The Genius of Paul Johnson

With the recent death of British historian Paul Johnson (1928-2023), the second Age of Johnson has ended. The first Age of Johnson is an honorific for Samuel Johnson, the great 18th-century man of letters. As impressive and influential as he was, his world was confined largely to Europe, whereas the world Paul Johnson leaves behind is, like his massive output, enormous and interconnected.

Hyperbole? I don’t think so.

A review of Paul Johnson’s work makes the point, as he was a peerless historian and commentator on modernity and its roots in the past.

The prime example of his abilities is his magisterial Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties (1983), a plenary counterattack on the prevailing progressivism of the previous hundred years. Though a handful of historians have discredited the progressive views of the New Deal, the Spanish Civil War, colonialism, Mahatma Gandhi, and Vietnam, none offers such penetrating insights into the events and ideas of the secular religion of modernity as Johnson’s page-turner, which is full of wit and elegant writing. Furthermore, lest one think the book is merely a polemic, a brief for conservatism, it resounds with the views of progressives fairly put.

Modern Times opens with a description of the jarring influence of Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin, both of whom knocked out the props of convention by saying that nothing permanent exists; reality is in flux. As Johnson indicates, this was a misunderstanding of Einstein’s theory of relativity, which had to do with the relationships among physical objects and was not meant as a construct for determining “values,” itself a loaded word that institutionalizes this modern form of relativism. Nonetheless, Johnson ties together a diverse group of modernists, ranging from Russian composer Igor Stravinsky to French painter Henri Matisse, from Irish novelist James Joyce to Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, as well as such artistic movements as atonal music to surrealism, all of which are capsulized in Johnson’s description of the writing of French novelist Marcel Proust as “a vast experiment in disjointed time and subterranean sexual emotions which epitomized the new preoccupations.” The profound consequence of this rootlessness was “to destroy the highly developed sense of personal responsibility” the West had enjoyed for 2,000 years.