Paul Hollander is dogged, if not downright mulish, in his intellectual focus. As is the case in Soviet and American Society and his celebrated Political Pilgrims, this collection of previously published articles and reviews explores the perceptions and beliefs of American intellectuals in regard to Marxist-Leninist countries. What Hollander lacks in the flourish and breadth of, say a Paul Johnson, he more than makes up for with a depth of insight on an important topic. Simply put, his thesis is that American intellectuals alienated from mainstream values and institutions have a need to idealize adversaries of our system of constitutional democracy.

Indeed, in discussing aging Sovietologist and former diplomat George Kennan, Hollander writes, “as Mr. Kennan’s appreciation for American society goes down, his esteem for its adversaries rises.”

Hollander has seen much of other political and social systems and perhaps that is partial explanation of his continuing study of those who advocate the radical change of American society. He explains in an epilogue that he was born to a Jewish home in Hungary, and that he was 11 when Hitler’s Nazi army occupied his first homeland in March 1944. In January the following year Stalin’s Communist army swept out their totalitarian predecessors to impose their own twisted vision of the good society.

Despite superior achievement in school in the postwar years, Hollander was denied further education, and exiled in 1951 with his family to a small village because of his maternal grandfather’s experience in business. He subsequently served in the army and did construction work. Hollander fled Hungary for Great Britain in November 1956 on the heels of the bloody Soviet suppression of the failed revolution. After obtaining a degree at the London School of Economics in 1959, he came to the United States to continue his education and to make his home. He received his Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton in 1964, just in time to catch the upheavals of the 1960’s.

It must have seemed strange to this comparative newcomer to observe highly-educated scholars mustering all of their critical faculties and harnessing them to the deepest suspicions about the American “system” and its leaders. These same individuals would gaze in awe at Castro, Che, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao, as well as their local representatives, and give them every benefit of the doubt. With the fervor and posture of religious crusaders, seemingly fearless radicals strode American campuses, occupying buildings, disrupting classes, and damaging property while the police watched. They carried on these activities in solidarity with the revolutionary leaders from abroad, who also wanted to radically change American society.

The information concerning the famine, mass murder, and massive duplicity of communist systems was and is available. Some choose to see it, others do not. For the most alienated of American intellectuals, the Cubans, Nicaraguans, Vietnamese, etc. are revolutionary exotica, heroic Rambos and Davids of the left, ushering in the new society. They are so different from the imperialistic, technocratic Americans, with their weapons of mass destruction, that they have an entirely different character and are to be held to different standards. Yet Norman Mailer and others have never made clear why “it was morally preferable to kill in Vietnam one’s enemies with concealed bamboo spikes smeared in excrement (to encourage blood poisoning) over burning them with napalm.” The image conjures up a scene in Apocalypse Now where the lost American colonel, who has adopted native ways, expresses admiration at the diabolical genius of the Vietnamese who chopped off the arms of those children who had been vaccinated by the enemy Americans. Yes, indeed, small is beautiful.

The spirit of the 1960’s survives, as does this same malevolence toward capitalist technology that leads “on the one hand to the despoliation of nature, on the other to the arms race and a possible nuclear war.” Hollander cites an interview with feminist Marge Piercy, who blames the ruling class for oppressing and even “killing” the masses through the use of technology in television, drugs, asbestos, contraceptives, unnatural food, bad schools, nuclear power, and assorted other mechanisms.

Yet life expectancies in capitalist countries are on average higher than in Communist countries, and pollution levels are lower. Further, the Communist countries are desperately seeking Western technology so they can “catch up.”

While alienated intellectuals bemoan technology, they use it on a daily basis to communicate with their fellow believers, publish and broadcast their message to the public, bring pleasure to their leisure time, and reduce the amount of time they spend in food preparation, keeping warm or cool, and personal grooming. While they see “Big Brother” here in America, with our great capability to gather and retain information, they cannot see what less advanced versions of this technology can do when put to use in the great modern police states of the 20th century. The implicit presumption is that socialist technology is superior to capitalist technology, but one’s own microwave and CD player are sacred.

In the past alienated intellectuals had little by way of social and financial support networks. Today it would seem that blaming America first is the shibboleth for success. Societal estrangement is now compatible with “a reasonably cheerful personal disposition and the untroubled enjoyment of the available pleasures of life: material, social, aesthetic.” As these alienated folk look to Gorbachev’s recasting of the Leninist blueprint, they sympathetically see the hardships he faces as he exorcises the Stalinist demon of terror and the Brezhnevian demon of stagnation. Every current Soviet evil is excused because of the difference in culture, history, or geography, while every pleasant similarity is seized upon and highlighted as proof that they are, wonder of wonders, “just like us.”

My only objection to the book is technical. The numerous typos disconcert the reader, as does the unnecessary repetition of the same quotes from one chapter to the next. On the whole, however, this book is dense with insight and documentation on social critics with Marxian wanderlust.

[The Survival of the Adversary Culture: Social Criticism and Political Escapism in American Society, by Paul Hollander (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books) 299 pp., $27.95]