In his account of the mechanisms of self-deception, Professor Hollander makes effective use of the concept of ''contextual redefinition.'' By this he means the way that activities are transformed by their context, so that what is detestable in one society becomes uplifting in another. Thus the left-wing intellectual feels that any society based on state ownership, whatever its superficial flaws, is essentially good; any society based on private ownership, whatever its superficial attractions, is essentially corrupt. Poverty represents a shameful failure in capitalism; but when associated with egalitarianism and the subordination of material to spiritual needs, it expresses a simple, uncorrupted way of life. Manual labor is demeaning under capitalism, ennobling under Communism. Child labor is abominable in the United States, but in Cuba the sight of children working 15 hours a week in the fields is symbolic of high and unified purpose. As Angela Davis once said, ''The job of cutting cane had become qualitatively different since the revolution.'' Contextual redefinition, Professor Hollander writes, also produces ''euphoric response to objects, sights, or institutions in themselves unremarkable and also to be found in the visitors' own societies.'' ''There is something about a Russian train standing at a station that thrills,'' wrote Waldo Frank. ''The little locomotive is human. ... The dingy cars are human.''

One would like to think that such quotations might have an admonitory effect on political pilgrims of the future. But given the craving for absolutes in so many minds, one fears that they won't. Readers also may be distracted by Professor Hollander's effort to turn his historical material to polemical ends. For he has bigger fish to fry - most particularly, Western intellectuals as a class.

Modern intellectuals, according to Professor Hollander, are to be defined by their antagonism toward the societies in which they live. His historical perspective on alienation seems at times a trifle shaky. ''It is interesting to reflec t,'' he w rites, ''why the estrangement of American intellectuals ... wa s not more strongly developed before the 1930's and why World War I did not leave more ofa residue of bitterness and cynicism.'' Has e veryone forgotten the Lost Generation? And the estrangement of the 1930's, in his view, wasnothing compared with the estrangement of the 1960's, when ''perhaps for the first time in history ... the lone vo ices of beleaguered intellectuals forming a small, isolated, crit ical vanguard were replaced ... by a vast, well-orchestrated cho rus of standardized nay-saying.'' Has everyone forgotten the Grea t Depression? But, then,sociologists are rarely much good at history.

In any event, this characteristic condition of alienation, Professor Hollander continues, sets intellectuals on a quest for alternative societies, which they keep hoping - despite disillusionment after disillusionment - will provide what their own societies deny them: in the Depression-ridden 1930's, full employment; in the emptily affluent 1960's, spiritual exaltation; at all times, status and recognition joined with submergence in a larger community and nobler purpose.

Above all, intellectuals seek cosmic meaning in existence. They take, Professor Hollander assures us, ''an 'organic' view of life (which implies that things hang together, add up to something) ... Such inclinations reflect revulsion from disorder, fragmentation, and what they imply: meaninglessness. ... The overintegrated and 'organic' perception of the world expresses the intellectuals' striving not only for meaning but also harmony,'' etc. Deprived of transcendent religious faith by the advance of secularization, intellectuals search endlessly for its equivalent in social terms. So while their opposition to their own society gives them a superficial reputation for skepticism and critical detachment, their central attribute in fact is an insatiable credulity.