The End Of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, And Political Morality In The Twentieth Century

The seduction of some of the twentieth century's great thinkers by the most corrupt ideologies of the age, communism and Nazism, is one of the most intriguing stories in the history of that ill-fated century. In The End of Commitment, the distinguished sociologist Paul Hollander investigates how and why these zealots finally fell away from the causes that moved them. His is the first book to take a comprehensive, historically comparative view of disillusionment with Communist systems and ideologies. In the course of his study Hollander examines the sentiments of former revolutionaries, high-ranking officials, and intellectuals in the Soviet Union as well as in the Soviet bloc countries and in third-world Communist states.