Paul Hollander has been variously described as a great political sociologist, a communist-studies (more precisely, an anticommunist-studies) scholar, and most concisely by his good friend Theodore Dalrymple, “a remarkable man.” Endowed with a humility too uncommon in today’s academy, he would have disliked being described as a public intellectual. Yet that he was, for his work revealed America to itself, in its manifold complexities and contradictions, a herculean dynamism complementing a good deal of self-doubt and an equally hefty dose of arrogant ingnorance. But an intensely private man, he was mainly content to learn and write.
Always busy with projects, in one of his last emails to me he wrote: “Did I tell you that I had an idea for another book (easily put together)? One more collection of short writings published in the last few years, with special reference
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