Righteous Political Violence and Contemporary Western Intellectuals

Abstract

Modern political violence has been increasingly preceded or accompanied by elaborate ideological justifications, devised, in part, by intellectuals motivated by their own political beliefs and commitments. Many idealistic intellectuals have been especially sympathetic toward political movements and systems that have promised to carry out far-reaching social transformations. These movements and systems have often relied upon violent means to accomplish their goals. The political partisanship of many Western intellectuals necessitates a revision of their idealized conception. These issues are dealt with in the context of the intellectuals’ attitudes toward Nazism, communism, and present-day Islamic radicalism.

Keywords:

• communism
• ends and means
• idealism
• ideology
• intellectuals
• Islamic radicalism
• Nazism
• political belief
• political violence
• theory and practice

Notes

Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society (New York: Basic Books, 2009), 2.

Arthur Koestler, Janus: A Summing Up (New York: Random House, 1978), 77.

Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils (San Diego: Harcourt, 1936).

Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928–1978 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 40–49.

Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 43–44.

Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (see note 3 above).

Political correctness amounts to a set of left-of-center attitudes, beliefs, and injunctions influenced by the therapeutic orientation that has developed since the 1960s. PC is mainly concerned with regulating racial, ethnic, and sexual relations and attitudes but also finds expression in matters which at earlier times were not considered politically relevant, such as sexual orientation, taste, and attitudes toward the natural environment.

Roger Kimball, Tenured Radicals (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1990).

Richard Posner, Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

Islamic suicide bombers do not agonize about the relationship between ends and means since they are willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the cause. How many of them might qualify as intellectuals, is, of course, another matter. In any event, there is an important difference between people willing to destroy themselves in the course of destroying their enemies and those who wish to preserve their own lives while seeking to eradicate evil.

Nathan Leites, A Study of Bolshevism (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1953), 208, 106, 348, 352.

What complicates matters further is that there is no agreement about what constitutes propaganda as distinct from a reasoned attempt at persuasion. Orwell did not cease to be an intellectual on account of working for the BBC. However, this proposition is based on my belief that the BBC was quite different from Nazi or Soviet instruments of propaganda.

See Qur'an 5:60, 2:65, 7:166 in Maulana Muhammad Ali, The Holy Qu'ran (Columbus, OH: Islam Lahore, 1917); see also Sayyid Qutb, In the Shade of Qu'ran (Leicester, UK: Islamic Foundation, 2001), IV: 170.

See also Paul Hollander, “The Appeal of Revolutionary Violence: Latin American Guerrillas and American Intellectuals,” in Paul Hollander, ed., The Survival of the Adversary Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1988), 207–232.

Ibid., 219.

Raymond Aron, The Opium of Intellectuals (London: Secker & Warbug, 1957), 35, 42–43.

Norman Mailer, The Presidential Papers (New York: Putnam, 1968), 69–70.

Max Weinreich, Hitler's Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany's Crimes against the Jewish People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 240.

Quoted in Joachim Fest, The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 115.

Leites, A Study of Bolshevism (see note 11 above), 105, 109, 114–115.

Eugene Loebl, My Mind on Trial (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 56.

Quoted in Leites, A Study of Bolshevism (see note 11 above), 105.

Alexander Yakovlev, The Fate of Marxism in Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 11, 17, 29, 38.

Quoted in Daniel Bell, “First Love and Early Sorrows,” Partisan Review, November 4, 1981, 547.

Paul Berman, The Flight of the Intellectuals (New York: Melville House, 2010), 151.

Gore Vidal, New Statesman, October 15, 2001, 18–19.

Quoted in Tony Judt, “America and the War,” The New York Review of Books, November 15, 2001, 4.

Norman Mailer quoted in “Notebooks,” The New Republic, November 26, 2001, 8.

Susan Sontag, “The Talk of the Town,” The New Yorker, September 24, 2001, 32.

Michael Mandel, “This War is Illegal,” The Globe and Mail, October 9, 2001.

Eric Foner, “11 September,” London Review of Books 23, no. 19 (2001): 20–25.

Stone quoted in “Voices of Reason? Not in Hollywood,” The Boston Globe, October 23, 2001.

Kingsolver quoted in “Notebooks,” New Republic, October 22, 2001.

Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: Norton, 2003), 122, 130, 134, 135.

Ibid., 131.

Quoted in Paul Hollander, “Ambivalent in Amsterdam,” National Interest (November/December 2006); see also Berman (see note 25 above).

Sontag, “The Talk of the Town” (see note 29 above), 132.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paul Hollander

Paul Hollander is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the author of 10 books translated into many languages.