Paul Johnson

Paul Johnson appears in Edward Said’s discussion as a public intellectual whose changing politics illustrate the continued appeal of colonialist arguments. Once a left intellectual, Johnson is described as having become a conservative social and political polemicist. Said focuses on a 1993 essay advocating renewed colonial administration, treating it as a conspicuous example of older assumptions surviving in contemporary debate.

Public Position and 1993 Essay

In the April 18, 1993, issue of The New York Times Magazine, Johnson published an essay entitled “Colonialism’s Back--And Not a Moment Too Soon.” Its central proposal was that “the civilized nations” should recolonize Third World countries where, in his view, the most basic conditions of civilized life had broken down. He recommended doing so through imposed trusteeships, making political control—not merely advice or assistance—the proposed remedy.

Johnson explicitly looked to nineteenth-century colonial practice. As Said summarizes his argument, Europeans had needed to impose political order in order to trade profitably. The historical example thus supplied both a precedent and a rationale: colonial rule was presented as a means of establishing order, while its connection to profitable trade remained visible in the model Johnson invoked.

Relation to Colonialist Thought

Said places Johnson within a broader survival of ideas that cast Western intervention as a civilizing responsibility. The essay’s language distinguishes supposedly civilized nations from societies judged to have failed to meet basic standards, then turns that distinction into a claim for external rule. In this account, the proposal does not simply describe crisis; it revives a colonial arrangement in which powerful outsiders determine the political order of other societies.

Johnson’s prominence matters to Said’s example. The essay appeared in a major magazine, and its author’s transition from left intellectual to retrograde polemicist makes the case a measure of how readily colonialist prescriptions could re-enter respectable public discussion. Said presents the argument not as an isolated eccentricity but as one with echoes in the work of U.S. policymakers, the media, and foreign policy.

Wider Political Context and Significance

Said connects those echoes to an interventionist U.S. posture in the Middle East, Latin America, and Eastern Europe, as well as a missionary cast in policy toward Russia and the former Soviet republics. Johnson’s call for imposed trusteeships therefore serves as a concentrated instance of a wider political logic: external power claims authority to order societies by defining their condition and prescribing a remedy.

The example also sharpens Said’s contrast between enduring Western hegemony and newer challenges to it. Formerly colonized and otherwise disadvantaged communities, along with women, minorities, and marginalized people, were no longer silent or represented only by senior European or American men. Their increasing influence on public and scholarly thinking unsettles the older arrangement in which others spoke for them. Johnson’s essay stands on the side of renewed colonial authority, while the wider shift Said describes opens space for contested histories and voices that colonial frameworks had pushed aside.