The question serves as the starting point for Hollander’s book “What is it about the human mind that made the intellectual defense of tyranny possible in the twentieth century?” He states that, “There is considerable evidence indicating that many well-known twentieth-century intellectuals admired dictators of various ideological persuasions, as well as the political system they represented. Such admiration, often merging into hero worship, was an integral part of a substantial body of political misjudgments” (Hollander 2). According to Hollander, this question is more important than ever because “we do not expect intellectuals to sympathize with dictators, let alone admire them”; rather, “we expect them to possess sound political and moral judgment”( Hollander 10). He takes us through a century of what he calls “political hero worship” on the part of intellectuals, starting with the admiration some European and American intellectuals expressed for Italian fascism and ending with contemporary intellectuals support for various current or recent tyrannical regimes, in order to shed some light on this question as well as to illuminate broader questions about politics and intellectuals.
Hollander starts off by listing the intellectuals who supported Mussolini’s fascist authority both inside and outside of Italy. While deteriorating objective conditions significantly contribute to the propensity of intellectuals in such circumstances to defend or admire tyranny, in the end, modern political hero worship is nurtured by dormant religious impulses that surface in the virtual elevation of the dictators here discussed, the author concludes this chapter by offering a solution to his central question, one that he had also raised in the book’s preface. Hollander focuses on Heidegger and others’ misgivings about modernity in the chapter that follows on Hitler’s Germany.
The communism of the twentieth century as it was practiced in Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Rakosi’s Hungary, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia is the topic of Hollander’s next chapter. According to Hollander, many intellectuals backed these regimes for similar reasons that led them to declare support for Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany. Some of these motivations are primarily influenced by an individual’s psychology, such as religious or secular-religious impulses, self-importance, and awareness to what Hollander calls the hospitality techniques or desire for purity, while others are more ideological in nature, such as the rejection of decadent modernity or inhumane capitalism, or dissatisfaction with the various leadership philosophies present in democratic regimes. According to Hollander’s account, the benefits of dictatorship on the left and right are very comparable.
Hollander then transports us to a revolutionary Cuba from there. We continue the theme of the appeal of lofty ideas, which led captivated intellectuals to delay critiques of restrictive political institutions, from the earlier chapters on twentieth-century communism. The concept of hero worship, or even obsession, continues into this chapter and finds its peak in the heartfelt poem offered to Fidel Castro and Che Guevara by their numerous followers.
He also calls our attention to the support that a number of more or less modern authoritarian governments have received from intellectuals. With a few significant exceptions, the governments and leaders examined in this chapter span the ideological spectrum, therefore there are less ideological affinities between intellectuals and regimes than in previous chapters. Many of the intellectuals examined also shared a dislike of the United States, which, according to Hollander, may have led some of them, regardless of their ideological leanings, to discover respect for America’s rivals.
Hollander summarizes the causes that, in his opinion, led intellectuals to suspend the exercise of their critical faculties and embrace autocratic leaders and regimes in his last chapter. Hollander does not intend to reduce intellectuals’ political concerns to reflections of their personal or emotional lives, nor does he intend to converge the two; rather, I believe he is trying to make the point that in order to fully understand the phenomenon that is the subject of his research intellectuals’ support for oppressive regimes and leaders both political or ideological factors and emotional or psychological factors must be taken into account. Both come to our attention in this article.
The psychological force that draws some men to tyranny is the same psychological force that draws other men to philosophy, so that the philosophic life, as exemplified by Socrates, is the most noble because it is supremely self-aware of and resists its own tyrannical implications. Hollander understood that intellectuals would always be tempted to try to actualize their ideas, so this point bears further discussion. In Hollander’s description, the figure of the tyrant or dictator as teacher, gardener, artist, molder, and shaper of souls recurs frequently. Many of Hollander’s intellectuals share a conception of human nature, or rather the implicit denial that there was such a thing, and as a result, they had great faith in governments and figures who were committed to the fundamental and coercive transformation of societies and human beings, on the theory that people are flexible and easily adaptable. The oppressive government committed to such a revolutionary project claims to bridge the gap between political ideas and political action, to give the ideas life, and to give them substance. For the intellectual, such a system presents the tempting potential that all barriers to advancement may be removed, and that the ideal may now be realized since these barriers, which are so persistent in free society, may be removed. While intellectuals and tyrants alike may consider themselves to be engineers of souls, they’re flirtations with dictatorship more frequently result in the saturation of ideas with blood than in the transformation of ideas into reality. The regrets of the twentieth century should serve as a helpful caution for the twenty-first, Hollander’s book reminds us.