Dangerous Hypocrites

Intellectuals
by Paul Johnson
Weidenfeld and Nicholson, $39.95

Paul Johnson is one of Britain's foremost conservative writers, one whose political views have undergone a significant change since the 1960s.  Formerly editor of the left-wing New Statesman, Johnson now writes for the Spectator and other conservative publications.  His recent book, Intellectuals, is a thought-provoking and disturbing exposé of the lives and careers of some of the leading dramatis personnae so beloved of the Left.  According to Johnson the influence exerted by the ideas of Rousseau, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Brecht, Norman Mailer and so on have definitely not resulted in happier, freer, and more prosperous lives for humanity.

Johnson asserts that the writings of Rousseau -- that "interesting madman" -- laid the foundations of the modern totalitarian state.  In claiming that "Virtue is the product of good government.  Vices belong less to man, than to man badly governed", Rousseau unwittingly "prepared the blueprint for the principal delusions and follies of the 20th century".  Like many other intellectuals whose ideas have changed the world, the private Rousseau was avery unpleasant person.  His five children were abandoned in infancy to the "care" of foundling homes.  None survived more than a few months.  His treatment of women was appalling (a characteristic shared by all male intellectuals in the book) and he was well-known among his contemporaries as deceitful, vain, ungrateful, cruel, hypocritical, rude and "full of malice".

Karl Marx, whose message about the so-called injustices of capitalism has had such an enormous impact on the world, emerges as an anti-semitic, snobbish racist who seldom washed, lived off Frederick Engels and allowed his family to live in such squalid conditions that his young son caught gastro-enteritis and died.  Marx's strident criticisms of capitalism and factories were made from a position of personal ignorance.  Johnson points out that, "so far as we know, Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life".  Marx and Engels also falsified evidence, systematically misused sources and ignored changes in working conditions and improvements in wages which did not suit their thesis.

While Marx railed against the exploitation of the working class he subjected his own servant to a regime as severe as that which he fulminated against in his writings.  Unlike industrial workers, who received some payment for their labour, this servant received not a penny.  To add insult to injury she bore Marx an illegitimate child in 1851 which he refused to acknowledge.  The boy was permitted to enter the house -- but only by the back door;  he could only speak to his mother in the kitchen.

In the decades following the end of the Second World War the thoughts, writings and personality of Jean-Paul Sartre occupied a central place in the development of "a challenging doctrine of individualism in which each human being is seen as absolute master of his soul".  His promotion of existentialism appealed seductively to the disillusioned of Europe.  During the 1950s and 1960s, as his reputation and influence grew, Sartre became highly skilled in the art of self-promotion.

By this time he had also established a relationship with fellow philosopher and doyen of feminism, Simone de Beauvoir.  In fact, as his many affairs clearly show, Sartre was the archetypal "male chauvinist pig".  Johnson describes Beauvoir as "this strong minded and brilliant woman [who] became Sartre7s slave ... she served him as mistress, surrogate wife, cook, manager, female bodyguard and nurse ... In all essentials, Sartre treated her no better than Rousseau did his Therese;  worse, because he was unfaithful".  This is an extraordinary indictment of a woman whose book, The Second Sex, is regarded as a major feminist manifesto.  Her miserable and destructive relationship with Sartre begs the question:  How could such a committed and intellectually gifted feminist spend so much of her adult life ministering to the needs of such a horrible man?

The more insidious nature of Sartre's beliefs and teachings is evidenced by his patronage of the founder of modern black African racism, Frantz Fanon;  his support of repression in the Soviet Union and claim that "there is total freedom of expression in the USSR" and his tutelage of the notorious Pol Pot.  During the 1950s Pol Pot and several other Cambodian middle-class intellectuals absorbed Sartre's sinister doctrine of "necessary violence" as they studied in Paris.  In 1975 several million of their fellow Cambodians were to have the misfortune to experience at first hand the legacy of Sartre's teachings.

The final chapter of the book dissects 20th century writers.  Entitled, "The Flight of Reason", it analyses the careers and writings of Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan and Noam Chomsky.  During the 1930s left-wing publications were reluctant to publish information about the Stalinist atrocities and later in the 1960s much was again hidden with respect to the real events of Mao's "Cultural Revolution".  Chomsky's extraordinary rationalisation of the Communist massacres in Cambodia makes chilling reading.

Johnson's intellectuals are an unlikeable lot.  Most have claimed to love humanity -- but their deeds and exhortations suggest a loathing of and contempt for their fellow-man.  Many were grotesque self-publicists who set out to dominate and control the lives of others with their meddling schemes of social engineering.  Finally, far from being led by Johnson into an unthinking criticism of all intellectual writings, the strength of his book lies in its warning not to take intellectuals and their self-proclaimed concern for mankind at face value.