After 1945, in the wake of the war and Neurath's death, the Unity of Science movement and its leaders were subject to pressures that hastened the movement's demise and helped to fashion professional philosophy of science as it flourished in the 1950s and '60s. These pressures can be sorted into three kinds according to their generality and diffusion through Cold War society. The most general concerns intellectual fashions. The beliefs and values that became popular and influential in American and British academic and popular culture after the war specifically opposed some of the Unity of Science movement's basic ideals and methods. One such ideal and method was collectivism. It was attacked in two of the era's most influential books, Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1944) and William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale (1951). These books attacked social collectivism and praised individualism, and did so to wide audiences both intellectual and popular. Buckley's witty disdain for Ivy League intellectual culture entertained popular readers (many of whom had themselves never attended a college or university), while Hayek's Serfdom was serialized in the popular Reader's Digest.

This mood of anticollectivism illustrated by Hayek and Buckley helped to support the second kind of pressure in play, one more localized to institutions of government, popular media, and education. For when Hoover's FBI, the House Un-American Activities Committee, the American Legion, or local politicians sought out communist professors in American colleges and universities, Hayek's and especially Buckley's books enlightened a largely approving public about the different kinds of un-American ideological perversity rampant inside them.