Intellectuals

Paul Johnson examines whether the intellectuals who set out to advise humanity were morally fit to do so. In case studies of figures including Marx, Rousseau, Tolstoy, Shelley, Ibsen, Sartre, Brecht, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Norman Mailer, Lillian Hellman, James Baldwin and Noam Chomsky, he looks at their respect for truth, their attitude to money, how they treated their spouses and children, legitimate and illegitimate, and how loyal they were to friends, setting private conduct against public principle. Johnson traces how the intellectual rose to become a secular seer and moral judge, taking over the place of the priest, and disputes the claim of such figures to the moral authority to transform society.

Marc Andreessen named it on the list of books in his Andreessen Horowitz post What I've Been Up To Lately.