We have just finished what surely must have been the worst of our centuries, and there is no reason to believe that we might not do worse if we fail to understand how and why we went so wrong. Since Communism bears no small responsibility for last century’s odious distinction, acquiring an understanding of the ideology is more than just an academic pursuit.

If the evil of Communism is less easily understood than that of its 20th-century counterpart, Nazism, the reason lies not in a lack of evidence, but in the difficulty of seeing how the manifest injustices perpetrated by Communist states followed from the ideology itself. It is not a conclusion that requires particularly intricate deductions, but it is complicated enough that those bent on denying it can cunningly make it seem less than a clear thing. For that reason, it is a subject that demands all the more consideration.

One way of understanding Communism is to study Communists and Communist sympathizers — a longtime pursuit of Paul Hollander, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His most recent contribution on this front is a book called The End of Commitment. It is not another catalogue of the disillusioning features of Communist states — evidence of which is abundant and, unfortunately, increasing. Instead, it is a study of the Communists and Communist apologists who, when confronted with the injustices and failures resulting from their ideology, came to form a critical view of it. More to the point, it is a study of why these individuals ended up disillusioned critics, while the great preponderance of their comrades did not. As Hollander describes the book, it is in some respect a continuation of Political Pilgrims, an earlier work of his which dealt with the grand illusions of Western intellectuals enthralled by Communist ideology.

The study is composed mainly of biographical sketches, ranging in length from a single page to more than ten, but on average about eight. The characters are arranged according to their countries: One chapter is devoted to Communists behind the Iron Curtain; two to Communists in the third world (Vietnam and China, and then Cuba, Nicaragua, and Ethiopia); and three to the West. The first two chapters on the West deal with intellectual sympathizers, party members, and assorted leftist radicals, divided according to their time period, the second group associated with a liberalism that got its start in the Sixties; the third chapter deals with the “rank and file,” an anonymous group that responded to inquiries Hollander had placed in a couple of magazines about a decade ago. The ties that Hollander draws between the Western radicals of the mid-20th century (almost all of them explicit Communists) and those of the Sixties (a group less formal in its adherence to Communism) is one of the more interesting aspects of the book, along with his considerations of why disillusionment was more widespread and drastic in the Communist countries themselves.

The book is straightforward enough, written in a detached, matter-of-fact style, with nothing by way of literary flourish except for a muted irony. The irony does occasionally make something more of a showing, as, for instance, when Hollander writes in an entry — part of a chapter on the unrepentant — about the Weatherman Bill Ayers and his revolutionary set, “There was also endless talk and fantasizing about ‘smashing the state’ followed by ‘smashing monogamy’ — the later providing the ideological justification for multiple revolutionary copulations.” Still, needless to say, it’s no enjoyable read.

An illuminating book, The End of Commitment is an academic pursuit. The vast majority of the text is exposition, not analysis, and while Hollander’s insights and conclusions are enlightening, they are scarce in comparison to the biographical information — information that tends to be rather dry. It is not like reading a collection of condensed analogues to Witness.

As it happens, it was in Witness that Whittaker Chambers wrote, “A man’s break with Communism is intensely personal. Hence the account of no two breaks is likely to be the same. The reasons that made one Communist break may seem without force to another ex-Communist.” This would seem to bode poorly for Hollander’s study, but it turns out to be not entirely true, as Hollander does find various patterns and similarities among the disillusioned he studies. This is not surprising, though, since few Communists embraced, and later rejected, the ideology for such profoundly spiritual and metaphysical reasons as did Chambers.

The subjects in The End of Commitment, especially the revolutionaries and the Western intellectuals, generally start off unhappy with the world, consider it to be miserably unjust, and are emotionally disturbed by the wrongs they perceive. Communism holds obvious appeal for them; it offers an explanation of the cause of those injustices and a way of remedying them definitively.

Communism is a dangerous thing for anyone who is willing to justify means with ends. It is difficult to conceive of what might count as a cost too high for a person dedicated to an ideology that promises to eradicate injustice. A terrible thing about Communism is the way in which all other realities, even human beings themselves, are subordinated to its ends. And a terrible thing about Communists is the absoluteness of their faith in Communism’s ends — a faith that leads them to sanction all sorts of atrocities.

A lesson to be learned from Communism, apart from what is wrong with the ideology itself, concerns the more general danger of placing one’s faith so absolutely in a political system’s ability to solve the problems of human existence. If a study of disillusioned Communists is interesting, it is because of the insights it offers into what moves a human being to commit himself to a political ideology in such a way. It is the disillusioned who reflect on why they allowed themselves to fall prey to illusions in the first place, and why they resisted disillusionment; so a study of the disillusioned is helpful in understanding the remarkable ability of Communist believers not to accept that their idealism has been sorely misplaced.

The End of Commitment is about a loss of faith; in some respect, it is also about faith’s beginnings. It was partly a denial of the persisting and unavoidable reality of human imperfection that ensured Communism would be so misguided; yet it is this same reality that ensures people will continue to look to place their faith in something. A clear understanding of Communism should ensure that they do not place it in the power of the state to wash the sin out of men.

–– Maximilian Pakaluk is an associate editor at NRO.

<em>The End of Commitment</em>, by Paul Hollander

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