I finally finished this--it took me quite a while. I found it necessary to do a few chapters at a time, broken up by something else. This book is an amazing, weighty but readable look at the "intellectuals" we've crowned as "experts" in the last few hundred years. Johnson notes the trend of intellectuals seeking to lead humanity to a better place than the priests and religious leaders of an earlier day, and asks the oddly-rarely-mentioned question "How is this working out?" Are we better off for following these intellectuals? Is the world a better place? Umm, well, not really. Why might that be? Johnson takes a magnifying glass to the lives and the writings of a number of Western "intellectuals" to answer these questions, and lays out the remarkable story of just how awful these men (and an occasional woman) have really been. No wonder the world's not a better place--the men Johnson chronicles for us are greedy, venal, vain, cruel, untruthful and untrustworthy. One thing I especially can't get over is how awfully these men treated women and their families. I've always been ambivalent about insisting that leaders be perfect in order to lead--no one is perfect--but the horrible stories laid out for us by Johnson show men who almost universally treat women with breathtaking cruelty and condescension.
I'm not sure that the trend written about here is still in force. It seems to me we've decided to dump true "intellectuals" like playwrights, professors and artists, and decided to all follow "celebrities" like Barbara Streisand, George Clooney, Michael Moore--perhaps Johnson could take a look at this and give us "Celebrities" :-)
This book is a fantastic volume of intellectual history. I originally considered giving it to my sons to read for modern history. However, I will not be doing that. Johnson is a little too frank in covering the sexual lives of his subjects--the result is a little hair-curling. My teens won't be reading it for school.