Have one to sell?

Flip to back Flip to front

Listen Playing... Paused You're listening to a sample of the Audible audio edition.
Learn more

See this image

Follow the Author

Paul Johnson

Intellectuals Hardcover – February 1, 1989

by Paul Johnson (Author)

90 ratings

See all formats and editions Hide other formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Audible Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$0.00

Free with your Audible trial

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$10.67

$45.40

$1.70

Paperback

"Please retry"

$17.38

$2.99

$9.09

Audio CD, Audiobook, Unabridged

"Please retry"

$21.97

$19.95

The lives of leading intellectuals--including Rousseau, Shelley, Karl Marx, James Baldwin, and others--are explored in light of the "heartlessness of ideas" that the author finds endemic to much of intellecturalism

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Customers who bought this item also bought

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Paul Johnson
576
Hardcover
$59.99
Paul Johnson
449
Paperback
$18.99
Paul Johnson
63
Paperback
$15.99
Evan Sayet
281
Paperback
$9.99
Viktor E. Frankl
24,995
Hardcover
$16.89
Paul Johnson
273
Hardcover
31 offers from $19.91

What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?

Page 1 of 1 Start overPage 1 of 1

Special offers and product promotions

Amazon Business : For business-only pricing, quantity discounts and FREE Shipping. Register a free business account

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Written from a conservative standpoint, these pummeling profiles of illustrious intellectuals are caustic, skewed, thought-provoking and thoroughly engaging. The author of A History of the World skeptically weighs each pundit's moral and judgmental credentials to give advice to humanity. He plays up the personal shortcomings of Marx, a failed academic given to pseudoscientific jargon, habitual anger and dictatorial habits; Sartre, a spoiled only child, existentialist philosopher of action who did nothing of consequence for the French Resistance and never lifted a finger to save the Jews; pacifist Bertrand Russell, who repeatedly advocated "preventative" nuclear war against Stalinist Russia between 1945 and 1949; Hemingway, whose adolescent rejection of his parents' religion is said to have triggered his secular ethic of action and violence. This rogues' gallery includes "notorious liar" Lillian Hellman; self-publicists Norman Mailer and Bertolt Brecht; leftist publisher Victor Gollancz, "a monster of self-deception"; Shelley, Rousseau, Tolstoy, Ibsen, others.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The central theme of Johnson's new book is "Beware intellectuals!" Johnson examines the rise of the intellectual as a sort of secular seer and moral arbiter, a role once filled by the priest or soothsayer. These intellectuals, starting with Rousseau, promote themselves as possessing the moral authority to transform society, a claim that Johnson disputes. He approaches his subject through a selective series of ad hominem case studies, including Shelley, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Marx, Hemingway, Brecht, Sartre, Hellman, and others. The focus is more on what Johnson takes to be the moral contradictions of these individuals than on their ideas. As such, it is more interesting as literary gossip than intellectual history.
- T.L. Cooksey, Armstrong State Coll . , Savannah, Ga.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product details

Publisher : Harpercollins; 1st U.S. ed edition (February 1, 1989)
Language : English
Hardcover : 385 pages
ISBN-10 : 0060160500
ISBN-13 : 978-0060160500
Item Weight : 1.6 pounds

Best Sellers Rank: #521,740 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #435 in Philosopher Biographies
- #1,106 in Sociology of Class
- #2,863 in Philosophy of Ethics & Morality

Customer Reviews:
90 ratings

Customer reviews

5 star		66%
4 star		20%
3 star		8%
2 star		3%
1 star		3%

How are ratings calculated?

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on August 5, 2018

Verified Purchase

good read for getting a better understanding of where some of these "modern" ideas are sourced from.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Dr. John S. Waldrip

Legacy compared to real life

Reviewed in the United States on December 20, 2013

Verified Purchase

The author does a wonderful job of showing the vast difference between the legacy supposedly left by the great intellectuals, but also the real nitty gritty of their actual selfish and self-indulgent lives as they were surrounded by enablers. Supposedly for the people, they very nearly always had no personal connection whatsoever with real people.

4 people found this helpful

Helpful

stz43

Lesser known facts

Reviewed in the United States on April 11, 2011

Verified Purchase

The Paul Johnson's Intellectuals is the must read book for anybody who wants to have a key to understanding the last 200 years of world history likewise to know the basic undercurrent of contemporary politics.

Let me use some quotations to review this book:

'Is the one of the themes of this book that the private lives and the public postures of leading intellectuals cannot be separated: one helps to explain the other. Private vices and weaknesses are almost invariably reflected in conduct on the world stage.' p. 274

'There was no danger of that in ......... case but she shared with ............ another habit - a failure to pay income tax. As the cases of ........ and .............. suggest, there is a common propensity among radical intellectuals to demand ambitious government programmes while feeling no responsibility to contribute to them'. p. 300

'And indeed, for a variety of reasons, social engineering has been the salient delusion and the greatest curse of the modern age. In the twentieth century it has killed scores of millions of innocent people in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Communist China and elsewhere. But it is the last thing which Western democracies, with all their faults, have ever espoused'. p. 340

This book contains fascinating gallery of the most prominent world personas whose private lives had contradicted in a drastic manner with their "love of humanity". As reader will find these intellectuals, whatever they teached or proclaimed, they had a very little or none respect for "truth".

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

tuxamation

Great book

Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2016

Verified Purchase

Great book. The section that details the contemporary critiques of Karl Marx's economic work was very enlightening.

Helpful

Harmon Spolan

I read it on and off, choosing the chapters ...

Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2014

Verified Purchase

I read it on and off, choosing the chapters on the people I am most interested in learning about. Johnson certainly is informed and is a top author.

Helpful

Jennifer Ellison

True to description

Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2020

Verified Purchase

Book arrived and was exactly in the condition described. Thank you ☺

Helpful

Martin

well satisfied customer

Reviewed in the United States on March 4, 2017

Verified Purchase

The book was in great condition and so was the cover. It came quickly too. I could not be more satisfied.
Thanks!

Helpful

is excellent.

Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2014

Verified Purchase

Must read..Paul Johnson at his usual iconoclast role.But how he missed Graham Greene,who may have as dark a side as anyone else PJ has pulled down. His treatment of Noam Chomsky,Indian Left's and intellectual's darling ,is excellent.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Yeats

Evicting squatters from the moral high ground

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 19, 2019

Verified Purchase

A highly readable expose of a choice selection of the righteous left's most prized prophets (and there are so many to choose from). I would have given five stars if Johnson had put a few more influential feminists into the mix. They always get off lightly.

Naturally, this book has irked the lefties. After all, to be a left winger is to be convinced that the moral high ground is your natural habitat if not your exclusive domain. Shocking then to have to face up the moral squaler of those thinkers lionised by generations of wannabe cultural revolutionaries.

I found the chapter on the sainted Victor Gollancz particularly revealing. So eager was he to press the left wing cause that he urged writers to produce works which would seem, superficially at least, to be non-partisan but which would lead the reader to view the world from a socialist perspective. Sounds very much like the way our modern day broadcast media operates!

5 people found this helpful

Words of Power

Plagues of boils.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 12, 2017

Verified Purchase

I bought this book when following up on a reference in the book United in Hate. The Marx chapter is worth the price of entry alone. I felt disgusted with myself (even if it was not really my fault) that I had not followed up on Marx sooner. The bilge that his followers spew into an already messed up enough world is appalling. Marx was a boil ridden maniac of the worst order and the author uses the nuclear option on him. He is more than deserving of it. Genocides and killings, torture and murder are portrayed by so many as "the human condition" as if we can do no better. Yet there are reasons why those appalling events happened. They were the consequences of human beings making the worst kind of choices. It all comes to down to choice for every single human being on this planet. We all have far more influence and power than we can ever imagine, even if we feel like a "drop in the ocean" of 8 billion souls. Thanks to people like this author people are waking up to the utter lies; the way they have been misled by so many who should have known a lot better. It's human nature to take a certain amount on trust. Trust is good, but as Reagan is quoted as saying ... "Trust but verify".

4 people found this helpful

Paul Marks

Should be read.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 27, 2015

Verified Purchase

A lot of people denounce Paul Johnson for showing just how repulsive many influential thinkers were - pointing out that there are scandals in his own life (which there are). However, given the hero worship that people like Karl Marx get from their followers (and even from some of their opponents - who bend over backwards to say that X was a good person but....., when X was not a good person at all) it is worth having the side of these people that their followers hide, exposed to public view. Also Johnson shows that this is not just a matter of private bad behaviour - the vileness (the world is not too strong) of many of the "great intellectuals" directly influenced what they taught.

5 people found this helpful

Byletts

Recommend

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 14, 2017

Verified Purchase

I was recommended this book and a quick look through (till I have more time to really read it) has awakened my interest. If you don't fall for "do as I say, not what I do" it is the book for you. Whether you agree with it or not, it will get you thinking.

3 people found this helpful

rgkd52

A clear eyed look at some historic figures

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 31, 2020

Verified Purchase

We continue to take guidance and moral advice from some very questionable characters and the writer shows us succinctly why we should question thier record as human beings more thoroughly

See all reviews

Pages with related products. See and discover other items: history of social classes, intellectual history, auto restoration

Follow the Author

Similar authors to follow

Intellectuals Hardcover – February 1, 1989

Customers who viewed this item also viewed

Customers who bought this item also bought

What other items do customers buy after viewing this item?

Special offers and product promotions

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

From Library Journal

Product details

Customer reviews

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Top reviews from other countries