America as a mass society

During the long 1950s, mass-society theory placed the United States on a path toward the collapse of liberal democracy into totalitarianism. “The specter of ‘mass society’,” Edward Shils declared in 1962, was “haunting sociologists.” Indeed its dystopic vision of modern society haunted much of postwar American social thought, politics, and culture.Footnote ² A number of sources quickly brought mass-society theory to the attention of postwar intellectuals. During the 1950s, modernist critics like Dwight Macdonald continued to argue that a culture by and for the “mass man … a solitary atom, uniform … and undifferentiated,” was necessarily a “debased” culture.Footnote ³ Erich Fromm's story of the emergence of isolated modern individuals and their submission to fascist totalitarianism, Escape from Freedom, was the first of several Frankfurt school analyses to reach a large American audience and went through twenty-four printings between its publication in 1941 and 1964.Footnote ⁴ Mass-society theories informed Arthur Schlesinger's The Vital Center (1949) and David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1951), two widely circulated books that brought mass-society theory directly to bear on American society.Footnote ⁵ The 1950 study led by émigré Frankfurt scholar Theodor Adorno of a fascist “authoritarian personality” that formed under the conditions of mass society produced volumes of empirical social-psychological research and political debate.Footnote ⁶ The extent to which American society faced the dangers of massification became the central question of mainstream sociology.Footnote ⁷ The classic work on totalitarianism by philosopher Hannah Arendt published in 1951 added weight to the theory. Arendt proposed several explanations for the rise of totalitarian regimes, but the logic of mass-society theory governed her discussion of totalitarianism. When the nineteenth-century class system broke down, she argued, “the fall of protecting class walls transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals,” the “atomized, isolated individuals” who fed totalitarian movements.Footnote ⁸

These dark insights found purchase in American social thought when the historical traumas of the mid-twentieth century shattered the liberal narrative of progress. Since World War I many American intellectuals had abandoned the certainty of progress, but continued to believe that history was moving in directions that made progressive moral improvement possible. That modernity instead produced totalitarian horrors challenged even modest liberal hopes. During the early and middle 1950s, under the combined impact of the Korean War abroad and McCarthyism at home, pessimism was deepest.Footnote ⁹

While liberal social thinkers could hardly escape the postwar presence of totalitarianism, not all were equally swayed by its ideological force, nor did they all give equal credence to the downward trajectory of mass-society theory. One major source of confidence and liberal commitment was the capitalist economy. For economists generally, the positive expectations of capitalism built into economists’ disciplinary paradigms warded off fears of capitalist collapse, especially as the United States escaped a postwar depression and produced new levels of prosperity. Modernization theorists were deeply engaged in countering the totalitarian enemy but they were among the most optimistic postwar liberals. Believing that capitalist economic growth remained the motor of social progress, they erected a model of the global future that instantiated idealized liberal features of American society. In his “Non-communist Manifesto,” the economist Walt Rostow ignored mass-society theory except to express incredulity at Americans’ “curious new obsession” with the “Organization Man.”Footnote ¹⁰

Pragmatist philosophers like Charles Frankel and Morton White instead maintained confidence in the ability of reason and science to achieve moral progress, while recognizing the need to counter the growing liberal pessimism. Making The Case for Modern Man, Frankel recognized some truth behind mass-society fears but argued that they foolishly turned “the imagination of disaster” from a “historical circumstance into a metaphysical necessity.”Footnote ¹¹

Sociologists and political scientists most consistently recognized the importance and considered the dangerous implications of mass-society theory, leading some influential social theorists to mount systematic critiques. Shils, from the conservative wing of postwar liberalism, accepted that modern society as it existed in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan was a mass society in structural and functional terms, but not in the threatening terms critics were applying to it. Modernity carried hopeful possibilities within it: “diffusely equalitarian, consensual, hedonistic, effective, humanitarian tendencies.” With all its current problems and inevitable tensions, mass society was coming “close” to attaining the ideals of the Enlightenment. Daniel Bell, from the left wing of liberalism, dismissed mass-society theory as an essentially conservative and romantic ideology of protest rather than an accurate portrayal of modernity in general or of American society in particular. For Bell, too, the theory ignored the equality, adaptability, and freedom that modernity—and especially American modernity—created, though he admitted that the theory captured some of the defining features and some of the “quality and feeling of modern life” (italics in original). Bell's inclination to American exceptionalism was echoed as well in his belief that ideologies of the left and right would not flourish in the United States. When during the mid 1950s and early 1960s he forecast that right-wing extremism would be moderated in time and celebrated the “exhaustion” of utopian “liberal and left-wing political ideology,” he put his trust in America's uniquely pragmatic politics, openness to change, and wildly productive economy, militarized now and for the foreseeable future, to be sure, but by necessity.Footnote ¹²

The liberal political philosopher Judith Shklar, a young émigré from Europe educated in the United States, was more deeply shaken by “the cultural alienation of the romantic and the despair of Christian fatalism” that had taken hold of the era. Although she believed such theories did not adequately explain the rise of totalitarianism, she could not shake their pessimism nor recapture liberalism's ideological faith. She believed that a new theory of liberalism was necessary, but felt stymied herself: “without that grain of baseless optimism no genuine political theory can be constructed.”Footnote ¹³

Schlesinger's Vital Center (1949) was a cauldron of such mixed emotions. It was a desperate call to turn liberalism into a realistic fighting faith to counter communist influence and the totalitarian fate of mass society, but its stridency betrayed how deeply Schlesinger and his audience feared that outcome. The Vital Center was Schlesinger's effort to mount a “campaign against social anxiety,” and while many eras have claimed anxieties, as Louis Menand noted, “During the Cold War, there was anxiety about anxiety.”Footnote ¹⁴ Schlesinger's numerous quotations suggest the many voices that made the theory of mass society feel relevant to American anxieties: quotations from the émigré Fromm and the neo-Orthodox Christian moralist Reinhold Niebuhr, from earlier American critics of commercial society (Henry David Thoreau, Albert Brisbane), and especially from the newly authoritative modernist writers (Søren Kierkegaard, Jean Paul Sartre, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, Feodor Dostoievsky).Footnote ¹⁵ Indeed, Schlesinger opened the book with an excerpt from Yeats's “The Second Coming” and echoed it in his title. “Who can live without desperation in a society turned asocial?” Schlesinger asked. “Freedom has lost its foundation in community and become a torment; ‘individualism’ strips the individual of layer after layer of protective tissue. Reduced to panic, industrial man joins the lemming migration, the convulsive mass escape from freedom to totalitarianism … the center cannot hold.” In mass-society theory, the social was a formation of large impersonal structures and weak social bonds—a “society turned asocial” that destroyed not only sociality, but the individuality basic to liberalism itself.Footnote ¹⁶

Expressions of anxiety thus mounted over the forms that totalitarianism was assuming in American society. For many liberals, the diseases of mass society—conformity, political apathy, and a degraded mass culture—became pervasive themes. McCarthyism, in particular, aroused liberal fears of native totalitarian impulses. Historian Richard Hofstadter drew on mass-society theory to link McCarthyism to a theory of “status anxiety.” He began his analysis with Adorno's psychosocial account of the authoritarian personality, and went on to find that the rapidly changing conditions of American society fed the insecurities, “rootlessness,” and infirm “sense of belonging” that destabilized status and fed McCarthyism. If Hofstadter declared himself exempt from “the widespread foreboding among liberals that this form of dissent will grow until it … plunges us into a totalitarian nightmare,” he remained deeply worried and spent the next decade studying the history of American extremist movements.Footnote ¹⁷

The ability to speak to mass-society anxieties made Riesman's The Lonely Crowd the preeminent sociological best seller of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁸ Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism had specifically exempted America from the analysis of mass society but when she read the manuscript of Riesman's The Lonely Crowd, she wrote her friend in “shock” that he had described “a being lost in the world which is similar to the … situation of my mass-man in Europe.” Arendt continued to believe that the ills of mass society were less virulent in the United States, but like her new American contemporaries, she spent the 1950s developing her theory of mass society with modern America very much in view.Footnote ¹⁹

Riesman analyzed American “social character,” a concept he developed from Fromm's psychosocial theory, and placed it ostensibly in a theory of population curves, but actually in a narrative of the transformation of traditional into industrial mass society. He described a shift from an inner-directed character that was shaped by economic production and scarcity and that conformed to the internalized values of parental authority, to an other-directed character that was shaped by economic abundance and consumption and that conformed to the promptings of other people. Following Tocqueville's analysis of American democracy, he declared the latter character type native to America—friendly, shallow, uncertain of one's self or one's values and hence seeking constant social confirmation. “The other-directed character is at once an analysis of the American and of contemporary man,” Riesman said. Indeed Democracy in America achieved its classic status during the 1950s in good part by the pertinence of its analysis of America's atomistic individualism to mass-society theory, for Tocqueville made conformism the central weakness of egalitarian democracy and the subservience of equal, atomized individuals to an “absolute and despotic government” its possible, though not necessary, outcome.Footnote ²⁰

In accord with his theory of social character, Riesman repeatedly warned that both social types were based in conformity—conformity to differently internalized standards at different stages of modernity—but given Riesman's own portrait of the other-directed character, the book was easily read as an indictment of the descent of American society into the ills of mass society. Riesman himself found virtues in the character's political passivity and looked for whatever possibilities mass society offered for individual autonomy. Market choice was an arena in which real freedom was possible, he said, offering immense possibilities for leisure, play, and imagination. Moreover, there were always tensions between individual and social character and between a changing past and current norms that would allow some individuals to become truly autonomous; indeed other-directed society as a whole might evolve in that direction. This conclusion was by design, however, a utopian gesture. Looking back ten years later, Riesman recognized that leisure and play were not the answer but still could not imagine what autonomy in an other-directed society would look like.Footnote ²¹

Riesman, like Hofstadter, declined to take his mass-society analysis of the United States all the way to its totalitarian end. In essays that followed closely on The Lonely Crowd, he declared himself skeptical of the widespread belief among liberal intellectuals that America would move into a totalitarian future: “America's justly criticizable follies and excesses” were not the “systematic and calculated terror of the Soviet Union and the Nazis.” Nonetheless, Riesman's absorption of mass-society theory sharply weakened his commitment to a communal conception of the social. While Schlesinger called for the restoration of social community, the fear of conformity made many liberals suspicious of it, especially in an era highly cognizant of the power of culture. In his essays, Riesman declared that Americans since the start of the twentieth century had wrongly placed their faith in the group rather than in self-interest. They should be urging the cultivation of “individuality” and “private selves,” not “greater social participation and belongingness.” That “individuals … are the creatures of their cultural conditioning” made “conformity with society … a necessity,” he said, not a “duty.” Berating psychologists’ undue emphasis on “adjustment,” Lionel Trilling, too, identified community with conformity, declaring that Americans’ “ideal of community” with its stress on cooperation and integration with the group was too strong. He was glad that Freud posited “a residue of human quality beyond the reach of cultural control,” a quality that Freud identified with biology: “a hard, irreducible, stubborn core of biological urgency, and biological necessity, and biological reason, that culture cannot reach.” The desire of 1950s liberals to strengthen the beleaguered individuals of mass society brought into question the ideal of community and, for some, sidelined the earlier socializing project altogether.Footnote ²²

Mass-society theory's severe diagnosis of the American social world thus made it difficult for liberals either to sustain the diagnosis or to envision social liberal remedies. As a consequence, the mid-century texts that took the mass-society indictment of contemporary modernity most seriously as an accurate description of American society stood on the organicist right and left of liberalism. Both presaged the major attacks on liberalism that would be mounted during the 1960s.

Sociologist Robert Nisbet was among the traditionalists who reenergized American conservatism during the 1950s by drawing on their long-standing fear of the masses. Totalitarianism was born in the unitary, centralized state of early modern Europe, Nisbet argued, its ever-expanding destruction of associational social ties produced the alienated individuals and lonely crowds of contemporary society. Community could only be restored and totalitarianism avoided by new kinds of laissez-faire and decentralization.Footnote ²³

C. Wright Mills's analysis of mass society from the left cast a larger shadow. As a student of Weber's sociology of bureaucracy, Mills drew a picture in White Collar of modern society's “new universe of management and manipulation” that was similar in many ways to Riesman's “other-directed” society, but shorn of any hopeful possibilities. Mills invested his hopes for the future in the rise of a new revolutionary class. His verdict five years later that American society was ruled by an interlocking “power elite” drew on the “complementary” idea of mass society. While a democracy, he argued, was governed by free discussion and public opinion, in a mass society “agents of authorized institutions penetrate this mass, reducing any autonomy it may have in the formation of opinion by discussion.”

If postwar social thought was “haunted” by the theory of mass society, Mills's power elite brought the ghostly presence into the light.Footnote ²⁴

Both critics of mass-society theory like Frankel and Bell and liberal thinkers who were deeply troubled by it like Schlesinger and Riesman struck notes that would be repeated throughout the decade: the theory did not describe modern or American society as a whole and did not forecast an inevitable future, but features of mass society existed in the United States and trailed totalitarian consequences. “Properly incorporated into social science,” the theory of mass society explained the “pathologies” that appeared in American society and the strategies needed to counter them.Footnote ²⁵ Historians have long recognized that postwar social thinkers were engaged in vindicating American society and placed vindication in the context of Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. The deeper context for that vindication was the task of salvaging America's liberal society from the pathologies of mass society and the onset of totalitarianism.

Vindicating American society: the social as system

Postwar liberals looked for supports for the weakened individuals of mass society that would exert control, but avoid totalitarian control. Their reformulation of postwar social thought followed two intersecting and overlapping paths: one—following the scientific imperative to produce theory—looked for systematic supports built by nature or culture into American society; the second—anchored in behavioral science—sought a middle ground for control by positing a society of free individuals and charting their responses to the choices given them by contemporary society and its experts. Both approaches lowered the rational, participatory, and mutualistic demands that earlier liberal thinkers had required of social liberalism. In such compromised forms, it was hoped, the liberal individual would survive in a world threatened by totalitarianism.

The effort to find social supports for mass society's beleaguered individuals appeared in many forms. One major effort focused on culture, the aspect of the social that social thinkers had come to accept as the medium in which the individual was formed. Beginning during the late 1930s and the 1940s, neo-Freudian psychoanalysts, social psychologists, and anthropologists came together to forge studies of culture-and-personality that normalized psychology and culture around a single characterological pattern. In the political context of winning the war and then of totalitarian threat, Ruth Benedict developed singular patterns of “national character” that viewed each national culture as a “personality writ large” and accorded with American loyalties. Margaret Mead became a champion of the genre in her belief that different national cultures were protection against both a levelling universalism and the totalitarian aims of Communist Russia.Footnote ²⁶

In Childhood and Society (1950), Erik Erikson, an émigré from Germany trained in Freudian psychoanalysis and influenced by Mead, showed how culture and biology cooperated to guide individual development, producing individuals who at once were secure in their individual identity and conformed to the norms of their culture. He found that in America's fluid, fast-changing society, unlike the authoritarian societies of fascist Germany and Communist Russia, young people had difficulty achieving that psychosocial goal. The growing influence of Erikson's theory rested in good part on its promise to ease the adjustment by both widening and solidifying middle-class norms.Footnote ²⁷

Constructing social supports for individual autonomy was also the work of the postwar creators of major public multimedia exhibits. As Fred Turner showed, they built a “democratic surround” to prod the individual to exert greater agency. Exhibits were designed to force audiences made passive by the effects of mass media to choose their own path and thus participate in construction of the artistic experience—as expressed by the Committee for National Morale in 1941, “to restore to the individual his belief that HE CAN MAKE CHOICES, HE IS NOT JUST A HELPLESS MUSICAL INSTRUMENT ON WHICH THE PROPAGANDIST PLAYS WHATEVER TUNE HE WISHES.” Under pressure of totalitarianism, the “democratic surround” turned a liberating modernist impulse into a strategy that led citizens “to manage themselves in terms set by the systems within which they lived—and by the experts who developed those systems.”Footnote ²⁸

The construction of systems that supported and contained the weakened individuals of mass society was preeminently the work of postwar social scientists. Recent histories of the social sciences link the systemic view of social phenomena to two factors: social scientists’ growing understanding that science culminated in the construction of theory, preferably in the form of a conceptual system, and social scientists’ experience of a collaborative interdisciplinary style of practice and organization during and after the war. The focus on systems also fulfilled the major ideological requirement of postwar social thought: systems grounded the social world in natural process and rule-based order; they integrated individuals into functional wholes but avoided the imposition of direct control. The requirement that postwar social sciences produce theories—and that those theories construct the social sphere as a system or body of interconnected systems—was a central feature of many of its leading works and lent scientific authority to new areas of social science.Footnote ²⁹

Social systems clearly dwarfed the individuals that composed them. The stability they lent to a precarious postwar world could both counter the anxiety and serve the ambition of the era. It is a mistake, however, to think that social systems necessarily constructed a strong social sphere. Systems analysis resulted in thin representations of the social world that lifted social action out of the social formations and relations of earlier liberal conceptions. Systems were meant to lend strength to the weakened individuals of mass society, but they did so by reducing both sociality and individual autonomy.

That strategy and outcome were at work in the leading social theories of the era, most directly in the study of rational decision making, the field that Hunter Heyck casts as the epitome of postwar social science. The capacity of liberal individuals to make rational decisions took on new urgency amidst totalitarian threats and the atom bomb. Incubated in Cold War think tanks like the Rand Corporation, decision theories regarded ordinary human reason as a useful tool for adaptation, but inadequate to the complexity of the modern world. Instead decision theorists used games, communication, and information to model how rational decisions could be reached within organizations or specified situations. They constructed social systems to compensate for individual incapacity by specifying the framework, rules, and interactions that controlled individuals’ choices. The individual became “a fiction,” a mere nucleus of behaviors that transferred rationality to the social system. At the same time, we should note that the social, too, became a fiction, a network of delimited transactions that robbed the social sphere—and the choices made within it—of social relations.Footnote ³⁰

Economics also moved toward a more rigorous systemic view of the market, changing from a mixed discipline in which there was substantial analysis of institutions into reliance on an abstract microeconomic theory. Mathematical economists formulated a general equilibrium theory of the economy that assumed perfectly competitive markets, and leading economists like Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow worked within that model, though amending it to show that markets would fail in some situations and require government intervention. Both scientific and policy ambitions spurred economists to extend economic logic from the market to the polity. Arrow indicted the ability of either the liberal polity or the market to satisfy all individual preferences, but his assimilation of market and political choices to a common language of “social choice” opened the way for later economists to reverse his judgment and turn the market into the normative social sphere.Footnote ³¹ James M. Buchanan already took that step. Under the name of “public choice,” he and fellow conservative Gordon Tulloch “provided the moral vocabulary for a political economy [in which] property rights were nearly sacrosanct.” Their use of economic logic and conservative values to analyze majoritarian democracy originated as a post-Brown effort to discredit government-mandated desegregation and, with it, governmental regulation of the economy.Footnote ³²

The scientific and political lure of system also affected the social visions produced by disciplines more deeply rooted in contextual and institutional concerns like political science and sociology. Moved by totalitarianism and scientific naturalism, mid-century liberal thinkers largely adopted a relativistic theory of democracy: American democracy was defined as a pluralist system of competing interests; government acted not as the wielder of the public interest, but as the neutral framework for group bargaining. Instead of an active citizenry, pluralism posited organized interest groups and political parties that were controlled by professional political elites who shared an underlying consensus on values and the parameters of policy. Even if individuals could not satisfy the classic requirements for democracy, Bernard Berelson said, “the system of democracy does.” As against mass-society theory and Mills's diagnosis of an American power elite, Robert Dahl concluded, American communities and the nation as a whole remained pluralist democracies.Footnote ³³

Lipset's Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (1960), another sociological best seller, was a revealing example of postwar pluralist analysis. In the now class-divided, bureaucratized American society, Lipset believed, the egalitarian democracy Tocqueville envisioned was dangerous. Fearing that participatory social groups were nurseries of fanaticism and factionalism, particularly among the working class, Lipset favored a pluralism of organized interest groups and professional elite leadership. The postwar political issue, he said, was not inequality but “freedom versus Communism,” so that ideological extremism of the left or right was the evil most to be feared. At the same time he claimed for this new formulation the benefits of social democracy: “The values of socialism and Americanism are similar” (italics in original) and are “institutionalized within America to a greater extent than in other nations.” America was not a fully egalitarian society, but it was struggling to become so, chiefly through belief in equality of opportunity and substantial investment in education. Democracy was “the good society itself in operation” and contemporary American society was its pluralist form.Footnote ³⁴

The most ambitious conception of social system emerged within sociology: Talcott Parson's general theory of the social system. Starting out during the 1930s, Parsons was spurred by scientific ambition and the model of economics to construct a general theory of society. At the same time, however, as Brick has shown, he retained earlier social liberal values. Parsons deliberately based his social system in a voluntaristic theory of individual action that made individuals capable of moral choice. By internalizing cultural norms, however, individuals shaped their behavior in accord with system-wide values and the “normatively structured models of behavior” of their statuses and roles. The social sphere became a formal system of structural-functional categories of social action and the axes around which they varied.Footnote ³⁵

For all its formal character, Parsons’ system reflected the social anxieties and ideals that reshaped the liberal socializing project. A graduate student in Germany during the 1930s, he was well aware of Nazism. But he did not abandon his prewar vision of “solidarity” and of “society as a communal body, and reform as the pursuit of harmony.” Nor did he approve the pessimism that was being spread by mass-society theory. Like his postwar colleagues, he moved from criticizing to praising the “modern liberal-individualistic type” of society and believed that capitalism was already being tamed by the professions’ service-oriented social norms. By the early 1960s he called his total field of integrated statuses, roles, and norms and the layers of cybernetic control within which they operated “the societal community.”Footnote ³⁶

Parsons epitomized the era's drive to imbed individuals in protective, normalizing systems. The high abstraction of his theory, however, limited its reach and attracted few disciples. Most sociologists followed the example of his student Robert Merton, who believed that theory should be “limited and modest in scope, rather than all-embracing and grandiose.” Indeed part of the importance of Parsons's structural-functional social system was the opposition it produced. At the end of the decade Dennis Wrong targeted Parsons in his influential critique of the “oversocialized conception of man” in sociology, and a younger generation of social thinkers rejected Parsons's conception of science and his politics. For them, system-prescribed value integration could no longer pretend to individual agency and social-democratic community.Footnote ³⁷

Vindicating American society: the social as behavior

While leading liberal thinkers worked to vindicate American society within the scientific imperative to produce theory, they worked more extensively within the concurrent scientific obligation to ground theory in objective empirical research. American social science was heir to a still powerful tradition of empiricism that rested science in the objective observation of experience and cast theory as the end product of cumulative empirical research. The behavioral science that rose to prominence during the 1950s included both tasks. The pluralist “system of democracy” was deemed a major discovery of behavioral research as well as an achievement of theory.Footnote ³⁸

Behavioral science was grounded in a positivist commitment to the objective study of behavior, with objectivity based in quantifiable data and behavior defined as the observable actions of individuals responding to stimuli. Unlike the strict behaviorism that ruled mental phenomena out of bounds, behavioralism enlarged the stimulus–response model to include mental reports of individuals’ attitudes and purposes—a method that claimed recognition of individual agency. Still, it was an agency exerted in reaction to external stimuli and knowable only in its external expression. In the great bulk of postwar social research, the study of society was study of the aggregate behavior of individuals, quantitative and statistical in form. Its preferred method was the survey questionnaire and questionnaire studies dealt only with behaviors “reported by or observed of individuals.” The “abstracted empiricism” of behavioral research projected a society not of social structures or dense social relations, but of aggregated individuals who reacted to stimuli within fluid “milieux.”Footnote ³⁹

Behavioral research thus steered political options away from social into individual and psychological channels. When postwar social thinkers turned their attention to combating poverty, their theory and methods focused attention on individual characteristics, so that the causes of poverty became the poor themselves and the culture of poverty that their behavior created, not the structural conditions that shaped behavior. Even when behavioral investigators of racism were conscious of its bases in structural and institutional inequalities, they relied on research that confined analysis and directed intervention to individual attitudes such as prejudice and tolerance and to individual psychological types. In the postwar context, the “authoritarian personality” became the totalitarian personality type that American investigators looked for within American society. A group of social scientists, scientific entrepreneurs, and policy makers proposed an “exemplary self” characterized by a creative and open mind to counter “the closed-minded authoritarian,” but they safely sequestered such open minds in their own interdisciplinary community and in the liberal center of the political spectrum. As with Lipset, Bell and others, social health was linked to psychological health and to the political center, illness to ideologies of the right and left.Footnote ⁴⁰

Paul Lazarsfeld, the preeminent postwar practitioner of empirical social research, is a revealing exemplar of how behavioral social research and fears of mass society worked together to abridge the social. As an active participant in Vienna's socialist movement, he acquired a contextual and structural understanding of society. In the United States, however, his socialist attachments weakened as his scientific identity took root and the individualistic, aggregative character of his scientific method eclipsed more holistic views of the social sphere.Footnote ⁴¹

His model of empirical social research, like survey research generally, centered on the exercise of individual choice. Heyck makes choice a keyword of postwar social science, one central to how reason operated within social systems. It was also central to sociologists’ construction of the social field. In his canonical text, The Language of Social Research (1955), Lazarsfeld declared choice to be the paradigmatic form of common social actions, and consumer choice its simplest and characteristic form. Wherever there are “actions many people perform repeatedly and under somewhat comparable circumstances”—buy food, choose a movie, change residence, have automobile accidents, commit crimes—“all these studies have one central topic in common: What are the factors which account for the choices which people make among a specified number of alternatives?” In studying why one choice is made rather than others, he continued, the conceptual dimensions of “a piece of social reality” should be translated into a set of variables. Variables, too, represented “situations and actions in terms of discrete, logically independent elements, each unaffected by the others.”Footnote ⁴² For postwar social scientists, the study of individuals’ exercise of choice reflected and confirmed the aggregative, behavioral understanding of society and the centrality of consumer choice: society—like the liberal economy—was an aggregation of individuals making constrained choices in an already structured field.

Choice thus expressed the combination of freedom and constraint, confidence and anxiety, that characterized the postwar era's diminished view of modern liberal society. As Sophia Rosenfeld argues, choice became an increasingly common and valued experience for individuals in modern liberal societies as they became able to choose their religious affiliation, political leaders, and an array of material goods, “even as other people and forces always determined the menu of options and defined who gets to pick what and how.”Footnote ⁴³ In postwar social science, the freedom such choices represented carried additional ambiguity. While the term itself invited attribution of free agency, the actual degree of freedom posited by behavioralism was uncertain. Freedom lay within the recesses of individuals who were defined externally by their responses to social stimuli. Behavioralism made individuals weak vessels of liberal society and, as Riesman worried, “creatures of their cultural conditioning.”Footnote ⁴⁴

In other ways too, Lazarsfeld's method and purpose occupied common ground with American social scientists. Both Viennese Austro-Marxism and American empirical social research asked why people made the choices they did in order to guide them toward “correct” choices. Moreover, as an exile from Nazism, Lazarsfeld was as eager to support American democracy as American liberals were, although he generally left it for his collaborators to fight Soviet totalitarianism by valorizing American freedom.Footnote ⁴⁵

One of his most influential books took direct aim at the theory of mass society. Lazarsfeld and his collaborator Elihu Katz studied the choices their subjects made in four areas—consumption, fashion, movies, and political opinion—and found in all of them a “two-step” process of influence that moved first from the media to “influentials” and thence to ordinary people of their acquaintance. The meaning of that finding was clarified and enlarged, the authors said, by social researchers’ exciting contemporary “‘rediscovery’ of the primary group,” a favorite topic of Progressive Era socializers. Such face-to-face groups with their informal relations had not disappeared but were “a factor to be reckoned with in mass society.” Katz soon drew the ideological conclusion: contemporary American society was not “an atomized mass society.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Equally important for our purposes, Lazarsfeld and Katz presented the formation of political opinion as continuous with the choices that individuals made in the market-saturated spheres of consumption, fashion, and entertainment. If America was still a liberal society, they imagined its freedom as comparable to the consumption of individual goods, and the process by which it was exercised as the flow of communications, rather than as participation in the achievement of common ends. Lazarsfeld—unlike many economic architects of neoliberalism—did not entirely collapse the political or social sphere into that of the market. His behavioral model of social action as a kind of consumer choice was nonetheless—like Arrow's language of social choice and Buchanan's language of public choice—one of the key social-scientific moves during the 1950s that eroded the categorical differences between societies, polities, and markets, and opened the way for the economic modelling of the social that took hold during the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ⁴⁷

Social liberalism revived and redirected

When postwar liberals turned away from social-democratic ambitions and vindicated the capitalist economy, America's militarized Cold War state, and the compromised democracy and freedom of American society, they set the stage for the decline of the social during the following decades. In historians’ narratives of liberal social thought, however, the 1960s stands as a barrier to seeing the continuities between the 1950s and the rest of the century. While the 1950s marked a retreat from the more robust social liberalism of earlier years, the 1960s saw a major revival of social liberalism in Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, in multiplying movements for civil rights and equal inclusion in American society, and in the rise of a New Left. That powerful revival, however, need not block sight of the continuing power of totalitarianism and the theory of mass society to abridge liberal conceptions of social democracy.

Until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Soviet Union remained the threatening totalitarian antithesis to American society, the rival to American power and ideas in the outside world and the danger within. The landscape of totalitarian concerns shifted considerably over those years. The intense pessimism created by the rise of totalitarianism lessened by the end of the 1950s but the threat of armed conflict and struggles for allegiance continued as the Cold War extended into Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The concept of totalitarianism itself was refined and challenged by scholars, who found differences and changes within totalitarian regimes that suggested that totalitarianism was not an entirely monolithic and impregnable system of rule. The totalitarian frame of liberal social thought could recede as new versions of liberalism moved to the forefront of debates. Still, it continued to exert formidable ideological force and to set the lines of force along which debate moved.Footnote ⁴⁸

The Great Society's revival of New Deal liberalism and its community of society–nation–government nonetheless marked a major departure from the slippery-slope defensiveness and compromised liberalism of the 1950s. Great Society programs enlarged social provision; attacked deprivation on multiple fronts, most effectively in Medicare and Medicaid; and experimented with strengthening grassroots democratic participation. Great Society liberals also contributed to the second major departure from 1950s liberalism, African Americans’ struggle for civil rights and equal inclusion in society. The struggle had gained only intermittent attention from the New Deal and little sense of urgency from white liberals preoccupied with totalitarianism during the 1950s, but the movement engineered a legal revolution against segregation and during the 1960s mounted an explosive protest campaign to implement political and social equality. Together with Johnson's legislative support, particularly the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the civil rights movement changed the body politic, challenged the white supremacy still imbedded in American society South and North, and inspired movements for equality among other subordinated segments of American society.Footnote ⁴⁹

Those efforts to build a fuller social democracy were a significant discontinuity with the 1950s only in part, however. Great Society programs did not escape liberalism's special categories of deservingness and the community efforts of the War on Poverty were short-lived. Following economists committed to Keynesian fiscal policy and theories of human capital, Great Society policies focused on individual skills and individual opportunity as the remedy for economic inequality. More to the point, the Great Society was itself a product of liberals’ imperial ambitions in the global contest with totalitarianism. As Gary Gerstle argues, Great Society programs were enabled and energized by the new power of the security state and the resources provided by Cold War taxation. A national state of mass taxation, worldwide militancy, security threats, and internal surveillance was not easily rendered as part of a community, especially when it attacked social democracy in the postcolonial and developing world in the name of anti-communism. If federal government support of civil rights legislation was stimulated by the Cold War, it was also held hostage by the “primacy of anticommunism [which] kept discussions of broad-based social change, or a linking of race and class, off the agenda.” Ultimately the Vietnam War—Johnson's obeisance to the task of defending American hegemony in the ongoing conflict with communism—overwhelmed the Great Society and its social-democratic intentions.Footnote ⁵⁰

A third source of social-democratic revival came from a young generation of radical critics who mounted a frontal attack on the anticommunist liberalism of their university teachers and on the academic norms that sequestered ideas from social action. Unlike the Great Society liberals, they were far less afraid of Soviet totalitarianism than of American totalitarianism at home and abroad. Like the theorists who inspired them, C. Wright Mills and Frankfurt school philosopher Herbert Marcuse, they argued that American society was already subject to monolithic social control—a “totalitarian,” “administered society” that was a technological “machine” of indoctrination and manipulation. To the New Left radicals, liberals’ militarism, hostility to postcolonial social movements, vindication of the domestic status quo, and blinkered academic norms were of a piece with totalitarianism—“the system” they wanted to dismantle. The contemporary liberal society portrayed by the “Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society” (1962) was a place where bureaucracy had metastasized, community had withered, and individuals suffered from loneliness, isolation, and political passivity.Footnote ⁵¹

When radical students moved discussion to the left, most Great Society liberals like Schlesinger balked at their “utopian” stance and social and cultural radicalism; they closed ranks around the tough-minded “realism” of Cold War militance, Great Society liberalism, and traditional academic conventions. A few liberal academics like Riesman had seceded from liberal support of the Cold War during the 1950s, however, and a few more joined them in opposition to the arms race and American foreign policy during the 1960s. Some liberals, like sociologist William Kornhauser, supported the young radicals’ actions, and over the next decades the New Left and their perspectives would secure a minority presence in the academy.Footnote ⁵²

The New Left carried forward the antitotalitarian themes of the 1950s not only in its critique of American society, but also in its determination to seek a more authentic existence. The radicals drew out the positive as well as the negative implications of the theory of mass society. Authenticity was the positive value at the core of the modernists’ negative view of mass society; authentic individuals were the opposite of modernity's undifferentiated masses and conformism. Rooted in a person's own intuition of selfhood, authenticity resulted in individuality, the achievement of a unique identity, and was expressed in all one's social relations. As the highest value of the romantic–modernist tradition and imbedded in the utopian humanism of Frankfurt school theorists, the authentic self was, in its modernist forms, fractured, changing, and at odds with the deranged culture of modern mass society; still, it carried with it intimations of a self, culture, and society in harmony.Footnote ⁵³

As Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen tells us, authenticity was already a major concern of the 1950s. In Erikson's psychosocial analysis, the achievement of a secure identity was both the work of culture and the mark of individual authenticity: for the individual who achieves “ego integrity … the style of integrity developed by his culture or civilization … becomes the ‘patrimony of his soul,’ the seal of his moral paternity of himself.” The 1950s produced a flowering of psychologies of selfhood, from Freudian analyses of the pathologies that deformed selfhood to more optimistic neo-Freudian psychologies like Erikson's, to a range of humanistic psychologies that asserted that “self-actualization” was within the power of individuals generally in democratic American society. At the end of the 1950s, the desire for authenticity and the perception of American tyranny gained ground together. Mills considered “the ideal of individuality” to be in “the very nature of man,” and the antiauthoritarian, anticonformist thrust of the desire for authenticity produced countercultural revolt, as in Norman Mailer's “hipster” who defied the “totalitarian tissues” of American society.Footnote ⁵⁴

For the New Left, the social they envisioned was figured as participatory democracy—an extension of social democracy in the tradition of Dewey, but in equal measure, an effort to dismantle “the system” and build individual authenticity into all of society's social and political relations. “The goal of man and society should be human independence … a concern … with finding a meaning in life that is personally authentic,” they said. “This kind of independence does not mean egoistic individualism—the object is not to have one's way so much as it is to have a way that is one's own.” Participating in struggles for African American equality and empowerment of the poor, the radicals struggled themselves to act both authentically and in concert.Footnote ⁵⁵

The liberatory individualism of romantic and modernist critics of mass society continued to grow in importance during the 1960s and the decades that followed, for it also played a major role in social-democratic energies during the 1960s. The civil rights struggle and the multiplying movements for equality it inspired sought not only equal rights and membership in an egalitarian society but also the more nonconformist and liberatory goal of authenticity. As a substantial portion of social liberal energies moved into issues of individual rights and social inclusion, the drive for authenticity directed those energies toward the recognition of differences. The liberal right of individuals to be free began to center on the right of individuals—and the groups whose identities they shared—to be different. Individuals became increasingly valued for the possession of a unique identity, and social affiliation valued for cementing group identity.

The problem of identity had long occupied African American writers and activists and was renewed by the civil rights movement and by the rising stature of modernizing postcolonial nations in Africa and Asia. Inclusion in an American culture steeped in racism and an African American culture that even black writers assumed to be damaged by exile and oppression created central and divisive issues for African American intellectuals. Modernist writer Ralph Ellison rejected the categories of identity offered to African Americans by the communities of white Americanism, black race consciousness, and communist universalism: to be human was to understand the world and American society through “my own eyes,” he said, to know oneself as, and to be recognized as, an individual. Ellison continued to believe that resources were available in white and black cultures for the construction of individuality. James Baldwin was determined to establish his identity as an American, despite the cruelty and shallowness of white American culture: “the black man [is] an American, as American as the Americans who despise him.” Yet he early decamped to Paris and after 1970 lived there in cosmopolitan exile. When the civil rights movement fractured during the mid-1960s, many black activists and intellectuals looked to postcolonial societies of color. Malcolm X, abandoning black nationalism, argued that black Americans’ only secure identity lay in joining the worldwide Muslim or pan-African community. Still others, like scholar Sterling Stuckey, searched for African roots in which to ground an authentic African American culture.Footnote ⁵⁶

For women's rights advocates too, inclusion demanded equal rights and authentic identity. In 1963 Betty Friedan put together her prewar trades union advocacy of equal rights for women and the psychologies of self-actualization she studied in graduate school during the 1950s to attack the “feminine mystique.” Her attack was continuous with the 1950s critique of mass culture, for its insidious effects were likened to those of the conformity and loss of self that were produced by mass society. Her central template for the “problem that has no name” was the identity crisis that Erikson had defined for men, and her conception of authenticity, like his, only partially challenged the limits of her culture: she too believed that what self-realization required was integration into the role structure and cultural projects her society offered. At the end of the 1960s, women activists on the left called for “consciousness raising,” deepening the examination of oppression imbedded in American culture and letting loose a wide-ranging search for authenticity that problematized the category of woman by confronting divisions within it of race, class, and sexual orientation and challenging conventional moralities.Footnote ⁵⁷ Gay men and women were already involved in those efforts. Given the 1950s’ “acute sense of the fragility of the modern self,” the sense of an “American manhood weakened by the forces of a mass society,” homophobia intensified during the 1950s. Responding to a wave of job discrimination by the federal government and to local violence, gay activists began to mount open protests and organize for equal rights. By 1970 what John D'Emilio called the “liberation impulse” was convincing activists that “one could remake oneself, that the quest for authenticity and fulfillment in a corrupt society was attainable.” Here too, the quest for authenticity increasingly produced multiplying divisions, identities, and communities.Footnote ⁵⁸

During the 1970s and 1980s, authenticity was both challenged and strengthened by another radicalization of mass-society theory. For those who followed out the theoretical implications of postmodernism, the monolithic power embodied in totalitarianism was already imbedded in modern society. As John McGowan writes, the vision of “a monolithic world in which everything is subsumed under a universal principle” first appeared in conceptions of totalitarianism, was echoed in the vision of modern society's “iron cage” and “administered society,” and echoed again in postmodern thinkers’ monolithic vision of a world increasingly dominated by an “all-encompassing capitalism.” Whether in the form of capitalism, patriarchy, Western metaphysics, or disciplinary power, the threat for postmodern thinkers was a “dystopic totality” and the hope was to find a way of “preserving pluralism (difference).”

Postmodernists’ antifoundationalist epistemology, however, problematized as it accentuated differences. The primacy of language allowed the transfer of monolithic power from institutional structures to linguistic codes and scripts or to historically formed cultural constructions of control. For postmodern critics, modern society's categories of Woman or Heterosexuality or Race were constructed by language, not representations of reality—they were totalizing efforts to discipline the unruly reality of differences. By that logic, the modernist search for an authentic self was an outmoded essentialist effort to find a fixed reality that did not exist. The denial of foundations nonetheless opened the way for the construction of more fluid experiential categories of selfhood, so that both authenticity and its denial encouraged the multiplication of identities. A national social community was overshadowed by the necessity for continuing critique, its commonalities defined as intersections between oppressed groups, and its unity more difficult to discern.Footnote ⁵⁹

As postmodern critics ond committed scholars of black studies, women's studies and LGBTQ studies brought their intellectual concerns and radical cultural values into the academy, new divisions among liberals opened on the right. By the mid-1960s, Trilling argued that a dangerous modernist adversary culture had become entrenched in the universities and a sizable portion of the middle class. By the mid-1970s, Bell believed that these adversarial values had produced an “unyielding rage” against rationality, morality, and the limits of existence, ushering in a new stage of Western history and a new “postmodern mood.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Cold War liberals like journalist Irving Kristol who shared Bell's analysis of contemporary moral decay became “neoconservatives.” Conservative intellectuals, who had been marginalized and of little concern to liberals during the 1950s, also gained a more powerful voice. Upholders of traditionalist and hierarchical values and libertarian supporters of negative liberty in the economy found widening audiences and financial support. Despite contradictory principles, they formed a conservative intellectual movement around their shared anticommunism that grew in tandem with conservative politics.Footnote ⁶¹

The growing political strength of conservatism was itself a major factor in weakening conceptions of the social. By the end of the 1960s, the consequential political and intellectual moves to the left were producing a consequential countermove to the right that changed the play of political forces. In national politics the movement for African American civil rights and its continued federal enforcement set off a conservative backlash. As the federal government and courts imposed national rules for civil rights in areas like race relations, school prayer, and sexual behavior, the combination of racism and cultural reaction spiraled into “culture wars” that pitted traditionalist and largely public voices on the right against academic and political defenders of a secular, culturally liberal, and diversely identitarian society. The Republican Party absorbed the backlash and steered it into the party's conservative economic policies and Cold War agenda to elect Richard Nixon in 1968.Footnote ⁶² By 1980, the party had moved further to the right, electing Ronald Reagan, a free-market cold warrior committed to rolling back the social liberal state and its egalitarian social and cultural revolutions. Liberals in politics largely moved with the tide and ceased to defend the liberal name. By the mid-1990s, as economic inequality continued to grow, ascendant New Democrats abridged the core national responsibility for social welfare, vowed a retreat from “big government,” and promoted individualistic market values and free-market globalism.Footnote ⁶³

The political resurgence of social liberalism during the 1960s did not last, for it provoked a political and intellectual resurgence of conservatism and the fragmentation of liberal politics and social thought. Conceptions of a mutualistic social would have to survive against a background of retreat in social liberal politics.

Rethinking liberalism and the social

Facing increasing opposition in politics, buffeted within the academy by energized voices on the left and right, and divided within their own ranks, liberal intellectuals of all kinds moved to narrower ground to rethink and defend their basic premises. The liberalisms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had retained their classical identity in political theory, even as American social thought and politics had relegated their antistatist forms to the ranks of conservatism. With totalitarianism now constructed as America's Other, liberal theory revived and reanchored society in liberalism's foundational political individualism, and recast conceptions of the social to fit within that narrowed space.

Judith Shklar had been too discouraged by the pessimism of mass-society theorists to rethink liberalism in 1957, but she recovered enough by 1964 to reformulate liberalism on classically individualistic grounds. She advocated a “barebones liberalism which, having abandoned the theory of progress and every specific scheme of economics, is committed only to the belief that tolerance is a primary virtue and that a diversity of opinions and habits is … to be cherished and encouraged.” Shklar's effort to escape the ideological baggage of economic principles and a narrative of progress forecast the narrower political and social terrain much liberal theory would occupy. Her vision of a liberal society that encouraged differences was an effort to maximize freedom and tolerance so as to “avoid the kinds of misery that organized repression now brings.” Pluralism was a “social actuality” of contemporary society and “something that any liberal should rejoice in and seek to promote.” Shklar thus looked back to the core liberal task of preventing governmental “repression” and forward to the diversity that would increasingly occupy social liberals, while bracketing issues of social welfare.Footnote ⁶⁴

The preeminent defense of social liberalism was John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971). Rawls returned to classical liberalism's moment of original consent and reimagined it as a moment in which individuals would choose society's principles of justice and distributional fairness while still ignorant of what place in society they would hold. They would, Rawls argued, opt for something like a modern welfare state, one that distributed social and economic advantages unequally, but “only if they result in compensating benefits for everyone, and in particular, for the least advantaged members of society.” His imagined contractors chose distributional rules based on calculations of their own advantage, however, not mutual responsibility. Community emerged from the satisfactions each player felt in a “good play of the game,” in which all cooperated by following the rules. As Rodgers argued, Rawls “built the case for a more equal society on the most individualistic and economistic of premises.”Footnote ⁶⁵

As Katrina Forrester shows, however, the basic structure of Rawls's philosophy and its basic task of justifying some degree of social equality on purely liberal grounds were forged during the 1950s in response to the totalitarian threat. Rawls incorporated both the antistatist principles of postwar liberalism and the concern for social justice he absorbed from his Episcopalian heritage and contact with British social democracy. Argued on a high level of abstraction, his theory embraced rather than resolved the tensions between the two poles of social liberalism, so that it became the baseline for both individualistic and socially oriented theorists. Forrester finds that the structure of Rawls's philosophy dominated political philosophy through the end of the century, absorbing and limiting the conceptualization of other concerns that emerged in philosophy and politics. Although she emphasizes the disciplinary and academic pressures that maintained the basic structure of Rawls's theory through the 1980s, the totalitarian threat that set Rawls's defensive political parameters during the 1950s remained in force as well. It is no accident that, as Forrester noted, the dominance of Rawls's theory prevented a fuller engagement with socialism.Footnote ⁶⁶

Those parameters are particularly visible in the more mutualistic social conceptions that made a comeback during the 1970s and 1980s. The New Left concern for participatory democracy, along with the liberatory desire for individual and communal authenticity, shaped a considerable portion of left-liberal social thought in sociology, political science, history, and anthropology. Methodological historicism had remained to varying degrees in these disciplines during the 1950s and it gained new epistemological authority with the antifoundationalist turns to culture and language. Under the aegis of historicism, scholars critiqued the postwar emphasis on scientific rigor and argued that social and political reflection must be grounded in disciplined ethical perspectives and actual historical worlds. By that standard, Rawls's stripped-down social contractors could not generate an adequate model of liberalism. Scholars examined philosophies like civic humanism and forms of association like civil society, class, and ethnicity, searching out the communal and participatory possibilities of other social forms. Communitarianism emerged in the 1970s and 1980s to argue for the social–ethical basis of political community without falling into “intolerance and semi- or fully totalitarian regimes.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Michael Walzer composed a pluralist communitarian answer to Rawls's just society by starting with the “particular world that we have made,” its national compact designed and redesigned in the ongoing public choices and activities of citizens. Walzer found egalitarian conceptions threaded through the American social fabric that “tend steadily to proscribe the use of things for the purposes of domination,” conceptions that grounded the compact in liberal freedom, but also suggested a more egalitarian and participatory ideal of “complex equality.” Walzer's polity allowed individuals to share activities and achieve a variety of social goods within different, limited, social spheres (national politics, local politics, work, education, etc). Within each sphere, individuals participated in setting the rules by which its distinctive goods were distributed, forming a kind of “decentralized democratic socialism.” Complex equality was designed as “the opposite of totalitarianism: maximum differentiation as against maximum coordination,” hence an answer to “the most terrifying experiences of the twentieth century.” Walzer declared the concept of totalitarianism an “ideal type” rather than an accurate description of actual societies, but it still framed his discussion. Careful to stay within the limits of liberal freedom and equality, he shied away from proposing direct efforts “to build a stronger and more intensely experienced community,” relying instead on a growing experience of complex equality itself to call forth stronger feelings of mutuality. Yet his own analyses of the actual individualistic, sharply divided, and inegalitarian American society suggested that without such effort, the move to a more egalitarian and participatory society would not occur.Footnote ⁶⁸ Like the other analyses of social, cultural, and governmental forms that might create a more ideal social democracy, the communitarian social was still on the defensive, still limited by its ability to conjure up the nightmare of totalitarianism.

Many other liberals in the social disciplines, particularly in economics and law, abandoned the mutualistic social altogether for liberal individualism and the economists’ model of the capitalist market as a system for fairly coordinating voluntary individual choices. As Ciepley argued, the majority of postwar liberal theorists, believing that values were not subject to rational proof, took diverse individual choices as their starting point and moved toward proceduralist and neutralist views of the liberal state.Footnote ⁶⁹

The use of economic logic to model liberal society proved to be a particularly effective solvent of a mutualistic social during the postwar decades. While the national economy as a whole was understood to have its own rules, as in Simon Kuznets's national income studies and Paul Samuelson's macroeconomics, microeconomic theory increasingly dominated the discipline. As we have seen, the individualistic premises of liberal political and economic theory and the practice of simplifying abstraction had already led Lazarsfeld and Arrow to conceive of society like the market, as a transactional realm of constrained individual choices. During the 1950s, a consensus began to form in the economics discipline around a mathematically grounded general equilibrium theory that assumed rational actors and perfect competition, leading social liberal economists like Samuelson and Arrow to explain non-conforming instances of economic reality as exceptions to the general rule. During the 1960s and 1970s, the pursuit of scientific rigor achieved strong paradigmatic consensus around the ideal assumptions of the general-equilibrium model, and nonconforming instances increasingly fell away. The ability that the paradigm gave economists to take simplified models of market logic into analysis of economic policy and other social-scientific, legal, and policy domains solidified its dominance and extended economists’ authority over large areas of liberal social thought.Footnote ⁷⁰

Meanwhile, an ideological free-market bias against the social liberal agenda had already established a beachhead in economics. Framing the choice as “freedom or totalitarian collectivism,” a group of conservative and retreating liberal thinkers led by Walter Lippmann and Friedrich Hayek launched a movement during the 1930s to limit government power over market economies. Warning that gradual moves to governmental regulation “led inevitably toward a dictatorial state,” they found early support in the United States, most influentially from economist Milton Friedman and colleagues at the University of Chicago. The influence of Hayek and a doctorate from Chicago—as well as the desire to roll back federal actions on race—shaped Buchanan's analysis of democratic government as an inefficient market of power seekers. As politics moved to the right, the discipline's paradigmatic bias against government interference in the economy converged with conservatives’ free-market politics.Footnote ⁷¹

The economists’ fusion of science and conservative ideology gave substantial intellectual legitimation to the conservative intellectual movement and conservative politics, and they in turn furthered economists’ influence over government policy. In that context, mainstream economics and government policies expanded “free markets” into support of global free trade and the free flow of capital, enforced by the hegemonic power the United States. With the global expansion of capitalism and its market mentality, neoliberalism developed around the image of a free-market world as the approaching liberal goal. With the fall of America's totalitarian Other, the American model of market society donned the mantel of individual freedom and vaulted into that ideal neoliberal space, a space already prepared for it by the providential underpinnings of the ideology of American exceptionalism.Footnote ⁷²

Francis Fukuyama mapped that sometimes neoliberal, sometimes neoconservative terrain when he announced “The End of History” in 1989. He did not use the term, but his analysis of Nazi Germany and Communist Russia as the two great challenges to liberalism in the twentieth century—now defeated—reflected the previous half-century of American discussion of totalitarianism. Nazism and Soviet Communism were alike in being ideologically driven attempts to achieve the culminating, utopian form of world history. Fukuyama referenced Hegelian philosophy rather than the theory of mass society, but his culminating vision of modernity was a “universal homogenous state” constituted by capitalism, not Spirit—a combination of “liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic.” This monolithic endpoint of history was first realized in America's market-based liberalism and already spreading around the world. In time, he said, politics would wither and only economic activity remain. Even Fukuyama expressed a brief qualm. A “universal homogenous state” dominated by capitalism, the monolithic dystopia of postwar social radicals had become the neoconservatives’ monolithic utopia—a measure of how thoroughly totalitarianism had continued to dominate the social imagination of the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁷³

Neoliberalism was also a measure of the weakness of liberal defenses of social democracy during the long 1950s and succeeding decades. Social liberalism formed around the recognition that in the modern world, liberal freedom and community could be achieved only if the weight of mutual social obligation and the democratic state were jointly brought to bear on the economic interests and social conflicts of an individualistic, capitalist society. For liberal politicians and social thinkers in the United States, however, totalitarianism and the theory of mass society kept holistic conceptions of the social and exertions of state power on Hayek's “road to serfdom.” Liberals remained determined to vindicate American society, believing that capitalist economic growth and the weak social liberal state would progressively create social democracy in the United States. Anxious to protect individual liberty, they placed increasing weight on the liberty of individuals and groups to be different rather than on the liberty conferred by equal membership in an egalitarian social democracy. When the 1960s revival of social liberalism was halted, they were thus ill-prepared to resume the liberal socializing project or to refute economists when they asserted that the market could be better trusted than government to produce the maximum possible social welfare.

As a consequence, many liberals were slow to respond to the declining economic security of the working class and its growing political alienation during the late 1970s and 1980s and failed to appreciate the depth of the unsolved problems of social inclusion. The civil rights movement succeeded in enlisting liberal support for the formal extension of basic rights. In the academy, studies of race, gender and sexuality made substantial gains before the end of the century and launched an educational process that began to change the attitudes of a generation of scholars and students. Still, even liberal whites North and South, within and outside the academy, proved willing to live with the entrenched and institutional racism that continued to subordinate African Americans and other people of color. An ethic of mutual social responsibility could not take hold when the common membership and common identity granted by formal decree was denied in practice. America's weak social state could not be strengthened without acceptance of an inclusive national community, nor could a more mutualistic society be forged without government creating greater social security for all its members.

Some portion of that failure can be attributed to the social situation of the intellectuals who formulated liberal social thought. Based in universities and part of an expanding sector of trained knowledge workers and professionals, liberal social thinkers were now members of an intellectual class that was dependent on substantial economic supports and exerted considerable social power. Attributing their elite status to merit, they largely failed to see that their standards of merit inscribed the racial, gendered, and economic inequalities of society. The cultural and political backlash of the reactionary right and the culture wars it bred thus deepened a process begun during the McCarthyite 1950s: it strengthened the alliance of liberal intellectuals with other educated elites and widened their distance from the populist demos. At that distance, racist and nativist resentments were more visible than the structural disadvantages that produced them, and sympathy for how inequalities shaped values and choices more difficult to muster.Footnote ⁷⁴

The view from 2020

We in the twenty-first century are in a different world from the one discussed in this paper, yet the previous century still echoes. With the collapse of communist totalitarianism and the end of a bipolar world, totalitarianism no longer carries the ideological power of previous years, but its themes remain vital subjects of discussion as separable problems rather than an indivisible totality. Authoritarianism, centrally controlled economies, and techniques of mass persuasion are discussed independently rather than put together into a single package. Mass society, too, no longer conjures up a totalitarian future; in its place are the complex problems of niche markets, social media, privacy, and fake news. The dangerous demagoguery of a Donald Trump would have been instantly recognized by mid-century theorists of mass society, but so too by the founding architects of the American republic.Footnote ⁷⁵

While the vision of a monolithic totalitarianism and its reverse image of neoliberal globalization may have shattered, the state capitalisms, failed states, mass migrations, nationalist nativism, and global climate change that have replaced them raise new alarms. Economic inequality and racism now command attention, for they were never adequately addressed by twentieth-century social liberals and have only grown more serious. The antagonisms they create have coalesced with the warring political, social, and cultural divisions that took root during the 1960s and 1970s and now divide the country into two, virtually tribal, identities. Liberals today, like Barack Obama, a social liberal intellectual who thought deeply about authentic identity, defend the values and practices of social liberalism with a shorthand assertion of “who we are,” or most often “This is not who we are”—a recognition of our deep investment in authentic identity. But the phrase is also a recognition of the depth of our divisions, an effort to call forth a common American “we” without explicitly stating values and explaining principles.

We Americans thus face a future of unprecedented global challenges with a much weakened sense of social solidarity and mutual responsibility. Yet there are enough indications of a rising social and political consciousness to give us reason to believe that a mutualistic social ethic is by no means gone in society or social thought. At an earlier moment of crisis, the moment that produced the fact and concept of totalitarianism, Karl Polanyi argued that since the Industrial Revolution, capitalism and its train of consequences had been destroying the social tissues of modern societies, but that pushed to the wall, society would rise up, recapture the political initiative, and reassert its inherent egalitarian and inclusive values.Footnote ⁷⁶ American social liberals largely, if imperfectly, rose to that challenge during the 1930s and World War II, but during the 1950s they retreated and in crucial respects continued to retreat during the decades that followed. We who follow them now have another chance.