Description
Do great minds practice what they preach? First published in 1988, Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals is a controversial portrait of the minds that shaped the modern world — built around one deliciously uncomfortable question: what happened when the men who preached morality, justice, and compassion to millions failed to practice those virtues themselves?
Johnson takes the measure of figures from Rousseau and Marx to Tolstoy, Ibsen, Brecht, Russell, Sartre, and, in later editions, Noam Chomsky. Rousseau wrote movingly about childcare while abandoning his own children. Marx thundered about capital while chronically mismanaging money. Tolstoy’s grand moral visions made life torment for his wife. One by one, Johnson exposes the gap between soaring public ideals and messy private conduct.
Provocative, witty, and meticulously researched, Intellectuals is not a hatchet job but a challenge: should intellectuals be held to the standards of honesty and decency they demand of others? For readers of history, biography, and the history of ideas — and anyone who loves a brilliantly argued polemic — this is an entertaining, endlessly debated work of popular intellectual history.
Intellectuals is Paul Johnson’s controversial and provocative portrait of the minds that have shaped the modern world. First published in 1988, the book asks an uncomfortable question: what happened when the great thinkers who preached morality, justice, and compassion to millions failed to practice those virtues in their own lives?
Johnson — the celebrated British historian — takes the measure of figures from Rousseau and Marx to Tolstoy, Ibsen, Brecht, Russell, Sartre, and, in later editions, Noam Chomsky. Rousseau wrote movingly about childcare while abandoning his own children. Marx thundered about capital while chronically mismanaging money. Tolstoy’s grand moral visions made life torment for his wife. One by one, Johnson exposes the gap between soaring public ideals and messy private conduct.
Provocative, witty, and meticulously researched, Intellectuals is not a hatchet job but a challenge: should intellectuals be held to the same standards of honesty and decency they demand of others?
For readers of history, biography, and the history of ideas — and for anyone who loves a brilliantly argued polemic — this is one of the most entertaining and debated works of popular intellectual history.
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