Context: As with the other articles in the ‘Notes from the book’ series, the primary reader I had in mind when writing this is me. I use these notes as an online Journal, with the act of writing a way to learn better, and the act of publishing, a driver to be very clearer in my views and to create an easy to access reference source from wherever I am. You may find some of the quotations longer than a typical book review, and this is by design. The notes are those I highlighted when reading the book using my Amazon Kindle – I outline how I sync these to my publishing workflow in this article.
Introduction
Intellectuals by Paul Johnson examines the credentials of 12 intellectuals who had a huge impact on moral views around humanity and society in our modern secular world (1700s – Present). From Jean-Jacques Rousseau through to Noam Chomsky, this is a book to read for anyone interested in the origins of the social constructs in our modern society. It’s part history, part biography, and part tabloid—making it entertaining.
What the author demonstrates in detail is that many of these intellectuals—whose ideas were used as the basis to formulate the structure of our societies—were fundamentally flawed.
The critique of these intellectuals is three-fold:
- Hypocrisy: Inconsistencies between stated ideals and personal behavior.
- Elitism: Many prioritized their theories over practical realities, enabled in part by their elite social status which shielded them from the true social impacts of their ideas.
- Social Impact: Linked to this, many of their contributions created harm and continue to do so to this day.
Understanding this context is important to give context to the seeds of the borderline insane ideas that have infected many Western societies through wokeism and associated movements.
I focused my reading on the more prominent of these intellectuals and set out my book notes below. This fuses lots of direct lifts from the book and my own thoughts.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Dates: 1712–1778
Key Quote: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”
Major Works: The Social Contract, Emile
Philosophy
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was the first of the modern intellectuals:
- Rejected the existing order in its entirety.
- Sought to refashion it from the bottom up.
He died a decade before the French Revolution of 1789, but many contemporaries held him responsible for it. His influence was in these broad areas:
- Education: Refocused education towards nature and health (cold baths, systematic exercise, sports).
- Totalitarianism: Wanted the state to have complete charge of the upbringing of children.
- Social Critique: Rejected class, urban sophistication, and monetary measurement of success.
- Capitalism Critique: Cited property and competition to acquire it as causing alienation.
- Exploitation of Privileged Guilt: Through extreme rudeness, echoes seen today in movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM).
Contradictions
In reality, Rousseau failed in all 13 occupations he tried and relied on a succession of elder wealthy women to get by, cheating on each of them. He claimed to speak only the truth, but even his book Confessions was full of lies. He fell out with all his peers, including Voltaire.
Edmund Burke
Dates: 1729–1797
Key Quote: “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look to it at all.”
Major Works: Reflections on the Revolution in France
Philosophy
Edmund Burke is widely regarded as the father of modern conservatism. His writings, particularly Reflections on the Revolution in France, provided a profound critique of the French Revolution, emphasizing the importance of tradition, social stability, and the gradual evolution of society rather than abrupt, radical change.
Burke advocated for the preservation of established institutions and customs, arguing that they embody the collective wisdom of generations. His ideas laid the groundwork for conservative political thought, influencing political leaders and movements that prioritize order, continuity, and skepticism of revolutionary upheaval.
Paul Johnson praises Burke’s emphasis on practical wisdom (“prudence”) over abstract principles, noting how Burke believed in evolving societal norms based on historical experience rather than ideological purity.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Dates: 1792–1822
Key Quote: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
Major Works: Ozymandias, Prometheus Unbound, A Defence of Poetry
Background
Shelley was a schoolboy prodigy and died young (aged 29), similar to many great English poets of his generation, such as Keats (25) and Byron (36).
Writing / Philosophy
Like Rousseau, Shelley believed that society was totally rotten and should be transformed, and that enlightened individuals, through their own intellect, had the moral right and duty to reconstruct it from first principles.
In his 10,000-word essay, A Defence of Poetry, he set out that social progress:
- Ethical Sensibility: Can be achieved only if guided by an ethical sensibility.
- Churches’ Failure: Churches ought to have supplied this but have manifestly failed.
- Science’s Limitation: Science cannot supply it. Nor can rationalism alone produce moral purpose—indeed, when science and rationalism masquerade as ethics, they produce moral disasters like the French Revolutionary Terror and the Napoleonic dictatorship.
- Role of Poetry: Only poetry could fill the moral vacuum and give progress a truly creative force.
Contradictions
Similar to Rousseau, Shelley was a bohemian who used his manipulative powers over women to get by and extract money. Like Byron, he considered himself exempt from normal rules of sexual behavior.
His stated principles were highly socialist, but he kept his wealth for furthering the cause. His socialist ideals were viewed by peers like Byron as overly utopian. He used his poetic gift to advance causes without looking into actual facts on the ground—for example, he wrote his An Address to the Irish People before he even set foot in the country.
Karl Marx
Dates: 1818–1883
Key Quotes: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” | “The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to gain. Workers of the world, unite!”
Major Works: The Communist Manifesto (1848), Das Kapital (1867–1894)
Background
Karl Marx has had more impact on actual events and the minds of men and women than any other intellectual in modern times. The Communist Manifesto outlines the goals of Marxism and socialism. Das Kapital provides a comprehensive three-volume critique of capitalism, discussing the labor theory of value, commodity production, and social division of labor.
After the failure of the German March Revolution, he moved in 1849 and settled in London. Most of his time in London, until his death on March 14, 1883, was spent in the British Museum, finding material for his study of capital and trying to get it into publishable shape.
Writing / Contradictions
Similar to Shelley and Rousseau, Marx was not a traditional scholar or scientist. He was more interested in proclaiming his ideas than in finding the truth. There were three strands in Marx:
- Poet
- Journalist
- Moralist
This made him a formidable writer and drove his influence despite his ideas not standing up to genuine scrutiny by more intelligent minds.
The chapter argues that capitalism, by its very nature, involves the progressive and increasing exploitation of workers; thus, the more capital employed, the more workers are exploited, which produces a great moral evil leading to the final crisis. However, as the Royal Commission on Children’s Employment of 1842 demonstrated, working conditions in small, pre-capitalist workshops and cottages were far worse than in the big new Lancashire cotton mills. Virtually all of Marx’s facts, selectively deployed (and sometimes falsified) came from the efforts of the State (inspectors, courts, Justices of the Peace) to improve conditions, which involved exposing and punishing those responsible for bad ones.
Personality
Similar to Rousseau and Shelley, Marx was largely unwilling to work. His influence seems to have been partly due to his biting humor, which made people laugh. This was also one of Hitler’s assets. Had he been humorless, his many unpleasant characteristics—including lack of hygiene and a violent temper—would have likely denied him a following.
Leo Tolstoy
Dates: 1828–1910
Key Quote: “The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.”
Major Works: War and Peace (1869), Anna Karenina (1877)
Background
Tolstoy was born into the hereditary ruling class in a country retaining serfdom—a form of slavery where people were bound to the land, and ownership passed with the property title.
He admired Rousseau as a fellow spirit. Like Rousseau, he was essentially self-educated, with all the pride, insecurity, and intellectual touchiness of an autodidact. He tried many things before settling down to a career as a writer—diplomacy, law, educational reform, agriculture, soldiering, and music.
Writing
Tolstoy set himself high standards; his work was exacting and arduous. Most of the vast bulk of War and Peace went through at least seven drafts. There were even more drafts and revisions of Anna Karenina, with changes of fundamental importance—transforming Anna from a disagreeable courtesan into the tragic heroine we know.
He had remarkable precision and imagery in his depiction of nature:
“The moon had lost all its lustre and was like a white cloud in the sky. Not a single star could be seen. The sedge, silvery before, now shone like gold. The stagnant pools were all like amber.”
Philosophy
Tolstoy’s philosophy included:
- Christian Anarchism: Answering only to God, not to the state or church hierarchies.
- Simplicity: Rejecting materialism.
- Ethical Principles: Focusing on ethical living.
- Non-Violence: Advocating for non-violent resistance.
His resistance to patriotism, imperialism, war, and violence in any form prevented any alliance with the Marxists. He guessed that Marxists in power would not renounce the state as they claimed.
Contradictions
In his youth, Tolstoy was extremely shy with women and resorted to brothels, which disgusted him and brought consequences. One of his earliest diary entries in March 1847 notes he was being treated for gonorrhea, obtained from the customary source. Similar to Marx and other intellectuals, he had illegitimate children with a peasant woman that he never acknowledged. As he aged, he became a more moral individual.
Ernest Hemingway
Dates: 1899–1961
Key Quotes: “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” | “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
Major Works: The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), The Old Man and the Sea (1952)
Background
By the end of the nineteenth century, the US had become the world’s largest and richest industrial power but hadn’t produced intellectuals of the kind described above. This was probably because there was no inequitable existing order which the new breed of secular intellectuals was focused on replacing. On the contrary, the United States was itself the product of a revolution against the injustice of the old order.
Hemingway grew up well-read and highly literate, a skilled sportsman and all-round athlete. He rejected his parents’ religion and decided early on to follow his inclinations in all things. He served as an ambulance driver during World War I.
He read ferociously. At his house in Cuba, he built up a working library of 7,400 volumes, characterized by expert studies on all the subjects in which he was interested.
Politics
Hemingway was deeply engaged with politics throughout his life and career. His political views evolved over time, becoming increasingly leftist and radical:
- Early Sympathies: As a young man, Hemingway supported the Socialist Party in America, casting his first and only vote for Eugene V. Debs, a socialist presidential candidate.
- Spanish Civil War: In 1935, Hemingway covered the Spanish Civil War as a correspondent and became personally involved, supporting socialist and communist volunteers in the resistance.
- Cuban Politics: After settling in Cuba, Hemingway covertly supported the Communist Party’s rise to power, channeling money through a Cuban friend. He remained a staunch supporter of Fidel Castro despite controversy.
Hemingway’s political engagement was not limited to his personal life but also manifested in his journalism and fiction. His impact is both on the way people write and on how the quarter-century 1925–1950 was framed in people’s minds. His work helped foster a more nuanced and often sympathetic perspective on leftist ideologies.
Writing
The essence of Hemingway’s fiction is observing boxers, fishermen, bullfighters, soldiers, writers, sportsmen, or almost anyone who has definite and skilled actions to perform, trying to live a good and honest life according to their values, and usually failing. Tragedy occurs because the values themselves turn out to be illusory or mistaken, or because they are betrayed by weakness within or external malice or the intractability of objective facts.
Most people, including professional writers, tend to see events through the eyes of others, inheriting stale expressions, clichéd metaphors, and literary conceits. This is especially true of journalists covering repetitive and banal events. But Hemingway had the advantage of excellent training at the Kansas City Star, where strict house-style rules enforced plain, simple, direct, and cliché-free English. This is a style of writing I try to enforce in my profession.
Publicity
Like many other intellectuals from Rousseau onwards, Hemingway had a striking talent for self-publicity. He created a physical, ocular Hemingway persona, reversing the old, soft-velvet, relaxed image of the Romantics in favor of a new he-man appeal: safari suits, bandoliers, guns, peaked caps, a whiff of powder, tobacco, and whisky.
Despite the central importance of truth in his fictional ethic, he believed that, in his own case, truth must serve his ego. He thought—and sometimes boasted—that lying was part of his training as a writer. He lied both consciously and unconsciously, as he makes clear in his tale Soldier’s Home, with its character Krebs:
“It is not unnatural that the best writers are liars. A major part of their trade is to lie or invent … They often lie unconsciously and then remember their lies with deep remorse.”
Contradictions
For a man whose code and fiction exalted the virtues of friendships, Hemingway found it difficult to sustain any for long. Like many intellectuals—Rousseau and Ibsen, for instance—his quarrels with fellow writers were particularly vicious.
Hemingway created his own code based on honor, truth, and loyalty but failed it on all three counts, and it failed him. More seriously, he felt he was failing his art. Hemingway had many grievous faults, but one thing he did not lack was artistic integrity. It shines like a beacon through his whole life. He set himself the task of creating a new way of writing English and fiction, and he succeeded. It was one of the salient events in the history of our language and is now an inescapable part of it. He devoted immense resources of creative skill, energy, and patience to this task, finding it difficult to maintain the high creative standards he had set himself.
Bertrand Russell
Dates: 1872–1970
Key Quote: “The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
Major Works: Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), Why I Am Not a Christian (1927), A History of Western Philosophy (1945)
Polymath
Russell is almost the definition of the word ‘polymath’. He published works on geometry, philosophy, mathematics, justice, political ideas, mysticism, logic, Bolshevism, China, the brain, atheism, wisdom, the future, and much more.
His friend Miles Malleson wrote of him in the 1920s: “Every morning Bertie would go for an hour’s walk by himself, composing and thinking out his work for that day. He would then come back and write for the rest of the morning, smoothly, easily, and without a single correction.” The financial results of this agreeable activity were recorded in a little notebook, in which he listed the fees he had received for everything he had published or broadcast in his whole life.
Background & Atheism
He was an orphan, with both parents dead by the time he was four, and his childhood was spent in the household of his grandfather, the first Earl Russell. The chief influence on his childhood was his grandmother, a high-principled, fiercely religious lady with marked puritanical views. Russell’s parents had been atheists and ultra-radicals and had left instructions for Bertrand to be brought up under the aegis of John Stuart Mill. His grandmother would have none of this and kept Russell at home in an atmosphere of Bibles taught by a succession of governesses and tutors.
By the age of fifteen, he was writing in his journal, using Greek characters to conceal his thoughts from prying eyes. He became an atheist around this time and remained one for the rest of his days.
Academic / Professional Philosopher
Between 1895 and 1917, again in 1919–1921, and in 1944–1949, he was a Fellow of Trinity College. He also spent many years lecturing and teaching at various American universities. However, a larger part of his life was spent telling the public what they ought to think and do, and this intellectual evangelism completely dominated the second half of his long life.
His brilliant book, A History of Western Philosophy (1946), is considered the ablest of its kind ever written and is still a best-seller worldwide. I’m halfway through this remarkable book, noted for both its breadth and depth (it’s a long read!).
Contradictions
Russell’s general position was that the ills of the world could be largely solved by logic, reason, and moderation. If men and women followed their reason rather than their emotions, argued logically instead of intuitively, and exercised moderation instead of indulging in extremes, then war would become impossible, human relationships would be harmonious, and the condition of mankind could be steadily improved.
Initially, he was a pacifist. However, he advocated a preventative war against Russia multiple times. Unlike most members of the left, Russell had never been taken in by the Soviet regime. He always rejected Marxism completely.
As a rule, he concentrated his criticism on the West, particularly Britain and the United States. This meant forgetting how much he hated not just the Soviet regime but Russia and the Russians themselves.
Also, like Shelley, his actual behavior towards women did not always accord with his theoretical principles. He was strictly brought up and remained strait-laced about sex until well into his twenties. But as Russell grew older, he became more lecherous and less inclined to follow societal rules, except when he found them convenient.
The ability to get the best of both worlds—the world of progressive self-righteousness and the world of privilege—is a theme that runs through the lives of many leading intellectuals.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Dates: 1905–1980
Key Quote: “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.”
Major Works: No Exit (Huis Clos, 1944), Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le Néant, 1943), Existentialism is a Humanism (L’existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946), Critique of Dialectical Reason (Critique de la raison dialectique, 1960)
Compared to Russell
Like Russell, Sartre was a professional philosopher who also sought to preach to a mass audience. However, there was an important difference in their approach. Russell saw philosophy as a hieratic science in which the populace could not participate. The most a worldly philosopher like himself could do was to distill small quantities of wisdom and distribute it, in a greatly diluted form, through newspaper articles, popular books, and broadcasts.
Sartre, by contrast, working in a country where philosophy is taught in high schools and discussed in cafés, believed that through plays and novels, he could bring about mass participation in his system.
Reading / Early Years
Sartre formed, and for many years maintained, the habit of reading about three hundred books a year. The range was very wide; American novels were his passion. In 1929, like most clever young men at that time, Sartre became a schoolmaster.
The 1930s were a lost decade for Sartre. The literary fame he expected and passionately desired did not come to him.
Existentialism / Politics / Philosophy
Existentialism is a way of thinking that focuses on you and your choices. It says that life doesn’t come with a set purpose, so it’s up to each person to create their own meaning and decide what’s important to them. It’s a philosophy that originates from Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) but became the most popular philosophy of the late 1940s and 1950s thanks to Sartre. His plays were hits, and his books sold in enormous quantities, some of them over two million copies in France alone.
He hated the bourgeoisie and was very class-conscious. But he was not a Marxist. In fact, he never read Marx, except perhaps in extracts. He was certainly a rebel, but a rebel without a cause. He joined no party and took no interest in the rise of Hitler. Spain left him unmoved. Whatever he later claimed, the record suggests he held no strong political views before the war.
His message was: the individual is entirely self-responsible; he has a right to criticize everything and everybody.
Sartre’s personal philosophy, what was soon to be called existentialism, was already shaping in his mind. In essence, it was a philosophy of action, arguing that man’s character and significance are determined by his actions, not his views, by his deeds, not words. The Communists and the newly-born Catholic Social Democrats (MRP) were fighting a fierce battle for paramountcy on the campus. Sartre used his new philosophy to offer an alternative: not a church or a party but a challenging doctrine of individualism in which each human being is seen as the absolute master of his soul if he chooses to follow the path of action and courage.
Nothing is so powerful, Victor Hugo had laid down, as an idea whose time has come. Sartre’s time had come in two distinct ways. He was preaching freedom to people who were hungry and waiting for it. But it was not an easy freedom. “Existentialism,” said Sartre, “defines man by his actions … It tells him that hope lies only in action, and that the only thing that allows man to live is action.” So Sartre’s new, existentialist freedom was immensely attractive to a disillusioned generation: lonely, austere, noble, slightly aggressive, not to say violent, and anti-elitist, popular—no one was excluded.
Contradictions
Personal Life
Between 1945 and 1955, Sartre completed a phenomenal amount of writing and other work by steadily increasing his intake of both alcohol and barbiturates. While in Moscow in 1954, he collapsed from over-drinking and had to be rushed into a Soviet clinic. Once recovered, he continued to write thirty to forty pages a day, often taking an entire tube of Corydrane pills (a drug withdrawn as dangerous in 1971) to keep going.
His biographer Annie Cohen-Solal notes that he often drank a quart of wine over two-hour lunches at Lipp, the Coupole, Balzar, or other favorite haunts. His daily intake included two packets of cigarettes, several pipes of black tobacco, a quart of alcohol (chiefly wine, vodka, whisky, and beer), 200 milligrams of amphetamines, fifteen grams of aspirin, several grams of barbiturates, plus coffee and tea.
Sartre seemed to be jealous of Albert Camus’ good looks, which made him immensely attractive to women, and his sheer power and originality as a novelist: La Peste, published in June 1947, had a mesmeric effect on the young and sold 350,000 copies. This was the object of some ideological criticism in Les Temps Modernes, but the friendship continued in an uneasy fashion. As Sartre moved towards the left, Camus became more independent. In a sense, he occupied the same position as George Orwell in Britain: he set himself against all authoritarian systems and saw Stalin as an evil man on the same plane as Hitler. Like Orwell, and unlike Sartre, he consistently held that people were more important than ideas.
Though not a man of action himself—one of Camus’s more hurtful gibes was that Sartre “tried to make history from his armchair”—he was always encouraging action in others, and action usually meant violence.
Sartre’s inability to maintain friendships with any man of his own intellectual stature helps explain the inconsistency, incoherence, and at times sheer frivolity of his political views. The truth is he was not by nature a political animal. He really held no views of consequence before he was forty.
Association with Communism
Sartre aligning himself with the Communists in 1952 made no logical sense at all. That was just the time when other left-wing intellectuals were leaving the Communist Party in droves, as Stalin’s dreadful crimes were documented and acknowledged throughout the West. It is more charitable to draw a veil over some of the things he said and did between 1952–1956. By the latter date, Sartre’s public reputation, both in France and the wider world, was very low, and he could not avoid perceiving it. He fell upon the Soviet Hungarian invasion with relief as a reason, or at any rate an excuse, for breaking with Moscow and the Communist Party.
He noisily condemned American “war crimes” in Vietnam and compared America to the Nazis (but then he had compared de Gaulle to the Nazis, forgetting the General was fighting them when he himself was having his plays staged in occupied Paris).
Association with the Khmer Rouge and Wokeism
For a black man, Sartre wrote, “to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.” This was an updating of existentialism: self-liberation through murder. It was Sartre who invented the verbal technique (culled from German philosophy) of identifying the existing order as “violent” (e.g., “institutionalized violence”), thus justifying killing to overthrow it.
What he did not foresee, and what a wiser man would have foreseen, was that most of the violence to which he gave philosophical encouragement would be inflicted by blacks not on whites but on other blacks. By helping Fanon to inflame Africa, he contributed to the civil wars and mass murders that have engulfed most of that continent from the mid-1960s onwards to this day.
The hideous crimes committed in Cambodia from April 1975 onwards, which involved the deaths of between a fifth and a third of the population, were organized by a group of Francophone middle-class intellectuals known as the Angka Leu (“the Higher Organization”). Of its eight leaders, five were teachers, one a university professor, one a civil servant, and one an economist. All had studied in France in the 1950s, where they had not only belonged to the Communist Party but had absorbed Sartre’s doctrines of philosophical activism and “necessary violence.” These mass murderers were his ideological children.
Summary
Unlike many intellectuals, and especially famous ones, Sartre was genuinely generous with money. It gave him pleasure to pick up the tab in a café or restaurant, often for people he scarcely knew.
In the end, again like Russell, he stood for nothing more than a vague desire to belong to the left and the camp of youth.
George Orwell
Dates: 1903–1950
Key Quote: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
Major Works: 1984, Animal Farm, The Road to Wigan Pier
I’m not going to lie—Orwell is one of my heroes, and 1984 is one of my most-read books.
Orwell was almost a classic case of the Old Intellectual in the sense that for him, a political commitment to a utopian, socialist future was plainly a substitute for the religious idealism in which he could not believe. God could not exist for him. He put his faith in man but, looking at the object of his devotion too closely, lost it.
Early Life and Antimperialism
After Orwell left Eton, he joined the Indian police, serving five years (1922–1927). As such, he saw the seamier side of imperialism—the hangings and floggings—and found he could not stomach it. In fact, his two brilliant essays, A Hanging and Shooting an Elephant, perhaps did more to undermine the empire spirit in Britain than any other writings.
Orwell was an intellectual in the sense that he believed, at least when young, that the world could be reshaped by the power of intellect. He thought in terms of ideas and concepts, but his nature and perhaps his police training gave him a passionate interest in people. His policeman’s instinct told him that things were not what they seemed and that only investigation and close scrutiny would yield the truth.
Spanish Civil War and Rude Awakening on Communism
All these activities had one aim: “I felt I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over man. I wanted to submerge myself, to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants.”
As a result, in 1936, he decided to travel to Spain to fight for the communists against the fascists in the civil war. There followed, however, the devastating experience of the Communist Party’s purge of the anarchists on Stalin’s orders. Thousands of Orwell’s comrades were simply murdered or thrown into prison, tortured, and executed. He himself was lucky to escape with his life.
Almost as illuminating to him was the difficulty he found, on his return to England, in getting his account of these terrible events published. Neither Victor Gollancz, in the Left Book Club, nor Kingsley Martin, in the New Statesman—the two principal institutions whereby progressive opinion in Britain was kept informed—would allow him to tell the truth.
He was forced to turn elsewhere. Orwell had always put experience before theory, and these events proved how right he had been. Theory taught that the left, when exercising power, would behave justly and respect truth. Experience showed him that the left was capable of a degree of injustice and cruelty of a kind hitherto almost unknown, rivaled only by the monstrous crimes of the German Nazis, and that it would eagerly suppress truth in the cause of the higher truth it upheld.
Second World War
Experience, confirmed by what happened in the Second World War, where all values and loyalties became confused, also taught him that, in the event, human beings mattered more than abstract ideas; it was something he had always felt in his bones.
Orwell never wholly abandoned his belief that a better society could be created by the force of ideas, and in this sense, he remained an intellectual. But the axis of his attack shifted from existing, traditional, and capitalist society to the fraudulent utopias with which intellectuals like Lenin had sought to replace it.
His two greatest books, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), were essentially critiques of realized abstractions, of the totalitarian control over mind and body which an embodied utopia demanded, and (as he put it) “of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable.”
Personal Reasoning Over Theoretical Imagining
Orwell came reluctantly and belatedly to accept the failure of utopianism due to the fundamental irrationality of human behavior.
Evelyn Waugh
Dates: 1903–1966
Key Quote: “I have a firm place in my heart for totalitarianism.” (dark humor)
Major Works: Scoop (1938), Brideshead Revisited (1945)
Brief Background
Evelyn Waugh was a prominent British writer renowned for his satirical novels that critique British society, particularly the aristocracy and the establishment. Born into an upper-middle-class family, Waugh was educated at prestigious institutions, including Lancing College and Oxford University. His early career included journalism and writing for various magazines, which honed his sharp wit and keen observational skills.
Waugh converted to Roman Catholicism in 1930, a decision that profoundly influenced his later works, infusing them with themes of faith, morality, and the clash between modernity and tradition. His writing often blends dark humor with incisive social commentary, making him a distinctive voice in 20th-century literature. Some of his most celebrated novels, like Brideshead Revisited, explore complex relationships and the decay of the British aristocracy.
Politics / Philosophy
Waugh was not an intellectual in that he didn’t think he could refashion the rules of life outside of his own head.
Waugh, like Orwell, believed in personal experience and seeing for himself, as opposed to theoretical imagining. He thought inequalities in wealth and position were ‘inevitable’ and therefore ‘meaningless to discuss the advantages of their elimination’. He also didn’t underrate the importance of the irrational in life.
Noam Chomsky
Dates: 1928–Present
Key Quote: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”
Major Works: Syntactic Structures (1957), Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988)
Syntactic Structures
Syntactic Structures was a highly original and decisive contribution to the ancient but continuing debate on how we acquire knowledge, particularly how we acquire so much. In this book, Chomsky challenged the prevailing behaviorist models of language acquisition, which viewed language as a set of learned habits formed through repetition and reinforcement. Instead, he proposed that the ability to use language is innate to humans, governed by an underlying universal grammar shared by all languages.
Chomsky’s study of syntax, the principles governing the arrangement of words or sounds to form sentences, led him to discover what he called “linguistic universals.” The world’s languages are much less diverse than they superficially appear because all share syntactic universals that determine the hierarchical structure of sentences. All the languages he and his followers studied conformed to this pattern. Chomsky explained that these unvarying rules of intuitive syntax are so deep in human consciousness that they must be the result of genetic inheritance. Our ability to use language is an innate rather than an acquired ability.
Politics
Throughout the 1960s, intellectuals in the West, especially in the United States, became increasingly agitated by American policy in Vietnam and by the growing level of violence with which it was executed. Now therein lay a paradox: how came it that, at a time when intellectuals were increasingly willing to accept the use of violence in the pursuit of racial equality, colonial liberation, or even by millenarian terrorist groups, they found it so repugnant when practiced by a Western democratic government to protect?
Many libertarian conservatives criticize Chomsky for what they perceive as selective outrage, focusing predominantly on U.S. foreign policy while being less critical of authoritarian regimes elsewhere.
The arguments of intellectuals like Chomsky undoubtedly played a major part in reversing the strong determination of the United States to ensure that a democratic society had the chance to develop in Indo-China. When American forces withdrew, social engineers promptly moved in, as those who supported American intervention had all along predicted they would. It was then that unspeakable cruelties began in earnest. In Cambodia, as a direct result of American withdrawal, one of the greatest crimes in a century took place in 1975. A group of Marxist intellectuals, educated in Sartre’s Paris but now in charge of a formidable army, conducted a ruthless experiment in social engineering, even by the standards of Stalin or Mao.
His advocacy for policies like wealth redistribution, stronger labor unions, and critique of capitalist systems is seen by some as detrimental to economic freedom and personal responsibility.
Manufacturing Consent
Manufacturing Consent is a critical analysis of the role of mass media in shaping public opinion and political agendas. Co-authored with Edward S. Herman, the book introduces the Propaganda Model, which argues that media outlets serve the interests of dominant, elite groups in society through a series of five filters:
- Ownership: Media organizations are often owned by large corporations with vested interests.
- Advertising: Revenue from advertisers can influence media content to favor business-friendly perspectives.
- Sourcing: Reliance on official sources for information can lead to biased reporting.
- Flak: Negative responses to media content can pressure outlets to align with elite interests.
- Anti-communism/Ideology: Dominant ideologies shape the framing and presentation of news.
Chomsky’s solutions involve more government oversight or public control over the media, which, as we now know, has happened with very problematic consequences.
Conclusions
Based on the above, it’s understandable that today there is huge public skepticism when certain ‘intellectuals’ stand up to preach to us.
The belief seems to be spreading that intellectuals and academic institutions have become “woke madrassas” that are destroying the meritocratic fabric founded in successful Western countries.
I’ll leave the final word for Paul Johnson:
- One of the principal lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity, is – beware intellectuals.
- Not merely should they be kept well away from the levers of power, they should also be objects of particular suspicion when they seek to offer collective advice.
- Beware committees, conferences, and leagues of intellectuals. Distrust public statements issued from their serried ranks.
- Discount their verdicts on political leaders and important events. For intellectuals, far from being highly individualistic and non-conformist people, follow certain regular patterns of behavior.
- Taken as a group, they are often ultra-conformist within the circles formed by those whose approval they seek and value. That is what makes them, en masse, so dangerous, for it enables them to create climates of opinion and prevailing orthodoxies, which themselves often generate irrational and destructive courses of action.
- Above all, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget: that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.
