In 1989, prolific British writer Paul Johnson published Intellectuals offering case studies of a string of intellectuals, beginning with Jean-Jacques Rousseau and then Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertolt Brecht, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, right on down to more modern public thinkers. Johnson’s point is that however much these men (and Lillian Hellman) might have professed love of “humanity” and “progress,” they were rats to the actual people around them.

For example, Johnson wrote of the poet Shelley:

Any moth than came near his fierce flame was  singed. His first wife, Harriet, and his mistress, Fay Godwin, both committed suicide when he deserted them. In his letters he denounced their actions roundly for causing him distress and inconvenience. . . .  His children by Harriet were made wards of the court. He erased them completely from his mind, and they never received  a  single word from their father. Another child, a bastard, died in  a  Naples foundling hospital where he had abandoned her.

Of Karl Marx, the self-professed savior of the working man, Johnson wrote: He seduced his wife’s servant, begot a son by her, then forced Friedrich Engels to assume paternity. Marx’s daughter Eleanor once let out a cri de coeur in a letter: “Is it not wonderful, when you come to look things squarely in the face, how rarely we  seem to practice all the fine things we  preach—to others?” She later committed suicide.

Johnson concluded that we must “Beware intellectuals.” “Not only 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.” Read more