Intellectuals
A fascinating portrait of the minds that have shaped the modern world. In an intriguing series of case studies, Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, Lillian Hellman, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, and Noam Chomsky, among others, are revealed as intellectuals both brilliant and contradictory, magnetic and dangerous.
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- Jacques Barzun - From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life 1500 to the Present (2001)
The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1864)
Intellectuals By Paul Johnson
Daniel J. Boorstin - The Discoverers
The Great Courses - The Industrial Revolution (audiobook/lectures)
Decline of the West - Spengler
- Sadly, historian Paul Johnson died in the past hours.
His history of the XX Century, Modern times, and his biographies - among which are Intellectuals (1988), Creators (2006), Heroes (2007), Humorists (2010) - are some of the books one can warmly recommend.
- I was wondering if we'd end up in argument by Wikipedia :)
We're discussing language here, maybe we're not making fine distinctions a political scientist would make, but let's check a thesaurus:
https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/totalitarianism?s=t
Synonyms for totalitarianism: despotism, authoritarianism. In common language they're the same thing.
Perhaps an English-speaking political scientist would be unhappy at those thesaurus entries and claim the differences are critical, I don't know, honestly, don't really care. If you wish to draw a distinction, and argue that it's really important that Marx was merely authoritarian and not totalitarian (or whatever), that's fine by me. I concede the point through apathy. Does Polish draw the same distinctions as English, I wonder?
Anyway. It's a distraction. The point is, communism always ends in being a dictatorship like the USSR or China, it must through its very foundational assumptions, and whatever you call the resulting system that will always yield very heavy state control of industry, information, etc. You can't have a Marxist system without it.
As for top dogs: that's one of the primary logic errors in Marxist philosophy. He divided the world into exactly two camps and then pitted them against each other: labour and owners, workers and capitalists, proles and bourgeoisie. But this world existed only in his mind. Even in the 1800s there were many people who didn't fit that neat classification, including himself. Marx spent his entire life producing words and ideas; his "means of production" was a pen and paper. He was able to do this because he was supported by a factory owning friend. So was Marx a top dog or oppressed prole? What would it mean to seize his own means of production? Have a government official steal his pens? Marx failed to notice that his own existence didn't fit his own theories, because he was an idiot whose thinking had no value due to his staggering lack of real world experience. Indeed in Das Kapital he was forced to engage in various kinds of fraud to make his own arguments work, for instance, by citing decades old English factory inspector reports as evidence of contemporary problems without observing that those same reports led to changes in the law and improvements in factory conditions. If he had remarked on that, it would have undermined his thesis that capitalism couldn't self-improve and needed violent revolution to improve worker conditions.
A good introduction to just how isolated from reality he was can be found in the book "Intellectuals" by Paul Johnson. The relevant chapter has been reproduced at this link (ignore the weird picture and lack of attribution, the words are the same):
- I read Intellectuals by Paul Johnson and it occurs to me that even generously doubting the book, Bertrand Russell comes off as a real scumbag, complete womanizer, generally untethered person and despite being prodigiously intelligent, simply unwise.
Also defending idleness seems like the sort of opinion the well-off espouse, Russell carried around accounting of every cent he made, just to cheer him up whenever he felt down.
- Long time ago I have read Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky by Paul Johnson. They are almost all shown as misguided hypocrytes but still some of them did caught spirit of the time and inspired people.
> A fascinating portrait of the minds that have shaped the modern world. In an intriguing series of case studies, Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, Lillian Hellman, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, and Noam Chomsky, among others, are revealed as intellectuals both brilliant and contradictory, magnetic and dangerous.
- I think you really have to appreciate art separate from the artist. Many great figures in history were shits in real life. Paul Johnson's book Intellectuals is pretty much a gawker-style hit piece of Marx, Sartre, Tolstoy, Rousseau, Shelly, Brecht, Russell, and others - but it's not wrong. Hell, John Lennon was a dick to his pre-Yoko family.
Don't romanticize people and I think you can pretty comfortably enjoy both Netflix and the daily news. Ren & Stimpy is funny in its own right.
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