The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality (review)

In 1981, Paul Hollander, a professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, published Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928–1978 (New York: Harper Colophon), a groundbreaking study of Western intellectuals who had visited Communist totalitarian states and came back with eyewitness reports about the wonderful conditions they supposedly found. Hollander, who had grown up in Communist Hungary, knew the terrible and ugly truth about these regimes, and Political Pilgrims is filled with anger and bitter comedy. The Western intellectuals, mostly Americans and Britons who prided themselves on their ability to see beneath the smiling surface of liberal capitalism to the dark controlling reality, appeared to have lost all analytical ability once they entered the Communist paradises and marveled at the humanitarian delights of the Stalinist gulag. Political Pilgrims also came with a serious sociological analysis, which explained the grotesquely naive behavior of these intellectuals. Hollander underlined their essentially religious need to believe in something greater than the satisfaction of their personal needs, to believe in something greater than the pedestrian virtues of economic prosperity and free elections, to believe in—and serve—something life-shaking, world-shaking, and millenarian. In the absence of traditional religious belief (which they rejected with scorn), these intellectuals turned to the most extreme of socialist ideologies in order to find their needed visions of community fulfillment and individual meaning in life. Political Pilgrims was one of the first neoconservative assaults on the intellectual left that had come to dominate American culture since the 1960s, and it had a major impact. The book has gone through four separate editions since its initial publication, each time including additional bitterly hilarious stories of the antics of the dupes and fools who constitute what Hollander calls "the adversary culture."

Political Pilgrims was a study of commitment so intense and emotional that all analytical capacity disappeared. More than a quarter of a century later, Hollander has published a companion piece to Political Pilgrims addressing the question of why some of these committed intellectuals eventually lost their commitment to Communist idealism. This new book is an important study, in part because so little has been written about disillusionment with Communism since The God That Failed—the famous collection of essays by disillusioned leftist intellectuals (including Richard Wright, Stephen Spender, and Arthur Koestler) first published in 1949.

Individually, the life-stories collected in Hollander's new book are interesting, the intellectual trajectories often intriguing. Many of the people interviewed for the book, or whose biographies are engaged via their writings, come from Communist countries. Hence, to a great extent this is a study of defectors, exiles, and dissidents. The defectors had the (dubious) advantage of actually living their lives under the harsh and in some cases horrific conditions of the Communist regimes. Their personal experiences, innate intelligence, or innate rebelliousness allowed them to overcome the daily flood of government propaganda designed to numb them to the grim daily reality they actually encountered, or (worse) to accept it as paradisiacal. The other general category Hollander discusses in the new study is Western intellectuals who became disillusioned with the Communist dream without having to live the harsh reality. In these cases, individual personality counted more, and hence few unifying themes emerge. Students of radical Islam have pointed out that while the reasons for adhering to extremist Islamic teachings may be fairly uniform, individuals leave Islam for a wide variety of individual reasons: a bad personal experience with a mullah, a re-reading of the Koran, a careful reconsideration of the West. A similar diversity appears here with Western intellectuals' disillusionment with Communism. In the end, the stories of disillusionment are too diverse to create a unified or coherent package. The result often seems to be merely a list of interesting people and their interesting but differing experiences, with no general analytical conclusion possible. Perhaps this is a problem inherent in the study of rebels...