The Decline of the Intellectual

By Thomas Steven Molnar

Book Overview

In perhaps his most famous book, The Decline of the Intellectual, Thomas Molnar launches into a fundamental critique of the intellectual class. He sees it as a group that had lost its way, collapsing a sense of vision into political activism, social engineering, and culture manipulation, and abandoning the writing, philosophizing, and scholarship that had occupied their predecessors. Universities began to produce factory-like, faceless citizens, as the job market became the arbiter of education and culture. Today's professors are recruited from this group of job seekers, and hence, have a shared indifference toward learning.

Molnar likens present-day intellectuals to the earlier Marxists who elaborated their Utopian model in the Communist party. The campus intellectuals' objective is to transform the university into a replica and a laboratory of the ideal society. Colleges and universities thus become sources of propaganda of various political, financial, cultural, and ideological trends, not only among students, but professors as well. The thirty years separating editions have done nothing to weaken such a critical appraisal.

In his new introduction, Molnar writes that the decline of intellectuals has extended outside of the campus to the arts, the public discourse, and the robotization caused by technology. On the initial publication of this work, Frank S. Meyer wrote in Modern Age, "Thomas Molnar's book is not only true; it is intellectually exciting and it will remain a necessary handbook for anyone interested in the decisive problem of the 20th century." The Decline of the Intellectual is essential reading for sociologists, political scientists, educators, and university officials. It is the basis of present-day critiques of the academic world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1560007435
• ISBN13: 9781560007432
• Release Date: January 1994
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 390 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

The Decline of the Intellectual.

_The Decline of the Intellectual_ by Hungarian born conservative Christian philosopher Thomas Molnar is an account of the rise of the intellectual in public life and his subsequent decline. Molnar witnessed firsthand the horrors of totalitarianism in Hungary, and he traces here the developments of those ideologies which led to the subsequent horrors of the Twentieth century. This book is divided into chapters each focusing on different aspects of the intellectual as well as chapters on planetary coexistence and planetary ideology. Molnar traces the development of the intellectual from his beginnings in the medieval period in the dispute between realists and nominalists to his subsequent development into Marxist, progressive, and reactionary forms as well as the development of the American and European intellectual. To begin, Molnar discusses the emergence of the intellectual, emphasizing the conflict that developed in medieval Catholicism between realist and nominalist philosophies. Molnar shows how modern times are distinguished from prior periods of history in that the "triple aim of Peace, Unity, and Prosperity" has finally become realizable. However, with these aims comes a grave responsibility. Subsequently, Molnar traces the development of the intellectual in the ruthless political philosophy of Machiavelli from within the nominalism of Marsilius of Padua and William of Occam. Molnar also shows how the Cartesian spirit developed eventually leading to the rise of the philosophes in the period of the French Revolution, the first true intellectuals. Next, Molnar turns his attention to the shaping of ideologies. Here, he argues against the philosophy of Rousseau and shows how this subsequently led to the development of Marxism and the absolute state. In three subsequent chapters, Molnar considers in turn the intellectual at once as Marxist, as progressive, and as reactionary. Molnar shows the utopian beliefs of Marxists, demonstrating their errors and showing how they lead to the most horrendous forms of totalitarianism. Molnar next turns his attention to progressives. Here, he considers the errors of a naïve belief in progress, often motivated by Darwinistic thinking. Molnar shows the errors of the progressivism of individuals such as the Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin and the subsequent development his philosophy had on the progressive wing of the Catholic church. Molnar also considers existentialists such as Camus and Sartre. Molnar shows how Sartre particularly and other progressives could not sufficiently distance themselves from Marxism and eventually embraced the horrors of the Soviet state. Molnar also considers the philosophy of John Dewey and the role he played among other progressives such as Sidney Hook and Max Eastman. Following this Molnar turns his attention to the intellectual as reactionary. Here he distinguishes the conservative thinker from the capitalist and the communist. In particular, Molnar devote