unacknowledged legislators of the world.” A sublime egoist with a strong moralizing bent, Shelley assumed that others had to applaud his decisions and when they failed to do so up to his expectation, he was quick to display a sense of outrage. And there was also Ibsen, who changed the social thinking of his generation and that of posterity by preaching the revolt of the individual against the ancient regime of inhibitions and prejudices. He did not want to help others, let alone his own family, for richer he became, the less inclined he was to make any contract with them.

To encapsulate, Intellectuals serves as a literary stethoscope to examine the moral and judgmental credentials of select intellectuals most known to us throughout the modern western history. However, this is not a book to slender their intellectual contributions to the enrichment of culture and society on the whole by revealing their personal history. Rather, it is to show us readers a peril of effaced humanity undermined by the importance of ideas as held by most intellectuals, for ideas – or ideology – were their new gods or new mammon. They put ideas before their families, friends, and people for the sake of perfection of the arts, politics, or society. Moreover, so many intellectuals have jumped on the bandwagon of liberalism in favor of careerism. It is this hypocrisy that Johnson wants to bring to light in Intellectuals. And I think this book is one of the must-have books we should keep on our bookshelves to discern true intellectuals who practice what they preach, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson or George Orwell from those who are no more than learned careerists or demagogues.

rather shocking! I am only on Hemingway - middle of book - but enjoying every bit of it. What a wild and eye opening approach to this subject -- and something you would never get if you stuck to one-guy-at-a-time. Pretty amazing, really. It helps me forgive myself for not being a world-known author! LOL!
I just finished his Modern Times book (history of last century) and it was EXCELLENT, so I thought I'd try another Johnson. What a treasure!