The End of Commitment: Intellectuals,  Revolutionaries,  and Political Morality in the Twentieth Century
There is no one better placed than Paul Hollander to a provide sober and reliable explanation. (Walter Laqueur)The story is of great importance. (Richard Pipes, Baird Professor of History, Emeritus, Harvard University)A lively biographical presentation. (Robert Conquest, Stanford University)A fascinating study of the nature of ideological fervor. (Anne Applebaum)Illuminating. (National Review)An indispensable portrait of one of the great issues of the twentieth century. (Harvey Klehr, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Politics and History, Emory University)The first to pair a history of Communist systems with a social survey of how its ideology spread... (California Bookwatch)"Remarkable....Thoroughly tantalizing." (Juliana Geran PilonNational Interest)The life-stories collected in Hollander's new book are interesting, the intellectual trajectories...intriguing. (Arthur EcksteinJournal of Cold War Studies)Hollander's analysis of "secular messianism" and the disillusionment that it bred will not surprise readers of, say,The God That Failed(1950). However,The End of Commitmentdoes a very useful, informative job updating editor Richard Crossman's classic. Hollander ranges far more widely-from Ethiopia to China, from Cuba to Vietnam-and his critical energies are especially mordant in addressing the gullibility, self-righteousness, and dogmatism of some leftist intellectuals (Susan Sontag, Edward Said, and Noam Chomsky) who are in no sense ordinary hacks or dupes. (American Communist History)