By Blake Dvorak

Before David Horowitz gives a speech, he is often introduced as a former "civil rights leader" and "peace activist." These benign titles have always bothered Horowitz. "I was a Marxist," he says bluntly of his younger self, "a destructive Marxist."

Since his defection from that orthodoxy, Horowitz has focused much energy on explaining this mislabeling. If held end to end, the product of his work, in the form of speeches, books, and essays, could easily fill a small library. When prompted, however, he can provide a candid summary such as: "Marxists are not interested in civil rights. If they were, they wouldn't be pushing race preferences."

Statements like this are why Horowitz is not only the most provocative conservative today, but also the most despised. And there are more than enough affronts in his new book, Left Illusions: An Intellectual Odyssey, to make Ann Coulter blush. The first, and perhaps most enlightening, portion of the book contains essays Horowitz wrote while still aligned with the Left and just before he made his intellectual break.

Disclosing Horowitz's emerging perception that much of what he believed in and preached was wrong, these essays are a rare treat for students who know about the '60s "peace" movement only from their ex-radical professors' idealized accounts and the mythic "Summer of Love" anecdotes glamorized by Hollywood. In an essay first published for the left-wing journal Ramparts in 1969, here is Horowitz warning his fellow-radicals: "What we have here is hand-me-down Marxism, where a political vocabulary developed in a different epoch is transposed whole and adopted as an all-embracing wisdom." What Horowitz was describing was the pending collapse of the New Left that so few of his comrades wanted to hear.

But the implosion came, violently rocking the revolutionaries from their strongholds and sending many to the safety of university faculties. This demise sets the stage for two of the best, and most pertinent, sections of the book that deal with the subsequent destruction of our university system. In the words of one Stanford professor, applauding this state, by the 1990s the universities had become the Left's "new power bases."

Although at the time many conservatives noted this vast takeover with concern, perhaps no one understood the dire ramifications for the rising generation as clearly as Horowitz did. In a piece titled "Missing Diversity," Horowitz laments, years after the fact, "Outside the hard sciences and the practical professions, what is the penalty for bad ideas? There is none [anymore]. Once a discredited dogma like Marxism is legitimated through the hiring practices [of the university], there is no institutional obstacle to its expansion and entrenchment as a scholarly discipline." Just a sampling of the hundreds of courses on Marxism in our universities today shows that this is not mere partisan rhetoric.

Left Illusions is ambitious in scope and audacious in presentation, spanning the author's entire intellectual journey to conservatism and his endless battles with the Left. To be sure, the book's theme, "It's all liberals' fault," echoes Coulter-but, unlike Coulter, Horowitz has the rare qualification of having spent a life on the political front lines of nearly every major cultural battle of the last 40 years. In fact, Horowitz, though rarely amicable in his writing, has never been a mere curmudgeon with an ax to grind and an ego to tend to. He is, ultimately, a scholarly, elegant writer with a true gift for exposing radicalism in places most conservatives fear to tread.

Marketed as "A One Volume Course in the History of Our Time," in 43 chapters, Left Illusions covers topics that range from Shakespeare to the current War on Terror. The textbook feel of the book is very much intended. As Horowitz explained in a recent interview, his new book is "particularly for students … who have to deal with campus leftists or those who call themselves liberals these days. You need to know about Cuba, or Vietnam, or affirmative action, or the Cold War, or the War on Terror. They're all covered in this book."

The value of these chapters, organized thematically, is that each stands alone as a historical snapshot of the time in which it was written. Readers familiar with Horowitz, especially those who have read his autobiography, Radical Son, will find some of the previously unpublished essays a joy to read since they're designed to complement that work. New readers, even if they come to disagree with some of his arguments, will depart with the understanding that Horowitz has a keen eye for analyzing the cultural issues underlying political-historical movements. His contribution is in revealing these movements for what they really are, namely the death-spasms and counter-attacks of a discredited but still dangerous ideology.

Blake Dvorak is the managing editor of Consumers'Research magazine.