A Tribute to Paul Hollander (1932–2019)

Excerpt

In this column (56–3), Advisory Board Editor, Alexander Riley, pays tribute below to Paul Hollander, a long-time contributor to Society. He published articles, reviews, and letters, nearly fifty in all, between 1981 and 2018. (We cannot provide a full list here. Those interested in such a list should contact the Editor-in-Chief at society@wellesley.edu). He was missed most during the 1990s, absent five out of ten years. But after that time, the past 18 years, he was only absent in 2008, making up for it in 2009 with two reviews and one article. Four decades is a life’s work, and his first in 1981 was entitled “Political Hospitality,” his first of many accounts of Western intellectuals in these pages. It was an excerpt from his famous work on Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China, and Cuba, 1928–1978. By 1986, he added Nicaragua to the pilgrimage theme (“Political Tourism in Cuba and Nicaragua”). And by 1988 he was developing a deeper perspective on what today would be called the cognitive orientations and dispositions of intellectuals representing the adversary culture (“Alienation and the Adversary Culture”). In the early 1990s, he explored the fall of communism, as he pointed out, “In total contradiction to Marx’s basic propositions, social systems were reverting to capitalism” (“Why Communism Collapsed in Eastern Europe”). In 2002, he assessed how Hungary had fared since his previous visit in 1991 after the fall of communism (“Hungary Ten Years Later”). Another interest emerged by the mid-2000s: love, match-making, and dating, exemplified in two articles “The Counterculture of the Heart” (2004); and “Expert Advice on Dating and Mating” (2011). Finally, in 2010 he wrote three prophetic pieces on the cult of celebrity in America and abroad, ranging from “Michael Jackson, the Celebrity Cult, and Popular Culture” to “Slvoj Zizek and the Rise of the Celebrity Intellectual” to “Why the Celebrity Cult.” Popular culture, populism, celebrity, and social media have created a potent stew [Ed.]. …