Paul Hollander, who passed away on April 9, 2019, knew from an early age that ideas had consequences and that the worst of these could be terrible indeed. As a child in Budapest, he was forced to hide from the Nazis. Not very much later he had to flee from Hungary after Soviet tanks crushed its anti-Communist rebellion.
Settling in the United States and earning a Princeton Ph.D., Paul spent his teaching career on the sociology faculty of the University of Massachusetts. But despite his discipline’s materialist bent he never lost sight of the singular importance of ideas and the capacity of the wrong kind to seal people into lightless intellectual vaults. His uniqueness as a sociologist lay in demonstrating how the blinders of “theory” could turn the most vocal truth seekers into dupes of grotesque and transparent lies; how
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