Until recently, anti-Americanism attracted little serious attention among social scientists and intellectuals. Apparently it was not considered worthy of study or close scrutiny, because it was rarely seen as a pathology that required better understanding. Unlike other more researched, consensually reprehensible attitudes and prejudices, such as racism, sexism, anti-semitism, and homophobia, anti-Americanism was regarded among the intelligentsia as a more or less natural phenomenon, perhaps regrettable but easy to explain and largely justified.

Admittedly, anti-Americanism is not easy to study given its diffuseness, varieties, endless sources, and the difficulty in locating it on the spectrum of political attitudes and positions. Anti-Americanism may be associated with radical revolutionaries or with the guardians of traditional moralities and social orders. There is anti-Americanism on the left as well as the right. Intense anti-Americanism sometimes makes the extreme right and extreme left hard to distinguish from one another. Noam Chomsky, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, or Gore Vidal would have found little to quarrel with in the statement of Istvan Csurka, leader of the radical right-wing party in Hungary, who, following September 11, said “this event was bound to happen. The oppressed people of the world could not tolerate without a counter-blow the humiliations, the exploitations, and the purposeful genocide taking place in Palestine.”

Anti-Americanism can be found in both highly developed, complex Western societies and in the most backward ones of the Third World; it can be found in the remaining communist states as well as the post-communist ones. Identification and