The Fellow Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism, Revised and Updated Edition

by David Caute

This highly regarded book gives a lucid and balanced account of fellow travellers in Europe and America: those individuals who were not willing to become Communists but were attracted by the socialist systems of the Soviet Union, the Popular Democracies, and Communist China.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300038755
• ISBN13: 9780300038750
• Release Date: March 1988
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 420 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Enlightening Read

David Caute chronicles how intelligent, and sometimes brillant, individuals allow a vision of utopia (the Communist or Socialist Society) to blind them to brutal realities of their experiment. The book illustrates the very human failing to believe in an idea but ignore its consequences. These people sincerely WANTED TO BELIEVE in a better future. Their desire was so powerful that they were willing to deny human suffering. Interestingly, Caute points out that many fellow travelers were also chauvanistic. They expected democracy and civil liberties for Western Countries but thought that a dictatorship of the proletariat was acceptable for the developing world (Russia and China). It's fashionable now to pan Communists, Socialists, and fellow travelers for falling into this trap. They had a vision of a better society but failed to acknowledge the normal human evil to abuse power. However, Caute's thesis can apply to anyone who follows an idea blindly: such as classical liberals today who advocate market fundamentalism to the developing world but ignore the poverty such policies have frequently caused.

Simply wonderful

Caute does what the fellow travellers refused to: take what people said at face value. He exposes how easily so many intellectuals shrugged off the piles of bodies amassed by communism in the name of some vague good. Teffirying.