In general, when Paul Johnson's books come up for review in scholarly publications, the attitude of professional historians is quite dismissive and hostile. Part of the problem with Johnson is one that is common to a lot of popular history; his methodology and source base is shallow and he does not critically engage with historiography or the relevant literature for his topic. But much of professional historians' problems with Johnson run deeper than the typical pop historian's foibles.

Johnson's work is ideologically charged with a neoconservative Weltanschauung that distorts his analysis. The fundamental problems with Johnson's view of history are threefold. One common complaint is that he tends haphazardly divide history into a stark Manicheanism of forces of light and dark, with seldom any in between. Craig Lockhard's review of Modern Times in History Teacher sums up this problem:

Not surprisingly, given this approach, most twentieth century leaders and thinkers emerge as "villains" with few redeeming characteristics. The list is long and includes obvious candidates like Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin and Pol Pot. But many historians would give a more balanced (often even sympathetic) account of some of his other "villains": Sun Yat Sen, Mao ("a brutal ... ruthless peasant"), Chiang, Gandhi ("a political exotic"), Nehru, Sukarno, Trotsky ("a moral relativist of the most dangerous sort"), Lenin, Tito ("a political gangster"), Keynes, Freud, Peron, Castro, Allende, Nkrumah, Nyerere, Kaunda, Lumumba ("a worthless scoundrel"), Hammarskjild, Nasser, and Franklin Roosevelt. Only a few heroes or semiheroes emerge, mostly proponents of free enterprise economics: Churchill, Harding ("a generous and unsuspicious man"), Coolidge (who presided over America's "Arcadia"), Hoover, Eisenhower ("the most successful of America's twentieth century presidents"), Nixon, Jean Monnet, Adenauer, Salazar and Franco (dictators who promoted growth economies).

As the above listing indicates, this is a highly diverse lot representing different historical contexts, political movements, agendas, and personalities. But Johnson lumps these various people and movements together with an assertiveness that covers up that this, simply put, is bad history that casts more heat than light. Also writing in History Teacher, Emil Pocock's review of A History of the American People notes a further problem with this methodology:

The problem is not just that Johnson has strong opinions or that his moral outrage is inconsistently applied, but that his insipid justifications reduce complicated and difficult situations to simple formulae. This approach precludes any possibility of greater under- standing and insight into how Americans have actually grappled with difficult problems, especially where real interests and values have come into conflict. The United States has always been a heterogeneous nation, but Johnson is incapable of celebrating American diversity and its animating contributions to American social, cultural, and material life. Instead, he venerates the myth of the melting pot-that unique American panacea that has the power to dissolve social and cultural strife.

Pocock highlights the second major problem of Johnson's history: his unabashed Eurocentrism that celebrates the contributions of white Protestant Christians to global progress. In the History Workshop roundtable "An Ethnocentric History of the World: The Case of Paul Johnson," Burjor Jal Avari and George Ghevarghese Joseph dissect Johnson's valorization of Europeans often at the expense of other cultures. In doing so, Avari and Joseph claim that Johnson recapitulated the worst tendencies of older Eurocentric scholarship without contributing anything new to historical understanding. They write, "His is a restricted world, consisting, in the typical Hollywood cowboy movie style, of the goodies and the baddies. While there is a balance of both among the whites, Johnson's blacks are predominantly the baddies." This Eurocentrism dovetails with Johnson's neoconservative anti-Marxism to lead him to condemn anticolonialist movements without any empathy for the colonized. Johnson's old-school, top-down approach to history means that he can reduce complex movements to their leaders and their personal excesses and mistakes serve to condemn the movement as whole. Lockard notes that Modern Times's positive view of colonialism rests on a very narrow and selective source base and does not consult the perspective of the colonized. Therefore, anti-colonial movements in Johnson's view are either misguided, as in the case of India, or stalking horses for dictator's will to power, as in the case of Idi Amin. Both Avari and Joseph note that this way of viewing history reduces the agency of non-Europeans and turns them into just passive objects for European civilization and the few special individuals that revolt against Europe for cynical ends.

The final problem historians have with Johnson is related to his use of language. As the extended excerpt from Lockard's review indicates, Johnson uses very stark terms to describe historical figures and ideologies he does not like. The problem with this slander is that the charges frequently fail to stick. Johnson's biography of Napoleon is a case in point. Johnson's Napoleon is simultaneously a Hitler, a mafia don, a precursor to Qaddafi, and military Luddite. These are many hats for Napoleon to wear, but they all serve the purpose of constructing a hatchet-job upon a historical figure Johnson clearly dislikes. Johnson seldom tries to prove these charges, because in his court of historical opinion, he has already measured them and found them guilty. Johnson casually dismisses works of other historians with alternative views as either reflective of individuals working with an ideological agenda or "guilt-ridden" liberals that cannot see the truth.

In short, Johnson has significant flaws as a historian. His political biases shape both his history-writing but also magnify his bad habits as a popular historian. His historical narratives have an ideological certainty and teleology that would make a Stalinist historian proud.