What is the common denominator that unites Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Percy Shelley, Karl Marx, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Ernest Hemingway, Bertolt Brecht, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, and Lillian Hellman, each of whom gets a major chapter? The common factor is that they are all leftists. Johnson does not hold them to consistency. Bertrand Russell, for example, blew hot and cold on the Soviet Union—at one time, when the U.S. had a monopoly on the atom bomb, he advocated wiping Moscow off the map; world government would naturally follow. Hemingway, a genius at story telling, followed a fashion in leftism that put him at odds with John Dos Passos on the Spanish Civil War in a way that Katy Dos Passos, a fervent supporter of the anti-Stalin anarchists, quite rightly labeled as opportunistic. Edmund Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s friend at Princeton, began as a man of letters, not a reformer. He shifted as a New Republic editor in the depression to do some first-rate reporting of the “American jitters” and going on from there to track Lenin’s road to the Finland Station. But in late middle age he reverted to his origins as a man of letters.

Leo Tolstoy’s world-saving was suspended in midstream to make way for the writing of War and Peace, possibly the world’s greatest novel, and Anna Karenina. These were works of true genius. But Tolstoy thought less of them than of his efforts as a self-constituted messiah.

Marx “howled gigantic curses” against those who would interfere with the revolution he saw coming, but he brought up his daughters in a thoroughly conventional way. He didn’t want them to have vocations. He talked about science, but he himself was incapable of good scientific research. Engels had to supply him both with cash and information about the working classes.

Shelley could be heartless in his thinking, but his poetry was certainly not heartless. Ibsen, no collectivist, wrote plays about individuals. Sartre wrote under the influence of both drink and drugs. He hoped that Europe could be created as an entity, but he groveled to the Soviets and admitted lying about the things he had seen in Russia. Camus’s gibe was that Sartre, as an existentialist, tried to make history from his armchair.

Rousseau, among the leftist intellectuals, is the main malefactor. His theory that society should be governed by a “general will” led inexorably to Lenin’s totalitarianism. The American Founding Fathers wanted nothing of any “general will” beyond a commitment to pluralism and the safeguarding of minority rights. One could wish that Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, who has suggested that all adolescents should serve a compulsory term in doing good as defined by government, should read Paul Johnson on Rousseau. Nunn’s own ideal “general will” would surely be humane, but no group of politicians can be trusted to formulate compulsory goals for a country. That should be left to individuals on a voluntary basis, subject to amendment as situations change.

The egotism of Johnson’s leftist intellectuals is almost incalculable. Johnson quotes a contributor to a book on Rousseau’s Social Contract as saying that Rousseau was a “masochist, exhibitionist, neurasthenic, hypochondriac, onanist, latent homosexual afflicted by the typical urge for repeated displacements, incapable of normal or parental affection, incipient paranoiac, narcissistic introvert rendered unsocial by his illness, filled with guilt feelings, pathologically timid, a kleptomaniac, infantilist, irritable and miserly.” Johnson documents much, though not all, of this. Yet Tolstoy could say that “Rousseau and the Gospel” were “the two great and healthy influences of my life.” Johnson professes himself to be baffled. He lets Sophie d’Houdetot, Rousseau’s last lover, sum things up by saying “he was ugly enough to frighten me and love did not make him more attractive. But he was a pathetic figure and I treated him with gentleness and kindness. He was an interesting madman.”

The madness of some of Johnson’s intellectuals did not extend to Victor Gollancz, who packaged and sold Rousseauistic literature for his Left Book Club in London between the wars. Money-making is a rational objective. But the West, waiting for the evidence, might have been a little quicker than it was in noting that the Rousseauists were lovers of humanity who did not actually care for human beings. They treated their own wives, children, and friends and relatives abominably. Sartre boasted he could “run” four mistresses beside Si mone de Beauvoit at a time. Paul Johnson supplies the evidence with detail that is most amusingly stated. But he really owes us more than that.