The vices of intellectuals? Exhibitionism and contempt of common sense. Paul Johnson exposed them

Understatement was not his forte. Maybe that’s why the obituaries of Paul Johnson, who died last week at 94, remembered more the polemicist than the historian, more the journalist than the thinker. And yet, a rare case among those who live to see their name printed at regular intervals, Johnson really was, a thinker. The most important books by him, from Modern Times (1983) a The Intellectuals (1987) ad A History of the American People (1997), are not only popular works. I’m not, to be clear, there History of Italy di Montanelli (and Gervaso and Cervi): a soup of memories of high school studies, not surprisingly served in a town where only a few people attended high school and it was something a little more serious than what we did. It’s in it an original historical perspective, little first-hand research but extraordinary capacity for synthesis, that reconstructing the causal links of events beyond the before and after which is typical of true historians. In this way, starting from the facts but reading them in a radically different way from most, Johnson exerted a decisive influence on the conservative movement, especially in the United States, and more generally on its readers. The economic cycle theory of the Austrian school economists, which explains that at the root of the bust there is a boom artificially produced by the expansion of credit induced by monetary policy, it comes to life in Johnson’s pages on the Great Depression, intertwines with the political events of the 1920s, ignites the perspicacity of those who read them. A very skilled craftsman of the word, however, it is his intellectual curiosity, his taste for detail, his determination to put some historiographical myths upside down but playing the same game as the historians, which make Johnson one of the most important voices of Anglo-Saxon conservatism after the Second World War .