COMMENT
INTELLECTUALS, ACADEMICS, AND
POLITICS
Paul Johnson has written several interesting books, but
his latest,
The Intellectuals,
is not one of them. Its thesis, that intel–
lectuals are not noted for their thinking, is arbitrarily and errati–
cally documented. But by simply raising the question, Johnson
has brought up an important issue, namely the contradiction be–
tween the fact that the intellectual heritage of Western civiliza–
tion has been created by the intellectuals and the fact that in
many respects the intellectuals have been heavily prejudiced
and manifestly wrong.
To make his case, Johnson has picked twelve figures at ran–
dom, for no more apparent reason than that they illustrate his
point, all of them being easy targets, of course, of a moral and in–
tellectual criticism. The twelve subjects are: Rousseau, Shelley,
Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Brecht, Russell, Sartre,
Wilson, Gollancz, and Hellman. Aside from the fact that they
are notable for their mistakes as well as their achievements,
Johnson goes in for lengthy exposes of their sex lives, their
drinking habits-all the shabby aspects of their personal lives, ir–
relevant to the value of their ideas or their writings. Moreover,
most of the examples Johnson has selected are writers not theo–
reticians: to do a real job, he would have had to examine thinkers
like Aristotle, Spinoza, Augustine, Locke, Toqueville, Kant, Isaiah
Berlin, Lionel Trilling, Orwell, etcetera.
Although Johnson has taken the easy way, there is still the
question posed by the contradiction between the role of the intel–
lectuals in the advance of Western civilization and the extent to
which they have been mistaken and have yielded to ideological
fashions and prejudices. We have only to cite the examples of the
encyclopedists who failed to envision some of the consequences
