After Progress: Defining American Political and Cultural Maturity in the 1940s and 1950s
Open Access
- Author:
- Faber, Robert S.
- Graduate Program:
- History
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 29, 2006
- Committee Members:
- Anne Carver Rose, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
John Philip Jenkins, Committee Member
Greg Eghigian, Committee Member
Sanford Ray Schwartz, Committee Member - Keywords:
- History
American History
Inteellctual History
Cold War
New York Intellectuals
liberalism - Abstract:
- ABSTRACT In the middle of the twentieth century, a circle of influential intellectuals living in New York City believed that American culture, along with world civilization, had reached a crucial turning point. In a world characterized by global war, genocide, and the prospect of atomic destruction, they felt that classic liberalism had failed Western culture, and, indeed, that it had failed them personally as well. Their solution was an ideology that combined an anti-radicalism that rejected the extremes of both the left and the right, with cultural modernism, which eventually became a component of Cold War liberal ideology during the 1950s and the early 1960s. They expressed their views through literary criticism, historiography, and social science with a qualitative emphasis. These intellectuals were originally part of the anti-Stalinist left, and they were especially associated with the journal Partisan Review. The work of several intellectuals is examined, including Philip Rahv, William Philips, Dwight Macdonald, William Barrett, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., John Crowe Ransom, F.O. Matthiessen, Irving Howe, Sidney Hook, but the work of Lionel Trilling, Richard Chase, and Richard Hofstadter are subjected to detailed scrutiny. The work of Trilling, Chase and Hofstadter are held as paradigmatic examples of a particular anti-radical Cold War liberal discourse that was concerned with the relationship between personality and individual psychological development, and ideology.