Crisis of faith.(books, arts & manners)(The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality)(Book review)

The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality, by Paul Hollander (Ivan R. Dee, 391 pp., $28.95)

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IN both practical and intellectual terms, Communism has been entirely discredited by the events of the past two decades. Nonetheless, a large number of people--and a significant proportion of Western intellectuals--still harbor a good deal of fondness for socialist ideals, and their politics demonstrate it vividly.

In The End of Commitment, the distinguished sociologist Paul Hollander, author of Political Pilgrims, investigates what causes people to adopt and steadfastly adhere to ideas that lead to mass murder and widespread suffering. Observing that many intellectuals placidly accepted and even enthusiastically approved of actions done for the ideal of Communism that would have horrified them if committed for any other reason, Hollander explores the amazing ability of true believers in political religions to persist in their faith despite mountains of contrary evidence.

The book consists almost entirely of brief political biographies--of some who lived under Communism and came to oppose at least some variety of it; of others who lived in free nations and approved of Communism, but ultimately saw its horrors as unjustifiable even if they still saw the ideals as laudable; and of still others who have yet to turn their backs on the socialist vision.

Exploring "the connections between idealism and fanaticism which contributed so much to the great historical outrages of the 20th century and continue to do so today," Hollander finds that the key factor is an individual's moral threshold, the point at which "actions, forms of behavior, or policies would invariably bring about unconditional moral indignation or revulsion, regardless of who commits these acts and under what circumstances."

Hollander astutely observes, in a discussion of Soviet dissident and literary scholar Lev Kopelev, that his and others' faith in socialism was really a substitute religion, a matter of "profoundly and genuinely religious attitudes and beliefs." Kopelev's struggles, he notes, "indicate that intellectuals--no less than ordinary people and possibly more so--long for sustaining beliefs." Hollander writes vividly of Soviet intellectuals who endured frequent collisions with the authorities and even more persistent shock and revulsion at the brutality the Communist leadership engaged in and required their underlings to carry out.