Reviewing Eric Hobsbawm's Interesting Times, Niall Ferguson proposes that Hobsbawm's life "helps us to answer one of the most puzzling historical questions of the 20th century: why did so many otherwise intelligent people become Communists?" An excerpt:

The Far Left will always be chic while the Far Right is irredeemably repulsive. But was there really such a great moral difference - as Hobsbawm insists there was - between being a fascist and being a Communist?

The essence of Communism is the abnegation of individual freedom, as Hobsbawm admits in a chilling passage: "The PartyÖ had the first, or more precisely the only real claim on our lives. Its demands had absolute priority. We accepted its discipline and hierarchy. We accepted the absolute obligation to follow 'the lines' it proposed to us, even when we disagreed with itÖWe did what it ordered us to doÖWhatever it had ordered, we would have obeyedÖ If the Party ordered you to abandon your lover or spouse, you did so."

Consider some of the "lines" our historian dutifully toed. He accepted the order to side with the Nazis against the Weimar-supporting Social Democrats in the great Berlin transport strike of 1932. He accepted the order to side with the Nazis against Britain and France following the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact of 1939. He accepted the excommunication of Tito. He condoned the show trials of men like Laszlo Rajk in Hungary.

In 1954, just after Stalin's death, he visited Moscow as one of the honoured members of the Historians' Group of the British Communist Party. He admits to having been dismayed when, two years later, Khrushchev denounced Stalin's crimes at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. When Khrushchev himself ordered the tanks into Budapest, Hobsbawm finally spoke up, publishing a letter of protest. But he did not leave the Party.

In the end, the only way to understand this extraordinary trahison d'un clerc is precisely as a succession of acts of quasi-religious faith. In a surprising aside, Hobsbawm himself refers to 'the Party' as the "Communist Universal Church" and later admits: "For young revolutionaries of my generation, mass demonstrations were the equivalent of papal masses for devout Catholics."

Ferguson's analysis resonates strongly with Stanley Kurtz's great National Review piece "The Church of the Left," where Kurtz argues that "liberalism now functions for substantial numbers of its adherents as a religion: an encompassing worldview that answers the big questions about life, lends significance to our daily exertions, and provides a rationale for meaningful collective action." Offering women's centers as an example, he proposes that "many of the young women who affiliate themselves with campus women's centers are looking for a world view, a moral-social home, and a meaningful crusade in which to take part." Leftism, then, gives its adherents' lives some meaning, filling the twentieth-century vacuum left by religion and creating collective purpose for those who find individualism distasteful -- or just plain scary.

However, as the Hitchens' "defection" proves, even long-term believers are finally beginning to question the credibility and motives of the One True Leftist Church, are starting to lose faith in the distorted ideological tenets propounded by the Gores, the Sontags, and just about every professor and graduate student in English, women's studies, sociology, and education today. In short, left-leaning individualists have had enough and, like Orwell, are jumping the collectivist ship. It might be premature to imagine Hitchens as a modern-day Luther, nailing his 95 Theses to the church door before leaving for good -- but it's a hopeful image.