Who would you consider the primary intellectuals of the 19th and 20th century? I spent two solid years between the ages of 24 and 26 during my "vision quest" to identify and learn from the worlds intellectual.
FYI, I and other hippies of the 60's, always saw the Soviet Union as a brutal dictatorship which had nothing to do at all with the left or anything worthwhile. The right wing has been trying to hang the Soviet Union, and communism around the necks forever, but we hippies never embraced it and saw they were all brutal dictatorships.
We lefty's are capitalists. But we wanted fair capitalism e.g. Organization Man and the Man in a Gray flannel suit.
Very few left wing intellectuals embraced the soviet Union or Communism. In fact we called them the "crazies".
What we sought more than anything was enlightenment as put forth by the Buddhists, self actualization as put forth by Abraham Maslow, sophisticated social theory as put forth by Max Webber, Russell, Huxley and Einstein and sophisticaed thought as put forth by Alfred Whitehead, Goethe, Nietzche, Doestevsky, Tolstoy, Sartra and Camus.
Herman Hesse many books (I read them all), Huxley's Brave New world, Thomas Mann and Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange land-lol, were among our favorite authors. |
