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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 April 2013
Mid-twentieth century American intellectual history is in the midst of a boom; a younger generation of historians, now half a century distant from the era, and less inclined than their immediate forerunners to be committed to a vision of the 1960s as a critical turning point in modern culture, is reshaping what has been an underdeveloped field. Recent studies of thinkers such as C. Wright Mills, Ayn Rand, Lionel Trilling, and Whitaker Chambers, and subjects such as postcapitalist social thought and pollsters in mass society, to name a few, have regenerated interest in an arena that had once been dominated by studies of the New York Intellectuals and Richard Pells's useful summaries and evaluations of prominent intellectuals of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The newer intellectual history of this period appears to be premised on several ideas: that the so-called “liberal consensus” of the era was an ideological product of liberalism itself, rather than an adequate description of the contours of thought; that thinking in terms of clear and sharp distinctions between right and left doesn't help us understand the ways in which ideas, sensibilities, and intellectual commitments were configured at mid-century; that there is a great deal more continuity in social, political, and cultural thought than an image of the 1960s as cultural watershed would allow; and that the mid-century decades are, in the most profound sense, the first years of our own time, with all the characteristic epistemic, moral, and critical problems that have characterized thought and culture in the world in which contemporary Americans live. What the Progressive Era was for mid-century historians and intellectuals such as Richard Hofstadter and Henry May, the mid-century, and particularly the early Cold War era of the late 1940s and 1950s, is, for the historian of today, the root of the destabilizing conundrums of modernity, particularly the puzzle of the role of critical intellect in a mass-mediated environment of socialized knowledge, feeling, and being.
1 Examples of recent work include Geary, Daniel, Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2009)Google Scholar; Burns, Jennifer, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (New York, 2009)Google Scholar; Kimmage, Michael, The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Cambridge, MA, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brick, Howard, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, NY, 2006)Google Scholar; Igo, Sarah, The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public (Cambridge, MA, 2008).Google Scholar
2 See Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform (New York, 1955)Google Scholar; May, Henry F., The End of American Innocence: A Study of the First Years of Our Own Time 1912–1917 (New York, 1959).Google Scholar
3 Trilling, Lionel, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning (New York, 1965).Google Scholar
4 Jacoby, Russell, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York, 1987).Google Scholar
5 Macdonald, Dwight, “Masscult and Midcult,” inMacdonald, , Against the American Grain (New York, 1962), 44–6Google Scholar.
6 See Rubin, Joan Shelley, “Repossessing the Cozzens–Macdonald Imbroglio: Middlebrow Authorship, Critical Authority, and Autonomous Readers in Postwar America,” Modern Intellectual History 7/3 (2010), 553–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar