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Eminent 'Progressives'
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15969 |
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BOOK WORLD
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7 / 1989 |
2,847 Words |
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Michael D. Aeschliman
Michael D. Aeschliman teaches English literature at the
University of Virginia. He is the author of The Restitution of
Man. |
INTELLECTUALS
Paul Johnson
New York: Harper and Row, 1989
385 pp., $22.50
Paul Johnson's Intellectuals is a companion volume to his Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, arguably one of the most important books of the last quarter century. The scope and range of Modern Times are vast, its detail and specificity exact, its subject vitally important. In an era of scholarly proliferation and narrow focus ("knowing more and more about less and less"), on the one hand, and the terrible simplifications of glossy magazines and television, on the other, his book succeeded in digesting and deploying masses of the best modern scholarship in a highly readable and instructive overview of our tragic century. There is something Victorian in this achievement, something reminiscent of the attempts of John Henry Newman and Matthew Arnold "to see life steadily and see it whole," in the light of an overarching sense of normative value and truth. Of the decline of this conservative Victorian moral insistence and aim, G.M. Young wrote about how modern culture had become "impoverished for the benefit of the specialist, the technician, and the aesthete: we go out into the wasteland of experts, each knowing so much about so little that he can neither be contradicted nor is worth contradicting."
As Thomas B. Macaulay provided mid-nineteenth-century English readers with a great historical work that itself helped to shape the culture of its readers--their aims, values, and views--so too has Paul Johnson. He is a literary journalist and a historian, but also a moralist. But how different the story he
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