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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 109
EAN num: 9780061253171
ISBN number: 0061253170
Label: Harper Perennial
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 416
Printing Date: May 01, 2007
Publishing house: Harper Perennial
Release Date: May 01, 2007
Sale Popularity Level: 21545
Studio: Harper Perennial
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Product Description:
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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Rated by buyers 
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I read this book, here in Brazil.This book is correct and definitive.Do you want to see how really was Rousseau, Karl marx,etc.?
This book is the best choice to see the reality, about leftists' idols.
Karl Marx?One womanizer, lazy, crook, charlatan,etc. man.
Rousseau?Another crook.The creator of frauds , such as "the good savage" fraud.
All bad ideas of these chalatans:Rousseau, Karl Marx, Lenin,etc. sent to death more than 200,000,000 people since 1917 until our days.
Read this book and see the true, about leftists' idols.
Rated by buyers -
Unfortunately, this book suffers from the sacred cow syndrome. Johnson discredits so many of the secular world's heroes, that many will not allow his voice to come through the din of their ad hominem accusations. It really is a shame because they cry foul without looking at the big picture.
At very first glance, this work appears to be using an Ad Hominem attack against mostly secular thinkers. But at its core, it has a much more profound message. These 'attacks' are actually case studies on the validity of the ideas these intellectuals are passing on to our society.
His point is this: If these intellectuals' ideas are going to affect the quality of our lives, we must inspect the quality of these intellectuals' lives. This is not ad hominem, it is looking for the proof in the pudding. If the thinkers are putting forth ideas on the mating habits of the Blue Whale, then looking at their personal life is indeed ad hominem. But if our moral framework is being influenced by a great thinker, then it is perfectly acceptable to look at his or her morality.
I will say that Johnson is very caustic in his critiques (and hilarious at points), but I believe if you read critiques of non-secular moral advocates who were caught with inconsistencies between their private and public lives, the critiques are at least as biting.
Finally, I don't believe most skeptics have read the whole book. The last line of the book is actually where the most clarity is shared.
"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."
In my podcast, Christian With A Brain, this book was a tremendous resource when I discussed the Limits of Logic. When our leaders experiment with the governing of people, when they construct plans for societal design, it would be wise to very first place an ear upon the chest of humanity, hear their heartbeat, feel their pain, look into thier eyes, then begin, and end - with them.
Rated by buyers 
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The book was somewhat interesting, and Johnson gives credit for talent, in most cases, where it is due. He gave good short synopses of the individuals' lives and claims to fame. I think the particular subjects were chosen for their scandalous lives, plus left of center leanings, rather than a general survey of intellectuals, or a survey of intellectuals who had scandalous lives, regardless of political leanings. This makes for an odd mixture of playwrights, philosophers, and political activists, who have socialist inclinations, and deplorable personal ethics, with a general implication that all those who are non neoconservatives, are ethically and morally deficient. Very 1988.
Rated by buyers -
This is the kind of book that is either going to inspire or infuriate you, but it should provoke valuable discusion and thought in either case. Johnson's thesis is quite simple: the revolutionary thinkers whose ideas have shaped intellectual history over the past 250 years were, for the most part, lousy human beings. These were not not common or garden variety jerks but personalities whose flaws were so manifest that they must call into question the value of the theories they generated.
This is an interesting proposition. Does it matter that Peter Sellers, the world's greatest comedic actor, was a vile neurotic, that Marilyn Monroe was a goddess on screen but a drug-addled manipulator in everyday life, that Winston Churchill, who saved civilization during World War II, was also an alcoholic ego-maniac? Probably not. But Johnson asks a deeper question: if a thinker cannot live out his own principles, can these ideas have any real merit? His book convinces us that there is a real connection between the rancid lives lived by intellectuals and the disasters their ideas produced.
For example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau is adored by educational theorists and his ideas and entrenched in the curricula of teachers' colleges, despite the fact that he serially abandoned every one of his children. Karl Marx was bourgeois to the core and seems to have exploited the only working-class woman he ever knew: paying her starvation wages, impregnating her and forcing her to abandon their child. Johnson lacerates the behaviour of these prominent figures but more importantly shows how their shabby personal values foreshadow the social harm their works engendered.
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