From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez

Paul Hollander is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University, Massachusetts. Born in Budapest, Hollander earned his BA from the London School of Economics and Political Science and his PhD from Princeton University, New Jersey. He received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974, and was a Visiting Scholar several times at the Hoover Institution. He has published fifteen books, most of them dealing with communist systems, totalitarianism, political violence, extremism, propaganda, and the political attitude of Western intellectuals.

• 1. Introduction: intellectuals and politics; 2. Mussolini, fascism and intellectuals; 3. Hitler, Nazism and intellectuals; 4. Stalin, Rakosi, Soviet communism and intellectuals; 5. Castro, Che Guevara, and their Western admirers; 6. Western intellectuals, Mao's China and Cambodia under Pol Pot; 7. Other dictators and their admirers in more recent times; 8. Conclusions: the personal and the political.

'The author of the classic study, Political Pilgrims has produced a grim catalogue of the political misjudgments and myopia of Western intellectuals regarding modern dictatorships across the political spectrum. Paul Hollander is one of the key scholars who, in recent decades have fostered a revision of our understanding of intellectuals in politics. Against the self-image of Western intellectuals as guardians of reason, human rights, social justice and liberal democracy, Hollander offers numerous examples of intellectuals, some quite distinguished, who abandoned reason for mindless admiration of dictators, ignored gross human rights violations and dismissed abundant evidence that the objects of their enthusiasm were horrific tyrants. From Benito Mussolini to Hugo Chavez is both an enduring work of scholarship and a timely warning.' Jeffry C. Herf, University of Maryland