The Only Super Power: Reflections on Strength, Weakness, and Anti-Americanism [Hardcover]

Paul Hollander (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0739125435 | ISBN-13: 978-0739125434 | Publication Date: December 16, 2008

In The Only Superpower: Reflections on Strength, Weakness, and Anti-Americanism, Paul Hollander examines anti-Americanism (including the relationship between the foreign and domestic varieties), American culture (especially mass culture), the lingering political and cultural influences of the 1960s, and the controversial relationship between the realms of the personal and the political. He also revisits the part played by hatred, and especially the scapegoating impulse, in social and political conflicts. The essays range widely, from Michael Moore's political celebrity, the American love for SUVs, and getting old in America to Islamic fanaticism and the aftermath of the fall of Eastern European communist systems.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sociologist Hollander made his name dissecting the pathologies of anti-Americanism, but his scalpel has dulled in this uneven collection of essays. Anti-Americanism, he argues, is a form of bigotry like racism, sexism and anti-Semitism, most luridly exemplified by hate-filled Islamist terrorists and their Arab supporters. But his main target is American leftists of the adversary culture, Noam Chomsky presiding, who, he contends, scapegoat America for the world's ills and reflexively side with its enemies. (Hollander himself cops to misgivings about America's infotainment culture and love of SUVs.) Many of these thin, repetitive pieces first appeared in publications like National Review and the online FrontPage, and are the weaker for preaching to the choir: lazy ironies abound—Michael Moore denounces rich people, but he's rich himself!—and the author often merely gestures at the excesses of left-wing ideologues rather than carefully rebutting them. That's too bad, because his intriguing thesis that discontent with modernity fuels anti-Americanism could stand fuller development. Hollander's oft-voiced wish that Americans would criticize themselves less and foreign tyrannies more seems wrongheaded; it's precisely the habit of searching self-criticism that distinguishes liberal democracies from their foes. (Nov.)
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Review

Hollander is one of the few critics who seriously address how celebrity culture has deeply altered the role and function of intellectuals. He reexamines his ideas about America's adversary culture, born of the 1960s, and provides ample illustrations of its continued vitality in new forms and voices. (Jonathan Imber 20091101)

In this fine collection of essays Paul Hollander continues his lifework of documenting the misperceptions and misrepresenations of ideologues and those under their influence. He shows time and again how peddlers of anti-Americanism are bent on undermining the political system whose advantages they enjoy and abuse. By juxtaposing their claims and plain facts he exposes their indifference to truth and reason. (Kekes, John )

The distinguished Hungarian-born sociologist Paul Hollander has a uniquely Central European perspective on the foibles of American life and especially its intellectual milieu. These fast-paced essays are smart, provocative, and sometimes amusing snapshots of our wonderfully imperfect universe. (Norman Naimark )

Paul Hollander, one of our most distinguished political sociologists, has written a wide-ranging, personal, and trenchant set of essays about America and its adversaries, at home and abroad. With reflections on his own fascinating journey from Hungary to America, Hollander provides unique and thought-provoking perspectives. (Ornstein, Norman J. )

I have been reading Paul Hollander for many years—often agreeing with him, sometimes disagreeing, and always profiting from his knowledge and acuity. (Berman, Paul )

In this beautifully written, understated, and powerful collection Paul Hollander brings his acute powers of observation and analysis to bear on a variety of important themes in American culture and society including the discontents of modernity, the cult of celebrities, the pervasive entertainment orientation of mass culture and the responses to global anti-Americanism and the manifestations of Islamic fanaticism. His observations illuminate recent trends and contain wise and sobering insights for the present and future of our country. (Jeffrey Herf )

He writes with force, clarity, and even elegance.... He is capable of taking a comparatively small phenomenon and extracting the deeper significance from it.... Paul Hollander's work is an example of the dialectic between lived experience and abstract reflection, of which all work in the humanities should—but alas, seldom does—partake. (Dalrymple, Theodore City Journal )

Paul Hollander's latest book is an understated, wry, and often hilarious collection of reflections on the profound link between anti-Americanism and the delusions and desires stirred up by modernity. Hollander's book is rich in fact and vivid, direct observation; a sociologist by profession, he practices something close to the nineteenth-century Tocquevillean variety of the discipline and eschews the abstruse theory, do-gooding mawkishness, and quantitative pedantry that plague his field and academe at large. The Only Superpower contains many delights of this cringe-inducing variety; Hollander is a master at unveiling lame vanity, the psychologically dirty and suspect. . . . Hollander's book is an important reminder in a time when not just the intellectual but the ordinary American seems to cleave ever more dangerously to a presumptous desire for change and progress, which (so it is hoped) will obscure the fundamental limitations and shortcomings of life itself. (The New Criterion )

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 302 pages
• Publisher: Lexington Books (December 16, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0739125435
• ISBN-13: 978-0739125434
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,848,830 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Theodore Dalrymple, in the current "CITY JOURNAL", writes:, May 1, 2009

By 

D. M. Lallatin (Petaluma, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Only Super Power: Reflections on Strength, Weakness, and Anti-Americanism (Hardcover)

I would never have found or purchased this book without having read Theodore Dalrymple's review in the Spring 2009 edition of "City Journal." I only quote it here:

Sociologists do not always write with clarity, let alone with grace. A friend of mine studying sociology once showed me some of the writing of the late Talcott Parsons, a longtime professor at Harvard, and I thought that anyone who waded through its obscurities deserved a degree for effort and determination alone, though not for wisdom and judgment.
Paul Hollander is not one of those sociologists who disdains to make his meaning clear to the average man, or at least to the average educated man. Though English was not his mother tongue, he writes with force, clarity, and even elegance. More important still, he does not treat human beings as if they were iron filings in a magnetic field. He knows that the search for meaning is one of man's most salient characteristics, and he is capable of taking a comparatively small phenomenon and extracting the deeper significance from it.
Hollander is preeminently what one might call a sociologist of ideology, or perhaps a psychosociologist of ideology, because the history of individual intellectuals, of which he has accumulated an encyclopedic knowledge, interests him as much as that of groups. He is best known for his now-classic book Political Pilgrims, which examined the phenomenon of twentieth-century Western intellectuals who allowed themselves to be seduced and duped by radical revolutionary regimes of the most patent despotism and brutality. How and why did so many intelligent, cultivated, and educated people come to believe such obvious nonsense? Pilgrims was a tragicomic study of how the cherished ideas of the self-important can so easily overwhelm their common sense, and how education can serve to blind as well as to enlighten.
His most recent book, a collection of mainly short pieces, takes its title from Hollander's acute observations of anti-Americanism, both foreign and domestic. America, he notes in The Only Superpower, is seen as the most modern of all countries, in the vanguard of almost everything, so all the discontents and disappointments of modernity--which are many, serious, and often contradictory--are laid at its door. For Hollander, anti-Americanism is a form of inverted utopianism: if it weren't for America, mankind would be living in a latter-day Garden of Eden.
Other essays offer insight into the life of our societies. Hollander can find social significance in the apparently trivial detail, like the phrase uttered by all of his retired friends and colleagues: "Busier than ever." (I have used it myself, often, since I retired from hospital practice.) Why should the elderly in our society be busier than ever rather than, say, contemplative, as they are in other societies? Secularization has led to the general belief that human life has no transcendent meaning beyond itself; it is necessary, therefore, to pack as much into it as possible, to prolong it as long as possible, and to ward off disturbing thoughts of dissolution. Ceaseless activity will accomplish these things. The hyperactivity of American retirees suggests that religious belief is much less rooted in American life than is commonly believed. Americans, and modern Europeans, have no answer to Dryden's question:
Hast thou not, yet, propos'd some certain end
To which thy life, thy every act may tend?
Another small phenomenon that Hollander analyzes with wit and compassion is the personal ads in the New York Review of Books. He finds them significant for two reasons. First, they suggest a degree of social isolation: substantial numbers of intelligent and educated people are unable to find partners by the customary routes of work, friendship, community, and so forth. There is an underlying melancholy in this.
Second, the self-descriptions of the people who place the personal ads are revealing of the tastes, worldview, and ideals of a sector of the population that is important well beyond its demographic size. Readers of the Review are, of course, likely to be members of the liberal intelligentsia. Their ads give a powerful impression not so much of hypocrisy as of lack of self-knowledge. The ads' authors claim to be profoundly individual, yet there is an underlying uniformity and conventionality to everything that they say about themselves. Their desire to escape convention is deeply conventional. Their opinions are democratic, but their tastes are exclusive: Tuscany and good claret mean more to them than beach resorts and the Boston Red Sox. They think of themselves as funny and demand humor in others, but they succeed in conveying only earnestness and the impression of deadening solemnity. (Demanding that someone be funny is a bit like demanding that he be natural for the camera.) Contented with, and even complacent about, their position in the world, they somehow see themselves as enemies of the status quo. They are ideologically egalitarian, but psychologically elitist: Lord, make everyone equal, but not just yet.
With their memories of the sixties, when to be young was very heaven, they still believe that an oppositional stance in pursuit of perfection is virtuous in itself--indeed, is the prime or sole content of virtue. And it is this belief that renders them interesting to Hollander, for it makes genuine moral reflection about the nature of various governments and policies impossible. It transforms merely personal discontents into matters of supposedly great general importance.
Near the end of the book, Hollander provides an understated account of his own intellectual development. Born in 1932 a bourgeois, assimilated Jew in Hungary, he escaped death toward the end of World War II by successfully posing as a Gentile. The Communist regime installed in Hungary after the war was less life-threatening than the Nazi occupiers had been, but still horribly despotic, economically disastrous, and suspicious of his family because of its bourgeois past. Having witnessed slaughter in the streets in the 1940s, he saw it again in 1956, the year he managed to escape to the West.
These experiences were surely enough to make anyone distrust totalizing ideologies of whatever stripe; but studying in England, Hollander also came under the influence of Isaiah Berlin, who taught that human desires and desiderata are permanently in conflict with one another. (Hollander's piece on travel in this volume illustrates how educated, prosperous, but slightly dissatisfied Westerners roam the world in search of self-contradictory gratifications; I blushed to see myself portrayed in this way.)
His background makes clear why Hollander has always been interested in evil, and why he sees the avoidance of evil as politically even more important than the quest for the good. Man is permanently dissatisfied with his lot because he wants contradictory things simultaneously: excitement and security, anonymity and community, routine and variety, and so on. No political arrangements will ever satisfy him entirely; this does not mean that hell on earth is unavoidable, though it has been often enough produced by those who believe they can reconcile the irreconcilable by means of absolute power.
It is a pleasure to read a sociologist who can distinguish so clearly and with wit the less than perfect from the evil; who understands the benefits of environmental conservation without turning such conservation into a quasi-totalitarian ideology; who can see the frivolity, vulgarity, and worthlessness of industrially produced popular culture while appreciating just how quickly dislike of such culture can mutate into contempt for the people who consume it; who, in short, keeps the limits of human possibilities constantly before him. Paul Hollander's work is an example of the dialectic between lived experience and abstract reflection, of which all work in the humanities should--but alas, seldom does--partake.
Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Last Exit to Dystopia, January 7, 2010

By 

Pieter "Toypom" (Johannesburg) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Only Super Power: Reflections on Strength, Weakness, and Anti-Americanism (Hardcover)

This varied collection contains amusing essays on certain controversial aspects of western culture like celebrity worship, SUVs, consumerism, obsessive travel and the infotainment trend in TV news; on the sad side there are absorbing accounts of the conforming non-conformist's search for companionship & the compulsive need for action instead of contemplation amongst older people. However its main themes continue the author's life work, i.e. analyzing anti-Americanism and the treason of intellectuals. The autobiographical conclusion ties in with this theme by revealing the reason for Hollander's dedication to liberty and the rule of law.

He draws a clear distinction between foreign and domestic anti-Americanism by discussing both differences and similarities. The foreign variety derives predominantly from ambivalent love/hate attitudes towards modernity of which the USA is emblematic. In second place is the emotion of envy. Abroad, the phenomenon is not confined to the intelligentsia and their audience; large sectors of a population may find in America a convenient scapegoat for their problems. The mixed fruits of modernity include secularization, industrialization, urbanization & mobility that undermine community, social cohesion and traditional religion.

In contrast, the American strain is almost completely restricted to the intelligentsia and rooted in idealism and failed expectations. The collapse of communism promoted the irrational aspects and emotional articulation of anti-Americanism. Hollander identifies the common experiences & traits of the domestics as: a belief in the perfectibility of human nature, a record of higher education in the humanities or social sciences, an inclination to personal dissatisfaction with life, disdain/envy of commerce & trade and difficulty in separating the personal from the political. Eric Hoffer's True Believer might be very helpful here as it provides more detail on the personality types likely to join mass movements.

Today's main varieties of anti-Americanism include
(a) the traditional anti-Western theoretical one that rejects Enlightenment values; it currently manifests as postmodernism and multiculturalism
(b) true-believer collectivism (the anti-capitalistic mentality)
(c) the cultural strain characteristic of nationalistic elites that hate American popular culture since it threatens their domain
(d) conservative anti-Americanism which distrusts innovation and worships tradition/religion.
Like André Markowitz, Robin Shepherd & Denis MacShane, the author is aware of the phenomenon's close ties to antisemitism/anti-Zionism.

Hollander has revised that part of his definition of anti-Americanism which implied that it was mainly expressed verbally or by the type of violence that avoided mass murder; 9/11 changed all that. The Jihad against the West & India represents pure pathological hatred and the urge to dominate. For the rest, anti-Americanism resembles racism, antisemitism, sexism, homophobia & ethnic prejudice, employing like them the usual stereotyping, exaggeration, distortion, half-truths and deception. The phenomenon is of course hundreds of years old as Barry Rubin has proved in his book Hating America: A History.

Titled "Americana," part two explores inter alia celebrity culture, the decline of common sense, the deterioration of TV news, the need to rehabilitate great literature and the emptiness inside retired or aged people who think their worth depends on frantic activity. Michael Moore is identified as the new political celebrity that differs from the Chomskyan type in its lack of intellectualism or a countercultural background. The porcine propagandist purveys blue collar pretensions for self-promotion. Hollander's dissection of the personals in the New York Review of Books mocks the conformity of the atomized elitist for whom lifestyle becomes a deity.

Part Three is devoted to North Korea and its western fans, the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution, the Velvet Revolutions of Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Empire as well as encounters and travels in Amsterdam & Greece. After this overseas detour, Hollander returns to the USA to investigate the survival and persistence of the adversarial culture or blame-America-first crowd. These are the fans of Noam Chomsky, a stagnant mind who, gifted with a silver tongue, has been fluently and endlessly repeating himself since the 1960s. In a stream of articles, pamphlets & tracts notorious for cross-referential footnotes that never lead to verifiable sources Noamie has demonized Israel and America for decades whilst occasionally praising Pol Pot, Nasrallah, Saddam and sundry other butchers. In order to learn more about the psychological processes at work, I recommend Last Exit to Utopia by Jean-François Revel.

The description of the type of intellectual or artist who cannot quit his utopian addiction and the manner in which his hatred of America is expressed ("the impatient foot-stomping of the irrational child") closely mirrors the observations of Bernard Harrison and Chantal Delsol who points out that in Europe indignation has become the preferred vehicle of an insincere morality. Erupting in fits of rage, this postmodern piety's selectivity betrays it as contradictory posturing. When it comes to criticizing the West, the USA & Israel, moral absolutes suddenly replace the relativist platitudes harnessed to justify the murder of Israeli civilians.

Or one gets Chomsky showing solidarity with Hezbollah, an Iranian terror proxy in Lebanon whose members are not even Palestinian. The author explores at length the connection between the personal and the political, considers the case of Cuba, demystifies Marxism and revisits the utopian yearning of public intellectuals. In the final, autobiographical part, Hollander talks about his youth in Hungary, his escape to freedom at the age of 24 in the aftermath of the doomed 1956 revolution and his career in sociology. The Only Superpower is a lively and thought-provoking read. Quality works of related interest that I recommend are United In Hate by Jamie Glazov and Anti-Americanism by Jean-François Revel.

3.0 out of 5 stars A conservative political writer, November 20, 2011

By 

DM (ORegon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Only Super Power: Reflections on Strength, Weakness, and Anti-Americanism (Hardcover)

Paul Hollander (born 1932 in Hungary) is an American scholar, journalist, and conservative political writer. He is known for his criticisms of Communism and left-wing politics.

In this book Hollander says that America has nothing to be ashamed of; that Israel is an angel. That anyone, group or country that hates us has no legitimate reason. America is the perfect world citizen.
PH relates everything left of right to Communism. Hates Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore....

He doesn't like it when we question ourselves, our country.

I did like chapters 6, 8-12