For almost a century, many public intellectuals as well as many other not-widely-known intellectuals have bashed America because they feel our society is unjust, but then turn right around and oddly praise and even go so far as to travel to some of the most squalid Communist and totalitarian regimes on the planet (regimes filled with people who, of course, would flee and move to the United States in half a heartbeat if given the chance). In "Political Pilgrims," author Paul Hollander examines this bizarre phenomemon at length.
Hollander wrote the book in 1981 during the Cold War, so the focus is on the intellectuals' embrace of the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Communist China during different eras in the twentieth century. During that time, far too many Western intellectuals were exceptionally harsh when viewing their own societies but were overindulgent and gave every benefit of the doubt to totalitarian regimes that almost no American would want to live in and whose problems (including most problems found in capitalist societies) were vastly worse.
The author notes the traits of the intellectuals that led to their estrangement from Western societies, noting that since the West has become more secular, intellectuals actually have the hardest time adapting—they see a lack of purpose and meaning in capitalist societies and adopt socialism as almost a sort of quasi-religion in response. These "pilgrims" traveled to some of the worst societies on earth to look for alternatives to the West and suspended their critical faculties when they arrived, glossing over the political imprisonments and the suffering of ordinary people endemic to socialist societies (the pilgrims purported to be searching for a more equitable way of life, but the Communist regimes they visited were even more stratified than their native societies).
Hollander notes that many of the intellectuals succumbed to the flattery of their totalitarian hosts on their visits, even though many were at least middle-aged (viz., old enough to be clear-eyed enough not to fall for that approach). This 1998 version of "Political Pilgrims" contains the prefaces of each version released (four in all). The book is a bit repetitive in places and the book could easily have been, say, 10 or 20 percent shorter. Nonetheless, it is a worthy read and considered a classic treatment of the spectacle of those who take undue interest and pleasure in evil societies while simultaneously loathing their own much better, if imperfect, societies.
- Paperback: 626 pages
- Publisher: Routledge; 4 edition (30 January 1997)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1560009543
- ISBN-13: 978-1560009542
- Product Dimensions: 15.2 x 3.5 x 22.9 cm
- Boxed-product Weight: 907 g
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Amazon Bestsellers Rank:
338,994 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #241 in Socialism
- #735 in Political Ideologies Textbooks
- #1236 in Anthropology Textbooks
