Intellectual historians have been aware for some time that public and academic thought about society had changed dramatically in the United States by the end of the twentieth century. When William Sewell asked in 2001, “Whatever Happened to the ‘Social’ in Social History?” he was articulating a wider sense that since the 1970s, the social structures, institutions, and relations that had defined society for social thinkers since the nineteenth century had been receding in importance and looser, less substantial conceptions of the social fabric were taking their place, what Sewell called a “thinning of the social.” While the social sphere is an analytical category that allows a wide range of reference, a number of recent studies have echoed Sewell's question and have converged around a linked set of problems, notably Howard Brick's Transcending Capitalism and Daniel Rodgers's Age of Fracture.Footnote 1
What prompted the question of what happened to the social for all three authors was a fundamentally political concern. Sewell's focus was the social sphere portrayed by the new social history of the 1960s “from the bottom up,” a sphere of powerful social structures and relations within which the classes and conflicts of industrial society had formed. By the late 1970s, historians’ cultural and linguistic “turns” had changed social formations into interpretive practices and transferred historians’ attention “from the poor and powerless” to those who left written records, “those more favored.”Footnote 2 A few years later, and from a different point on the democratic left, Brick saw a longer rise and decline of thinking about the social sphere: beginning in the 1920s, an optimistic “postcapitalist” narrative on the “near-left” depicted capitalism becoming “more organized, more social, more service oriented, and probably more egalitarian” but then succumbed during the 1970s to neoliberalism.Footnote 3 “The social” that Sewell and Brick addressed was a normative conception of the social sphere; at stake in the question they asked was a mutualistic, social-democratic conception of society that had decisively weakened since the 1970s. Rodgers's synthetic account of “thinning” conceptions of the social covered a larger canvas of public and academic thinkers and a wider political spectrum of social thought, but the weakening norms of social democracy—“a sense of mutual obligation of each to all,” the “moral community of the nation”—appeared as the heart of what was at stake for Rodgers as well.Footnote 4
In this article and another that follows, I will answer the question of what happened to the social by placing the social within the chief political project that gave it salience for American liberal thinkers during the twentieth century: the effort to socialize American liberalism to meet the challenges of modern industrial society. Brick's postcapitalist narrative was one strand in an older and wider stream of social liberalism that began with American progressivism in the 1880s and 1890s and took shape under the impress of a progressive historical consciousness and adaptation of mutualistic social principles.Footnote 5
In that longer and wider context, the decline of the social began not in the 1970s but in the 1950s. All three authors—and a great deal of contemporary historiography—make the 1970s the pivotal decade of change for conceptions of society. In Rodgers's words,
conceptions of human nature that in the post-World War II era had been thick with context, social circumstance, institutions, and history gave way to conceptions of human nature that stressed choice, agency, performance, and desire. Strong metaphors of society were supplanted by weaker ones. Imagined collectivities shrank; notions of structure and power thinned out. Viewed by its acts of mind, the last quarter of the century was an era of disaggregation, a great age of fracture.Footnote 6
Rodgers's portrait of the 1970s as the divide between a postwar era of “strong metaphors of society” and an end-of-century “era of disaggregation” is compelling in many respects, but also misleading.
Metaphors such as strong or weak, thick or thin, depend on the frame of reference. Rodgers, like Sewell, is focused on industrial society's strong constraining and consolidating structures. American liberals’ narratives of the social sphere, however, included not only structural themes developed by Karl Marx and Max Weber but also views of social relations advanced by Ferdinand Tönnies, Émile Durkheim, American progressives, and modernist critics of society and culture. In contrast to the moral and affective bonds that earlier characterized local and associational social formations, modern society's structures were understood to carry with them impersonal, diminished social ties. If the social sphere's corporate and bureaucratic structures invited metaphors of thickness and strength, its attenuated social relations invited metaphors of thinness and weakness. Moreover, Rodgers joins to the strong and thick side of the ledger at mid-century the large and “the aggregate aspects of human life as opposed to its smaller, fluid, individual ones.” Aggregates can be large but they are loose collections of individuals. The form of society projected by a great deal of postwar social thought and that dominated postwar social research was precisely one of aggregated individuals who reacted to stimuli within fluid social environments.Footnote 7
Equally important, in the course of locating the line of fracture in the 1970s, Rodgers makes the 1950s into its opposite—an era of “strong metaphors of society” and thick context. The 1950s was certainly a period when many liberal intellectuals portrayed a society of large and consolidated structures. When compared to previous conceptions of the social sphere, however, as a standard and expanding historiography shows, postwar conceptions were marked by the erosion of context, attenuated conceptions of social bonds, and fundamental interest in individual selves, their psychology, their agency, and market-oriented choices.Footnote 8 By expanding the context to the full twentieth century, we can see that the long 1950s—the mid-century years between roughly 1947 and 1963—marked a consequential turning point, one that moved social thought away from earlier, more holistic conceptions of the social.Footnote 9
It is a truism of historical study that the answer to “when?” leads to the answer to “why?” In this essay I will show that liberals produced communal and mutualistic conceptions of the social early in the century and the strongest conceptions of national community during the 1930s and World War II, but retreated from those conceptions during the long 1950s as the balance in liberal thought shifted from strengthening the social to strengthening the individual. A number of intellectual factors fed into that shift—chiefly the rise of modernist sensibilities and of scientism—but the catalyst that brought them together was American intellectuals’ encounter with totalitarianism, an encounter already well developed in historiography but often not fully addressed. Postwar thinkers were profoundly troubled by the vision of monolithic power presented by totalitarianism and the theory of mass society that explained it. Modern mass society, they believed, was crippling the self-acting individuals at the core of liberalism, turning society into a mass of rootless, isolated individuals ripe for totalitarianism. It was through the lens of totalitarianism and mass-society theory that many postwar social thinkers redirected their concern to the endangered individual and weakened their commitment to social democracy.
In a second article I will show how postwar thinkers—in an effort to vindicate American liberal society—countered mass-society claims and reworked their understandings of American society to both incorporate and nullify the mass-society threat. They constructed social systems and behavioral theories that transferred faith from social democracy to abstract social systems, the market, and elites, yet claimed the virtues of social democracy. Social liberalism revived during the 1960s among Great Society liberals, in movements for civil rights and social inclusion, and in radical calls for participatory democracy. The totalitarian frame of social thought and fears of mass society remained in place, however, and continued to put robust conceptions of the social on the defensive and to turn attention to individual and market freedoms.
I am not alone in suggesting that totalitarianism played the major role in reshaping liberal social thought at mid-century. Wilfred M. McClay in 1994 linked totalitarianism and mass-society theory and argued that they produced “an invigorated commitment to the protection of the endangered self against the depredations of society” and a fundamental shift from prewar social thought that carried over into the 1960s. Although Benjamin L. Alpers in 2003 examined totalitarianism as part of a conversation about dictatorship that began in the 1930s and concluded in the 1950s, his analysis included the concern among intellectuals with mass society and with “the problem of the individual in modernity.” Jonathan Bell in 2004 and David Ciepley in 2006 most fully analyzed how totalitarianism reoriented American liberalism away from a more socially oriented political tradition to a liberalism defined by freedom, but entirely omitted the theory of mass society. Ciepley traced a long arc from a “sociological” tradition of “virtue progressivism” to a liberalism defined primarily by freedom, while Bell focused on the shift in ideology and politics during the 1940s and 1950s. My own account of the crucial role played by totalitarianism and the theory of mass society it spawned will build on that historiography and carry the analysis to the end of the century.Footnote 10
That late-century shift is often linked by historians to the short-term, fluid, and global processes of a new economic reality. While that may partly be the case, historians need to look more widely than the economic causation and market metaphors now prominent in neoliberal ideology. Clarifying his own position in a recent symposium on Fracture, Rodgers argues—and I agree—that ideas and reality influence each other in multiple, historically contingent, and sometimes contradictory ways. Rodgers's emphasis, like Sewell's, nonetheless remains on the causal power of social–economic structures during the Fordist era and the “massive shifts in the global economy” since the 1970s.Footnote 11 In this article I argue that a crucial factor in the decline of the social lies in the exigent political reality for liberal thinkers from the end of World War II to the end of the Soviet Union. The joint specter of monolithic power and mass society presented by totalitarianism produced retreat from earlier narratives of progress and social democracy and decisively changed the direction of liberal social thought.
My subjects will be chiefly American liberal writers and theorists of society, like John Dewey and Judith Shklar, who articulated ideologically salient and historically consequential positions in the formation and transformation of social liberalism over the twentieth century. They were centered in the social-science disciplines, but included cultural critics and writers like Lionel Trilling and Ralph Ellison with roots in other humanistic fields. Mostly based in major research universities, sometimes participants in government or reform politics, with access to public as well as disciplinary journals and publishers, their ideas about social liberalism commanded some authority within and outside the academy. Given the changing ideological and geographic borders of American liberalism through the century, a fair number of them moved at different times into and out of American liberal spaces like Herbert Hoover, Daniel Bell, and émigrés to the American discussion like Theodor Adorno and Erik Erikson. I include as well a number of interlocutors to the left and right of postwar liberalism like C. Wright Mills and Robert Nisbet who set important benchmarks for the liberal discussion of the social and its transformation. Finally, while fear of totalitarianism and recognition of the mass character of the postwar world were widespread in social thought, those concerns were not always foremost in liberal thinking about society and did not always coalesce around mass-society theory. I will thus note a number of postwar thinkers like Walt Rostow who mark out the limits of liberal intellectuals’ encounter with totalitarianism.
Socializing liberalism
During much of the nineteenth century, Anglo-American liberals believed that societies organized on the principles of individual autonomy, the capitalist market, and democracy would produce social harmony and continuing progress. Many liberals like Herbert Spencer relied primarily on the market's exchange relations and the functional interdependence it produced to create a spirit of harmony and cooperation. American thinkers also drew on the original meaning of the social as a sphere of interpersonal sociability, appropriate conduct, and morality. Anchored by the home and moving out to society's churches, schools, and voluntary associations, the social was a realm in which morality and a cooperative spirit were cultivated. The social's familial and communal ties of mutual responsibility were also believed to infuse the collective identities of Christian allegiance, republican citizenship, and nationality.Footnote 12 Still, the self-interest that liberals assigned to market behavior and the self-reliance and equality that they posited of rights-bearing individuals made the idea of a national community problematic. Racial and gender hierarchies sharply limited the reach of social inclusion. Given the dominant cultural norms of masculinity and Anglo-Saxon racialism, the mutualistic values of the social were easily linked to middle-class white women and their circumscribed social sphere, less easily associated with the society as a whole.Footnote 13
By the end of the century, however, the modern industrial economy, urban concentration, and new networks of interdependence reshaped virtually all institutions and relationships. Americans, accustomed to think their country was on a fixed Providential course, exempt from the problems of European history, began to recognize—as economist E. R. A. Seligman put it—that “we have been largely living in a fool's paradise.” America was now a modern industrial society like others and hence subject to the disruptive historical forces already at work in Europe. Indeed, the changing social sphere quickly took on contrasting normative implications. With focus trained on an industrial economy characterized by concentrated power, harsh competitive demands, an expanding proletariat, and diverse racial and immigrant populations, the social became the era's composite “social problem” of poverty, class conflict, and disorganization.Footnote 14 At the same time, however, the social sphere continued to carry earlier communal connotations. Although, as Raymond Williams remarked, social never achieved the “warmly persuasive” power of community, it did carry some of its cooperative and mutualistic meanings. In that context, “Social [became] an emphatic and distinguishing term, explicitly contrasted with individual and especially individualist theories of society,” so that socialism defined conceptions of society organized on principles of cooperation and mutual responsibility.Footnote 15
By the end of the nineteenth century, many liberal thinkers came to believe that the liberal narrative of progress could no longer sustain the promise of both individual freedom and social harmony. “Progressives” continued to believe in the engines of liberal progress—capitalism, democracy, and science—but they took seriously a newer narrative of the rise of modern society in which the traditional face-to-face social bonds that had regulated individual behavior and moderated social conflicts were being shattered by industrialism. The conflict and disorganization that resulted were a temporary phase and correctable, progressives believed, and they turned to the communal and mutualistic character of the social sphere for new conceptual and ethical horizons. The heightened condition of interdependence itself, the labor and agrarian protests already roiling American society, and the socialism developing in England and Germany marked out a general leftward direction.Footnote 16 A pioneering generation of reformers, women and men, often calling on Christian and domestic virtues, took on the “social work” of civil society. The “social sciences” that were forming in American universities abandoned models of evolutionary determinism and promised that scientific knowledge would smooth the course of change. Working through governmental and social policies, society's own ordering principles would be used to bring it under “social control.”Footnote 17
One major stream of progressive social thought “constructed a thoroughly social view of humanity.” Informed by native and British idealisms and fortified by the Social Gospel, liberal reformers like Jane Addams made democracy “a rule of living” as well as a political maxim. Gilded Age economists and university progressives began to redefine the liberal individual as a “social self.”Footnote 18 The implications of social idealism were most conscientiously pursued by philosopher John Dewey, who identified democracy as the collective ideal. Men are not an “aggregate” of “isolated non-social atoms, but are men only, when in intrinsic relations to men.” Social relations were the alchemy that created liberal individuals and social harmony. In a kind of “participatory democracy”—“association and interaction without limit”—individuals would achieve individuality and the nation become a community.Footnote 19
For most progressives, the conflict between individual autonomy and social constraint could be softened but not transcended. Liberal sociologist Edward A. Ross concluded that no single ethical principle can do justice to all individuals: some individuals would always be dissatisfied and social control would always be necessary. As the “natural” communal bonds of traditional society frayed, “artificial” social controls must be fashioned to replace them, yet he constantly worried that the energy of traditional American individualism would not survive. Many progressive liberals inherited the long American tradition of suspicion of a centralized national state. Some, like Louis Brandeis, were wary both of the large corporations forming in industrial society and of the stronger state being fashioned to control them. Others, like Herbert Hoover, believed that business corporations themselves marked out an associational path for reform that could combine public and private initiatives. For Herbert Croly, however, an activist national government was central to achievement of a “socialized democracy.” Croly urged Americans to leave behind their exceptionalist myth and fear of centralized government: “Popular government is to make itself expressly and permanently responsible for the amelioration of the individual and society.” That policy was both individualist and socialist, he said, and even more “unscrupulously [sic] and loyally nationalistic.”Footnote 20
For many progressives, the social axes of liberal freedom and harmony also ran along lines of race and ethnicity, less so along lines of gender. By and large the era's movement for women's suffrage did not engage the progressive socializers. Their concern was rather the largely immigrant industrial working class and, chiefly among African-American reformers, the tightening regime of white supremacy that produced new levels of conflict and violence. Racial hierarchies, rooted in slavery, were imbedded in the country's segregated society and culture and in many areas of social science. Given new life by eugenic science, they shaped the Jim Crow regimes and the “social control” of progressives like Ross and immigration reformers. Only European identities, unlike those of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, began to escape racial attribution and to be eligible for inclusion in an Anglo-Saxon-tinted “Americanism.” For egalitarian progressives, a socialized democracy required inclusion in society on an equal basis; this was still a radical stance in 1909, when the NAACP was formed by sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois and an interracial group of progressive reformers. Pluralists like Jane Addams and Robert Park, in theory if not always in practice, welcomed differences within a common humanity. Few Progressive Era intellectuals, like Randolph Bourne and Franz Boas, believed that pluralist differences were good in themselves and anchored community in a cosmopolitan culture, but their influence among liberal intellectuals would grow over the following decades.Footnote 21
What united progressives from liberalism's multiple socializing constituencies was the effort to recast the social bonds torn by industrialism. By instilling socially oriented values in the individual, by recognizing the economy as a social institution, properly and necessarily regulated to social ends, and by devising new forms of government regulation, social organization, and assimilation, they would curb the excesses and disorder of the new industrial society and moderate its racial and ethnic divisions. In that progressive context and to varying degrees through the century, the social was explicitly a normative as well as a descriptive concept, one that by definition inscribed the values of mutual concern, communal responsibility, and equal inclusion that modern industrial society lacked.
While some progressive intellectuals after World War I looked hopefully to long-term changes in capitalism to create social if not quite socialist transformations, most were discouraged by the wartime suppression of dissent and the conservative and nativist turn in national politics. The progressive effort to reconceive the social whole in pluralist or cosmopolitan terms survived among a secular intelligentsia that formed across racial lines, and business-oriented progressivism flourished in the form of welfare capitalism and Hoover's program of public–private associations. But the ideal of national democracy suffered as critics concluded that the average citizen was moved by emotions and propaganda rather than reason.Footnote 22 Social scientists turned away from the national democracy to examine communitarian and disaggregating crosscurrents in smaller-scale units of the social. A younger group of social idealists like Randolph Bourne and Waldo Frank, influenced by American romantic and European modernist writers, valorized the individual self and fulfillment within voluntary “beloved communities.”Footnote 23 Their rejection of the alienating culture of modern society would play a major role in the fortunes of the social for the remainder of the century.
Forging a liberal national community
The point when liberal intellectuals projected the most powerful and organically connected conceptions of society was during the 1930s and World War II, when for many liberal thinkers the social and the good were most thoroughly intertwined and when society, nation, and government were joined into a singular community. Holistic models of the social were in part the work of academic social scientists whose anthropological idea of culture spread to the society at large during the 1930s. For intellectuals, as Dewey said, “the idea of Culture … has such a wide sociological application that it puts a new face upon the old, old, problem of the relation of the individual and the social.” As the pattern of beliefs, values, and practices shared by a social group, culture was that aspect of the social through which both subjectivity and social cohesion were formed. During the 1920s Boasian anthropologists tended to look for sources of individual creativity and choice amidst the constraints of culture; during the 1930s and 1940s, facing depression and war, they found sources of social solidarity in culture's integration. Others followed suit, focusing on what Americans “shared collectively,” their unique “American way of life.” Regional and class-based archetypes of the common man—like the migrant farm laborer and the factory worker—represented the essential character of the whole people or were joined together in a mosaic of the whole. When national opinion polls appeared, the segmented national statistics were often reshaped by public interpretation into a majority that represented the whole nation.Footnote 24
Even more strongly, the holistic 1930s social bore the marks of New Deal liberalism. While progressives had often been wary of a strong central state, New Deal liberals now linked together society, nation, and government as a communal entity. Speaking favorably of “community, social responsibility, balance, centralization, cooperation, and control,” New Deal social activists, lawyers, and academics expanded social idioms tested in the Progressive Era and linked them more fully to the national government. Columbia University law professor Adolf A. Berle and economist Gardiner C. Means, in their 1932 The Modern Corporation and Private Property, argued that large concentrated industries of the industrial era could no longer be seen as private enterprises. They had “become more nearly social institutions,” although they had not yet evolved “a convincing system of community obligations.” With corporate governance in the hands of managers rather than owners, corporate control would ideally come to rest in “a neutral technocracy” that served “the paramount interests of the community” rather than “private cupidity.”Footnote 25
The New Deal made community obligation and technocratic administration the joint mission of the federal government. When the initial effort to create an industry–government alliance failed, the New Deal moved piecemeal toward the social-democratic left, passing national relief measures, the Wagner labor relations act, and Social Security. Other attempts to widen the reach of social democracy followed as growing industrial unions pushed for greater shop-floor democracy and social expenditure; liberals like Stuart Chase and George Soule urged expansion of government planning and moved toward increasingly collectivist values. New Deal government declared itself the agent of the people's will and a participant in the society's national communal bonds.Footnote 26
Franklin Roosevelt articulated that collective vision of national community and worked to identify it with American liberalism. “The faith of a liberal is profound belief not only in the capacities of individual men and women, but also in the effectiveness of people helping each other,” he said in 1935. Government, acting through majority rule, was the agent of “the active interest of the Nation as a whole.” This was, he emphasized, in line with “the historic traditions of the American people,” traditions that encompassed interdependence, cooperation, and freedom. Balancing the major economic divisions of the country—labor, business, agriculture—New Deal liberals believed themselves to be harmonizing the whole rather than engaging in interest-group politics. Roosevelt captured the liberal name from business-oriented progressives like Herbert Hoover for his governmental vision of national community and relegated their reliance on private solutions to the conservative fold.Footnote 27
Roosevelt's attachment to the liberal label was not misplaced. Liberals had from the start believed that their socializing project would broaden individual freedom and opportunity and grounded policies in individualistic as well as communal values. Roosevelt deliberately constructed Social Security as contributory insurance, believing its future was more secure if grounded in an individual property right. Public was supplemented with private and employer-based insurance, laying the foundation for a public–private welfare state. The New Deal's national programs largely worked through the states, in particular to maintain southern legislative support. For Roosevelt, his diverse team, and his supporters, the conflicts created by social liberalism's dual principles were submerged in the hope of continued advance in social-democratic directions.Footnote 28
Historians agree that by the late 1930s, the failure of New Deal programs to restart the economy and the resurgence of conservative politics led New Dealers to pull back their more ambitious socializing plans. When Roosevelt declared war in 1941, he recognized that the nation's “social economy” still needed immediate improvement, but his language now spoke to rights, not social obligations, and victory quickly took precedence. War production and the government policies that promoted it rapidly strengthened the economy, the business class, and its political power. Despite the efforts of some New Dealers, the transformation of social benefits into social rights—and the deeper sense of mutuality it required—did not take hold.Footnote 29
The war also forced the nation's endemic racial divisions to the fore. Although gains from New Deal programs and grassroots pressures began to bring civil rights into liberal consciousness and African Americans into the Democratic Party, Jim Crow remained in force and blacks gained only a segregated foothold in the military. Racism as well as wartime hysteria fueled the forced internment of Japanese Americans.Footnote 30 Still, the Nazis’ identification with anti-Semitism and racism spurred a redesign of public language around social pluralism. During the war and for some years after, the nation's unity would be described as a social pluralism of religious, ethnic, and racial groups, its differences oiled by tolerance.Footnote 31
The holistic social envisaged in New Deal liberalism thus began to weaken and disaggregate during the late 1930s and the war years, and mobilization for war eclipsed social-democratic ambitions. But national community remained a formation of formidable power and mobilization itself fortified common purpose. Public language remained focused on both bending individual interests to the common task and fortifying the common task by identifying it with individual interests. Social thinkers welcomed unifying, homogenizing forces such as the advent of television and the decline of regional and class differences, a universalizing perspective that for some reached out to a unified world as the war ended.Footnote 32 From the longer perspective of twentieth-century liberalism, it is after the war, during the long 1950s, that liberals’ communal–governmental vision of the social unraveled and the project to socialize liberalism decisively changed direction.
Postwar anxiety and ambition: scientism and modernism
Historians have often characterized the long 1950s by its obvious anxieties or its obvious ambitions; in truth, both ran through postwar social thought. The political upheavals of mid-century outside and inside the United States combined to heighten both insecurities and aspirations. The combined traumas of totalitarianism, World War II, the atom bomb, and the Cold War that closely followed cast the United States into a threatening world, yet one in which it had become the most powerful country in the world. Claiming a role of world leadership for the United States, liberals took responsibility for rethinking their shattered narrative of progress and the hazardous modernity which had resulted. No longer able to rely on history or America's exemption from it, they developed ambitious intellectual strategies to stabilize the threatening world that history had wrought.Footnote 33
Domestic affairs as well produced a new calculus of anxiety and confidence. For several years after the end of World War II, a progressive wing of the Democratic Party gained new social-democratic ambition from wartime victory and from democratic socialist advances in Britain and New Zealand, ambition reflected in Truman's Fair Deal program of guaranteed full employment and national health care. Despite the defeat of that program and the comparative weakness of the unionized working class in the United States, many liberals came to believe that social liberalism was safely established. The continuation of such key New Deal programs as Social Security, farm price supports, and banking and securities regulation by the Eisenhower administration encouraged the hope that the worst dangers of capitalism had been tamed. The wartime revival of capitalist industry, a postwar boom that reached into the working class, and mass consumption led them to think that capitalism promised increasing affluence at all levels of society. New Deal–Fair Deal liberals began to count on the long-term strength of capitalism, aided by government countercyclical fiscal policy, to produce increasing economic growth and solve the problems of social economy.Footnote 34
Liberal confidence in capitalism and expanding reform were undercut, however, by political anxieties. The international Cold War and a growing arms race created a climate of fear across the political spectrum. It especially revived a reactionary, conservative politics that used McCarthyite tactics to attack New Deal liberalism and its expansive social-democratic ambitions. Historian Richard Hofstadter lamented in 1956 that liberals were now on the defensive, “far more conscious of those things they would like to preserve than they are of those things they would like to change.” During these years, moreover, the national state became increasingly a national security state, an identity that projected a militant social vision riven by fears of subversion, quite at odds with the New Deal's communal vision of the nation. The combined hope for capitalist abundance and the need to save liberalism from reactionary attacks led many liberals to an anxious acceptance of the current configuration of American society.Footnote 35
Acceptance was aided by the significant social supports that liberal intellectuals enjoyed during the long 1950s. Social thought was now firmly centered in the academy and, in particular, in the social disciplines. The social sciences’ profile had been raised by wartime government work and by public concern with the future of American democracy in the postwar world. Despite political pressures, during the 1950s universities were a rapidly growing and democratizing cultural sector and the social sciences enjoyed substantial funding from foundations and the federal government. College education was also producing an audience open to social reflection. Social scientists educated journalists and popularizers who disseminated their ideas and they selectively joined writers and scholars of the humanities as public intellectuals.Footnote 36
Confidence and anxiety were linked as well to two major sources of postwar intellectual authority: the scientific norms of the social-science disciplines and the modernist ideas of intellectuals. Scientism substantially deepened the confidence of postwar social thinkers. The desire for greater command of scientific methods had become a programmatic wish of the social sciences after World War I. When more rigorous standards associated with the natural sciences took hold during the 1930s and when social scientists’ experience in World War II acquainted them with advanced technical practices, that wish came to fruition in mainstream social science during the long 1950s. The expertise bestowed by scientific practices expanded the social sciences’ instrumental reach into virtually every aspect of life. At the same time, the social disciplines, following respected public voices of science, declared their relative autonomy from society's direction. Their highest purpose was to construct powerful sciences of society; the use of their findings by policy makers and publics would necessarily follow.Footnote 37
As a consequence, the character of academic social thought changed dramatically. Social scientists adapted methods of the natural sciences to the social field, deploying sophisticated statistical and mathematical tools, particularly in economics. With the help of émigré intellectuals, they found theoretical perspectives and ideological meaning in earlier European social theories of modernity and subjected such concepts as bureaucracy, anomie, and class to empirical analysis, quantitative measurement, and theoretical elaboration. The scientific goal never took complete hold of the social disciplines. Particularly in anthropology, history, and political science, some scholars claimed the mantle of science for looser conceptions of objectivity, more context-sensitive methods, and a wider range of empirical data. Nor did scientific claims silence the criticisms of some natural scientists and humanists that the scientific goal itself was inappropriate. The goal nonetheless captured important sources of authority and power in academia and moved leading segments of the social disciplines to remodel their thinking and practice.Footnote 38
The conceptual range of postwar social thought and the data available to it thus expanded, even as they flowed into limited channels. The normative political character of social scientists’ reflection on society receded from view. Substantial social-scientific effort was drawn into methodology and into reducing substantive issues to questions amenable to approved methods of research. Claiming value-neutrality, social scientists often projected their own liberal values onto American reality by imbuing the existing American society with liberal democratic norms. An American liberal consensus was “both an empirical fact and a normative imperative.” So too with regard to science: sociologist Robert Merton's influential formulation of the “ethos” of science declared science itself to be allied to liberal principles.Footnote 39
While deploying science bolstered the confidence of postwar intellectuals in their own powers and in American society, the authority of modernist arts and ideas during the 1950s exacerbated anxieties about the character of American society. Modernism gained wide authority in American culture during the 1950s and deeply influenced an intellectual class of assimilating Jews and disaffected Protestants who began to enter academia after the war. Like European intellectuals and artists since the nineteenth century, modernists placed themselves in opposition to modern society and culture, decrying its instrumental reason, bourgeois values, and ugliness. Turning inward, they searched for an authentic self that alone could construct meaning and value in the modern world. Literary scholar Lionel Trilling expressed modernism's central value when he found in both modernist literature and Freud “the high authority of the self in its quarrel with its society and its culture.” Unlike their romantic precursors in that quarrel, however, modernists offered no sure path to authenticity, nor to the ultimate harmony of self and society. In the midst of a derelict society, the most honest stance toward society was alienation. That heroic stance was imagined for a creative elite, however, not for the masses who peopled modernity. The vision of the social sphere that modernism launched into academic and educated social thought was of a realm not simply problematic or in need of active correction, as it had been to earlier American liberals, but of a realm inherently deranged.Footnote 40
Totalitarianism and the theory of mass society
What brought together the postwar weakening of New Deal energies with the rising authority of science and modernism was liberal intellectuals’ encounter with totalitarianism. Totalitarianism discouraged conspicuous central government control, supported a tough language of science to sustain American strength, and validated the modernists’ dark vision of modern society. Its effects on social thought had begun to be felt in the late 1930s, and during the long 1950s it became the problem around which much of liberal social thought formed.
Totalitarianism is often bypassed by American historians for the other major historical category used to explain the direction of postwar thought: the Cold War. Although some recent historians have criticized a tendency to attribute everything in postwar culture to the Cold War, it remains a powerful historiographic theme. Several, ultimately overlapping, historical formations are often folded into the category—the fact and idea of totalitarianism, the international conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the governmental institutions and anticommunist agitation they produced within the United States. All three were important dimensions of the American experience of Cold War, but the intellectual formation that fundamentally structured the whole was totalitarianism. Alternatively, the Cold War is presented along with total war, the atom bomb, and the Holocaust as one of a series of separate traumas that combined at mid-century to darken postwar social thought. Indeed each brought to the postwar years its own history and horror, yet each grew from totalitarian soil and the contest it provoked.Footnote 41
The concept of totalitarianism emerged during the 1920s and 1930s as a holistic regime that promised, even to some American liberals, a nationalist cure for the ills of liberal democracy. As the ruthless character of totalitarianism became known, however, it quickly came to define liberal democracy's evil antithesis. Although scholars would debate a precise definition well past the 1950s, totalitarianism was widely understood as a new kind of radically authoritarian and holistic society, one that centralized all power in the state and used indoctrination, fear, and violence to conform society and human nature to its collectivist demands. Initially identified with fascism in Italy and Germany, it was linked by the end of the 1930s to both the Nazi and Soviet regimes.
The Soviet link fell into abeyance during World War II, but revived afterward as the Cold War refocused the totalitarian threat on communism. American communists and some left intellectuals resisted the totalitarian association of communism with Nazism, but by the late 1930s, party tactics in the United States and forced collectivization and purge trials in Russia led liberal intellectuals, even those who had been sympathetic to aspects of the Soviet regime, to condemn Stalin's communism as akin to Hitler's fascism and the kinship was soon confirmed by the Nazi–Soviet Pact. For conservatives, totalitarianism was an ideological tool to discredit New Deal liberalism; in a postwar context of conservative reaction and fears of America falling prey to communism, the whole spectrum of social liberalism was placed on the “slippery slope” that linked liberalism to socialism and thence to totalitarianism. The idea and reality of totalitarianism created what Nils Gilman attributed to the international Cold War alone, a “force field”: “field lines whose vectors define the topographic map of the intellectual and cultural life of the period.” While the intensity of forces waxed and waned with political events, the antithesis between totalitarianism and liberal democracy set the parameters and central issues for liberal social thought in the postwar era and continued to frame liberal thinking until the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the century.Footnote 42
For European and American intellectuals, the central problem was to understand how modern societies could develop into such authoritarian regimes. With the Nazi regime as template, the first German studies focused on the totalitarian state and the social–political conditions in which it arose. Social theorists on both sides of the Atlantic soon looked for underlying social and psychological causes. Their answers drew together criticisms of Enlightenment, liberalism, and modernity that had circulated since the late eighteenth century. Organicist critics of the American, French, and industrial revolutions on both the right and left had focused on the damage that individualism and instrumental reason inflicted on society's organic bonds. Romantics had argued that progress in reason necessarily involved instinctual loss and Friedrich Schiller already formulated the “classic diagnosis of the ills of modern society in terms of division, fragmentation, isolation, conflict, and distortion.” As the nineteenth century advanced, society appeared to be increasingly dominated by “masses”—the aggregates of undifferentiated, rootless, and isolated individuals created by modern industry, popular democracy, and mass communications. Intellectual and creative elites who worried about the rationality of the masses developed frightening theories of crowd mentality and debased mass culture. Marx attacked industrial society on different grounds, the theft by capital of the fruits of labor; his masses were the great body of the working class and the bearers of a utopian future. But his analyses of the psychosocial damage inflicted on workers by alienation from the product of their labor and the false consciousness induced in the working and middle classes reinforced the idea of mass alienation and loss.
By the early twentieth century these themes had been drawn into a narrative of the transformation of traditional into modern mass society that influenced social theorists in Europe and the United States: the premodern social formations that had nourished individuality and community had been replaced by industrial society's large impersonal structures and fraying connective social bonds, producing neither autonomous individuals nor individuality. Liberal theorists from Durkheim to the American progressives believed that current disorganization and anomie were temporary conditions and correctable as science advanced and new kinds of social relations formed. But the appearance of totalitarianism in the 1930s altered the balance. The theory of mass society, burdened with the ills of modernity at every stage of its development, now absorbed this new burden as well: the atomized individuals of mass society sought the false solidarity and order promised by totalitarianism and willingly submitted to the state's absolute authority. Ominously, mass society defined not only the totalitarian endpoint but “a stage between democracy and totalitarianism, as the former collapses into the latter.” In the theory of mass society, the criticisms from right and left that had dogged liberal modernity since the eighteenth century occupied center stage.Footnote 43
The Frankfurt school social theorists were the first to explore the view of totalitarianism as the product of modern society. As Germans of Jewish background and as Marxists exploring Freudian psychology, they were primed to find deep psychosocial illness at the core of totalitarianism. Keeping hold of their Marxist allegiance and a radical—if distant—utopian hope, they supplemented theory with empirical studies of the flawed society around them. During the mid-1930s as fascism took shape, Frankfurt scholars Erich Fromm and Theodor Adorno began to investigate the formation of authoritarian personalities. Exiled to the United States, they and some of their colleagues would find a ready audience and eager collaborators. Fromm's account of the emergence of isolated modern individuals and their submission to the authority of fascist totalitarianism, Escape from Freedom (1941), would be a central text during the following decades.Footnote 44
During the 1930s a number of American intellectuals also mixed Marxist and modernist commitments, and in so doing developed the themes of mass-society theory. The Americans, however, experienced Soviet rather than Nazi totalitarianism, and largely through the screen of the American Communist Party. Spurred by the party's failure to countenance their demand for intellectual and aesthetic freedom as well as by Stalinist brutalities, an influential group of New York intellectuals surrendered their Marxist hopes and turned to the modernist self. World War II and then Cold War politics rerouted their modernist sensibilities and social vision to a partial accommodation with American liberalism, where they assumed the stance of both participant in and alienated critic of American society and its shallow culture.Footnote 45 Trilling shed socialist hopes quickly and accepted the “necessity” of the post-New Deal regime with its bureaucratic “organizational impulse.” Still, liberalism was about “the quality of life it envisages”; the liberal imagination needed to be deepened by the modernist sense of complexity. Trilling saw himself standing with the great modernist writers who express “both the yes and the no of their culture.” A modernist intellectual like Daniel Bell, who rejected communism but retained a commitment to socialist values, also combined acceptance of the existing liberal political structure with criticism of its culture. Bell's “yes and no” was more tortured: “the unhappy consciousness of social democracy at an impasse, trapped by its commitment to pursue socialist ends through the instrumentalities of the capitalist state.”Footnote 46
For African American modernist writers like Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, the egalitarian promises of communism held special appeal, but those promises too proved hollow and modernist values became central. Wright's antihero, Bigger Thomas, was “a product of a dislocated society … a dispossessed and disinherited man,” the author said, an “American product [who] carried within him the potentialities of either Communism or Fascism.” Ellison fashioned a Bildungsroman around “a young Negro's quest for identity” across an alienating American landscape that offered no possibility of fulfillment. Like Trilling and Bell, but more deeply, African American intellectuals faced the existentialist problem of constructing an authentic self in an American social world that made authenticity impossible.Footnote 47
During the 1940s and 1950s, the critiques of modern society mounted by Frankfurt school critics and left-leaning modernist intellectuals were augmented by Weberian social theory and the neo-orthodox revival; together they deepened the anxieties that fueled mass-society theory. The influential work of Max Weber showed that the source of danger was bureaucracy—the paradigmatic form of authoritative power in both capitalist and totalitarian societies. Both forms of modern society were totalitarian-like, for the order bureaucratic organization created was an “iron cage,” wrought at the expense of individuals’ autonomy and moral ends. Weber both argued the necessity and lamented the moral consequences of the growing dominance of “the bureaucratic way of life,” this “parceling-out of the soul,” an agonistic stance that increased the plight of the alienated individual in mass society.Footnote 48
So too did the revival of Protestant neo-orthodoxy, most influentially for postwar social thought by Reinhold Niebuhr. Drawing on Kierkegaard and European neo-orthodox theologies, Niebuhr emphasized both the distance between God and sinful humanity and the imperative that humans nonetheless exert moral force in the world, in particular the force of socialist, then liberal reformist, and by the late 1940s anticommunist, politics. Secular liberals did not always welcome the tie to Christian doctrine, but recognized the aptness to mass society of Niebuhr's philosophy of “the essential homelessness of the human spirit,” with its “sense of estrangement,” of being “displaced” in the world.Footnote 49
From the 1930s through the 1950s, the concept of totalitarianism and its theory of mass society thus gained force among American liberals from many converging intellectual sources. As the frightening antithesis to American democracy, totalitarianism's rising power threatened Americans’ self-conception and their special place in world history. From the late 1940s into the middle years of the1950s, when the international Cold War took hold and morphed into the Korean War abroad and McCarthyism at home, the sense of immediate threat and liberal fear were at their height, but the ideological frame and the threat to American identity remained in place into the 1990s. American liberals’ engagement with totalitarianism was perforce an “encounter” with America's Other, and, by the same token, with the Other within.Footnote 50
Decentering the social
The encounter sharply changed the course of liberal social thought, turning it away from strengthening social democracy and toward valorizing individual liberty and strengthening the weakened individuals of modern society. Ciepley and Jonathan Bell correctly frame the turn to freedom as a choice: American liberal thinkers chose to oppose the totalitarian Other by identifying America primarily with freedom, the individualistic value at the root of classical liberalism, rather than democracy, a liberal value grounded in both individual consent and social ethics. Liberals had good reasons to focus concern on the individual. Totalitarianism, the fears of mass society, and the reactionary domestic politics they generated all put the individual in danger and renewed the value of individual freedom. If liberalism were to survive, social thinkers believed, the no-longer autonomous individuals of mass society required support and the principles of liberal freedom required new emphasis. Support and emphasis did not require, however, a turn away from social democracy. Decentering the social in favor of individual liberty was not the choice mass-society theory itself suggested, for it was a basic paradox of the theory that the restoration of individual freedom required reconstruction of the social ties that formed and sustained the individual, reconstitution of freedom's “foundation in community.”
In the United States, however, unlike Europe, the totalitarian consolidation of state and society put holistic, mutualistic, and centralized conceptions of the social on the defensive. Cohesive social bonds were easily imagined as forerunners of totalitarian solidarities, producing widespread wariness of intrusive government power. Harold Laski among other postwar observers noted “the deep discomfort when [Americans] are asked to support the positive state,” a discomfort visible even among social liberals. Unlike social democrats in Europe, their arguments for renewing the New Deal were shot through with cautions about undue centralization and reluctance to exert state power over the economy.Footnote 51
The American suspicion of centralized state power was long-standing, but it was not a constant; among liberals, it had been largely discredited by the depression and wartime mobilization. Totalitarianism, however, revived fears of government overreach just as capitalism and its business leaders were regaining power. Unlike the situation in Europe, American capitalists were not discredited by wartime collaboration and postwar economic collapse; on the contrary, big business was given substantial credit for winning the war and widening postwar prosperity. Even liberal proposals to expand social programs were wary of too great “interference” in the economy and trusted capitalist growth, assisted by government fiscal policy, to progressively create social democracy. As New Deal liberalism was put on the slippery slope to totalitarianism, social liberal proposals were “increasingly drawn toward abstract anti-totalitarian arguments and away from a politics of social democracy.” During the long 1950s, “free enterprise” became a touchstone of American liberty and “the American way” became equated with “individual freedoms, rights, and opportunities.” With totalitarianism cast as America's Other, capitalist ideology was strengthened and liberals’ commitment to social democracy weakened.Footnote 52
The focus on individual freedom also reflected the fact that for postwar liberal intellectuals, mass-society theory undermined the egalitarian underpinnings of mutualistic conceptions of society. The masses of mass-society theory were, after all, the demos of democratic theory, whose rationality and fitness to govern were already doubted by contemporary students of democracy and whose suspicion of intellectuals was a long-standing theme of American history. As intellectuals, the academics and writers who fashioned social liberalism, like American intellectuals generally since the turn of the twentieth century, were conscious of playing an elite role as educators and critics of American society. In postwar culture they assumed new responsibility and wielded new authority, yet not authority commensurate with their estimate of the postwar crisis or their own abilities. They believed that in McCarthyism, they were facing an expression of the masses’ virulent anxieties and scapegoating that could collapse into totalitarianism.Footnote 53 Respect for “the people” became more difficult to sustain and the superior trustworthiness of the intellectual, professional elites became easier to assume. The historian John Higham illustrated the change. As a student in the late 1930s he led a fight to allow a communist speaker to appear on campus; when he returned from his wartime army service, he was determined to help restore progressive values as well as “rebuild a vigorous, healthy intellectual life.” The postwar political climate changed his priorities. As he wrote his mentor Merle Curti in 1954, “I do believe that democracy is hostile to intellect even though it alone provides a free field for intellect.” He counted himself and always hoped to remain “in the broad liberal tradition,” but he was now “an aristocratic liberal, who has come to think of the tyranny of mass opinion as the worst of the dangers confronting us.”Footnote 54
Postwar social liberals’ commitment to a democratic social community thus weakened as their trust in the people declined and as individual and economic freedom gained ideological power. Steered by the totalitarian threat and the theory of mass society it spawned, many liberal intellectuals took a crucial turn away from the effort to socialize liberalism and toward a multifaceted effort to revive and revise the core message of liberal freedom. In a second essay I will follow out the consequences of that turn for conceptions of the social from the 1950s to near the end of the century.
