Intellectuals

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. 340This 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".

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

Great book with greater author. I like.

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.

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.

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

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

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!

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".

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.

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

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.