Mid-twentieth century American intellectual history is in the midst of a boom; a younger generation of historians, now half a century distant from the era, and less inclined than their immediate forerunners to be committed to a vision of the 1960s as a critical turning point in modern culture, is reshaping what has been an underdeveloped field. Recent studies of thinkers such as C. Wright Mills, Ayn Rand, Lionel Trilling, and Whitaker Chambers, and subjects such as postcapitalist social thought and pollsters in mass society, to name a few, have regenerated interest in an arena that had once been dominated by studies of the New York Intellectuals and Richard Pells's useful summaries and evaluations of prominent intellectuals of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.Footnote ¹ The newer intellectual history of this period appears to be premised on several ideas: that the so-called “liberal consensus” of the era was an ideological product of liberalism itself, rather than an adequate description of the contours of thought; that thinking in terms of clear and sharp distinctions between right and left doesn't help us understand the ways in which ideas, sensibilities, and intellectual commitments were configured at mid-century; that there is a great deal more continuity in social, political, and cultural thought than an image of the 1960s as cultural watershed would allow; and that the mid-century decades are, in the most profound sense, the first years of our own time, with all the characteristic epistemic, moral, and critical problems that have characterized thought and culture in the world in which contemporary Americans live. What the Progressive Era was for mid-century historians and intellectuals such as Richard Hofstadter and Henry May, the mid-century, and particularly the early Cold War era of the late 1940s and 1950s, is, for the historian of today, the root of the destabilizing conundrums of modernity, particularly the puzzle of the role of critical intellect in a mass-mediated environment of socialized knowledge, feeling, and being.Footnote ²

When one of those mid-century modernists, Lionel Trilling, described modern culture as driven by a newly discovered antipathy to culture that could take place only within culture itself, by a desire within culture to get “beyond culture,” he was engaged in one of the signal features of a kind of modern self-reflexive cultural criticism. In Trilling's imagination, this attempt to find the solvent of all that was artificial was located in the work of European modernists and its appropriation by the liberal imagination of his own time.Footnote ³ The modernism that Trilling helped to define, and for which he served as custodian and ambivalent mentor, continues to haunt the present. Despite repeated proclamations of a postmodern turn, a rejection of the central values of cultural modernism, and an embrace of a sensibility and way of knowing and valuing that unhinged the high modernism of mid-century, it seems doubtful that our culture has got “beyond modernism,” any more than it could possibly get “beyond culture” and still be a culture. Questions of the contingency of all knowledge and values, critique of the claims of all authority, a sense of both the liberating intellectual freedom and the moral danger of a world unmoored from tradition: these characteristically “modernist” concerns came to be articulated in their fullest way in the United States in the decades before and after World War II. Those who either bemoan or celebrate a postmodern destruction of the high modernist moment are projecting a kind of stability, authority, and cultural assurance on a moment that had none of these. It is as if some future culture critic would look to our own time and insist on the stabilizing commitments of a Foucault or a Rorty from which some future nihilistic and subjectivist philosophy had departed; to imagine that Freud or William James provided a stable set of approaches to a fixed reality rather than a deeply corrosive and destabilizing modernism is to fall victim to narratives of a “loss of innocence” that are themselves quite innocent.

Unloosed from tradition and the sense of fixity and necessity that went with it, modernism imagined a world of moral autonomy, aesthetic originality, biological and unconscious impulses liberated from social convention, a life of experimental possibility—but the same world was imagined as giving rise to unprecedented forms of control: corporate capitalism, rationalized bureaucracy, the professionalization and routinization of thought itself. What appeared from one angle to be the self liberated from arbitrary forms of constraint appeared from another to be the self unmoored and vulnerable in a world of psychic manipulation; the ontology of social democracy could be reconfigured as its evil twin, mass culture. The rise of totalitarianism and the organized horrors of the twentieth-century state only heightened the contradictions of a modernity imagined as simultaneously liberating and imprisoning. The modernist moment—a moment we are still within—was in its outlook committed to a kind of ironic and tragic sensibility, one in which necessity and freedom were imagined as two sides of the same coin.

This self-consciously tragic or ironic condition of critical intellect in a mass society is at the center of three recent works driving the reinterpretation of mid-century intellectual history. Robert Genter's Late Modernism attempts to lay out a new set of categories to make sense of the ways in which post-World War II thought and culture came to terms with the contradiction between ego autonomy and a fully socialized vision of the human person. Robert Vanderlan's Intellectuals Incorporated examines the public intellectuals who wrote for Time and Fortune magazines, and their struggles for a model of critical autonomy and cultural influence within the mass-mediated world they regarded with characteristic ambivalence. Jason Stevens's God-Fearing and Free locates the characteristic modernist sensibility in a Cold War cultural struggle over religious tropes of innocence and sin; the notion of religion as a form of mass culture in the liberal modernist critique plays a key role in his analysis. One comes away from reading these three books with a renewed sense of the intellectual and cultural sources of contemporary culture as a characteristic sensibility, an iteration of what has now become a long-standing condition.

Genter's Late Modernism is a brilliant reclassification of post-World War II art, criticism, and social thought. It begins with an art-historical framework for understanding modernism, but what is really at stake is a broader domain of social thought. This is an intellectual history that brings artists like Jackson Pollack and Jasper Johns into conversation with critics and social thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse and David Riesman, and literary figures like James Baldwin and William S. Burroughs. It turns out that, in Genter's framework, what initially appears to be a study of art and criticism is really a study of a larger modernist framework of the problem of selfhood under the conditions of mass society. One of its great interdisciplinary accomplishments is to demonstrate the ways in which artists and thinkers usually considered within specific disciplinary or subcultural frames were really grappling with a common set of problems.

Genter's central argument is that a group of artists and thinkers he designates “late modernists” can be distinguished from two other contemporaneous groups, which he labels “high modernists” and “romantic modernists.” These late modernists rejected both the embrace of an undisciplined sexually “authentic” self of the romantic modernists such as Norman Mailer, Jackson Pollack, and the Beats, and the notion of an autonomous rational ego set in opposition to mass culture of the high modernists such as the New York Intellectuals, the New Critics, and the Frankfurt school thinkers. For both high and romantic modernists, according to Genter, the new mass society produced by industrial capitalism had to be rejected as a constraint on the possibilities of freedom, critical intellect, creativity, and formal innovation. As much as romantic modernists and high modernists were divided—embracing antithetical models of the self, of ethical life, of politics and art—they shared a commitment to an image of society as a set of bureaucratic and materialistic forms of control which represented the antithesis of any vision of freedom. Late modernists, on the other hand, rejected the sharp distinction between individual and society; believed that critical intellect, political freedom, and aesthetic possibility were only possible through collectively constituted forms, symbols, and languages; and sought a greater freedom through social forms, rather than in opposition to them. Transcending the hierarchical attitudes of high modernists and the antinomian and anti-intellectual ones of romantic modernists, the late modernists, according to Genter, provided a bridge to the postmodernism of the mid-1960s and beyond.

The high modernists identified by Genter are, in some respects, odd bedfellows: sociologists as well as literary theorists, artists, and critics. Kenneth Burke, the literary theorist, who has never found an adequate place in the intellectual histories of this period, is the real surprise here. Genter shows the way in which his focus on rhetoric, language, symbol, and communication as necessarily social forms pushed against the stress on autonomy and individualism in the dominant high modernism of the era. Art was to be understood as communication, rather than self-expression. Burke is, in fact, the representative figure of late modernism; the book both begins and ends with him. And Jasper Johns is its representative artist, pushing past the dogmas of the dominant abstract expressionism of the era to recover a language of symbols and socially expressive forms that could be recontextualized away from the mimetic traditions of premodernist conventions. The late modernist pantheon also includes C. Wright Mills, James Baldwin, David Riesman, Erving Goffmann, Ralph Ellison, and Norman O. Brown. The cast of characters appears to be illustrative rather than definitive.

As useful as Genter's categorizations are in trying to make sense of the relationship between the various orientations toward art, culture, and politics that we find in the era of the late 1940s through the early 1960s, sometimes the tight chronological focus obscures as much as it illuminates. What is largely missing is the fifty years of modernisms that precede the Cold War era. While it is true that the specific concerns with a Freudian psychological idiom in the wake of the totalitarianism of the 1930s and 1940s gave mid-century modernism much of its specific character from Erich Fromm through Erik Erikson, for instance, it is also true that concerns about culture and freedom in terms similar to those articulated by Genter's late modernists can be found in much earlier iterations of modernist thought. Modernists from at least the 1890s on were troubled by the claims of a scientistic culture, and were wary of the bifurcations between fact and value, objectivity and subjectivity. The late modernists appear in a different light when seen in a tradition of thought that includes, among others, William James, John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, Charles Horton Cooley, Horace Kallen, Lewis Mumford, Randolph Bourne, Sidney Hook, and the early W. E. B. Du Bois, the literature of William Faulkner and John Dos Passos, and the painting of Marsden Hartley and Stuart Davis, rather than as respondents to a world of New Critics, Beat Poets, Frankfurt school émigrés, and New York Intellectuals. Dewey's Art as Experience (1934), for instance, was one of various attempts to reject formalist notions of the aesthetic as set against ordinary life and experience. His Freedom and Culture (1939) spoke to many of the concerns articulated in Fromm's Escape from Freedom (1942), but as an affirmation of the common cultural conditions of democracy against the psychological appeal of totalitarianism, rather than as an appeal to the rational individual against culture. That C. Wright Mills was steeped in Deweyan pragmatism should give us some sense of the continuity of many late modernist concerns with earlier ones.

The very notion of a “late” modernism implies a kind of teleology, a sense that the modernist “project” reached a kind of fulfillment beyond which it was impossible to go without ending modernism itself—hence the term “postmodern” to describe what came next. Like the term “late capitalism,” bandied about by Frankfurt school epigones and Marxist cultural critics, the term “late modernism” betrays, perhaps, a species of wishful thinking. In Genter's analysis, late modernism provides a kind of bridge to postmodernism, a shift away from some of the central preoccupations of the modernist sensibility, without a wholesale embrace of what would be a fundamentally new approach to art, politics, and culture in the late 1960s and the 1970s.

But what precisely separates late modernism from postmodernism? According to Genter, who both accepts the notion of a modernist/postmodernist divide and seeks, however, to complicate that split, postmodernism is characterized by “three related themes: the end of man, the end of history, and the end of metaphysics.” All three were presumably clear rejections of central modernist commitments. “Most famously,” Genter declares, “postmodernists began to argue that the era of the autonomous individual was over” (315).

I'm not sure how the end of autonomous individualism distinguishes postmodernism from those who rejected nineteenth-century liberalism and formalistic conceptions of the autonomous self in favor of the social self at the turn of the twentieth century. The fragmentation of selfhood in James's conception of the social self, and the rejection of the individual/society distinction in favor of a socialized vision of personhood in Dewey and others had already announced the death of the rational self-contained individual of social-contract theory and nineteenth-century liberalism. The postmodern “death of the subject” is old news, driven by the modernist desire to “make it new.”

And the idea of the end of metaphysics as marking postmodernism off from modernism is simply untenable, which Genter seems to realize as he discusses the various “antecedents” to the postmodern death of metaphysics. The wholesale critique of metaphysics was central to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernist thought, whether in the language of a Henry Adams, who could find no order in the universe, or that of a Rudolph Carnap, who declared metaphysical questions “meaningless.” That there continued to be those who emphasized autonomous selfhood and metaphysical order at mid-century doesn't mean that modernism itself was committed to those ideas in a central way that postmodernism has rejected. Rather, it suggests that modernism and its postmodernist offshoot have been characterized by ongoing discursive disputes between individualism and social holism, absolutism and relativism, necessity and contingency. There is more continuity than rupture—although the desire for rupture is itself a modernist ethic taken up by so-called postmodernists.

As my comments would suggest here, I am of the view that the modernist/postmodernist divide makes little sense for historians attempting to understand recent thought. Genter's analysis, in which late modernists are imagined as prefiguring or anticipating key elements of postmodernism, tries to preserve the distinction while undermining it at the same time. He suggests, for instance, that late modernists “still believed in the redemptive power of art, refusing to abandon the long-standing modernist claim that the aesthetic was one of the privileged sites for social transformation” (321). But Burke, Ellison, and Mills, having defined art in terms of rhetoric, as a form of symbolic action much like other forms of communication within society, really had little basis for asserting such a privilege. The logic of modernist thinking pushed in directions that undermined some of modernism's commitments to aesthetic hierarchy, for instance, in favor of its commitment to symbolic action. We can call the outcome “postmodernism,” or we can see it as an extension of incipient impulses and orientations in modernism itself: its sense of the particularity of historical time, of traditions as sources to be recombined in new ways rather than as constraints or limits, its notion of the arbitrariness of meaning, the critique of all forms of established authority. Postmodernism, like late modernism, is a form of modernism rather than its rejection or abnegation.

The one sense in which postmodernism remains meaningful is as an object of historical discourse. Figures like Mills and Goffmann began to speak of a “postmodern” epoch or era that would be sharply differentiated from the modernist era. In other words, postmodernism is an idea that has its own history, rather than being an actual cultural sensibility; it is an idea within the history of modernism. Originating in the late 1950s, by the 1970s and 1980s the idea of postmodernism had become ubiquitous. What it stood for depended upon what the analyst imagined modernism to be. Modernists believed in the fact/value distinction, postmodernists rejected it; modernists embraced the autonomy of the self, postmodernists claimed the self was “socially constructed”; modernists believed in aesthetic hierarchy, postmodernists rejected distinctions between “high” and “low”; modernists believed in depth and meaning, postmodernists in surfaces and the play of signifiers. What “tradition” had been for those who sought a definition of modernism, “modernism” became for those who sought a definition of postmodernism: the other against which to define a new departure. But all of the elements supposedly characteristic of postmodernism were to be found in various forms of modernism itself, and the postmodern critiques of modernism sound eerily similar to the modern critiques of received authority.

None of this is intended to denigrate the enormous achievements of Genter's book, which will surely give new life to the study of Cold War culture, and provide a coherent set of terms to debate and discuss the heady mix of art, culture, politics, and social thought of this key moment. Like all great books, it finds a new pattern that no one had noticed before, and makes it impossible not to see that pattern when observing that era in the future. And, given its distinctive interdisciplinary nature, I suspect it will find welcome readers among art historians and literary scholars, as well as cultural and intellectual historians.

Robert Vanderlan's Intellectuals Incorporated, like Genter's book, is concerned with the central tension within mid-century thought between the role and position of critical intellectual activity and the controlling forms of mass culture. Vanderlan suggests, referring to Dwight Macdonald and Partisan Review, that “the central modernist project” is to be understood as “the attempt to separate high culture from the corrupting embrace of mass culture” (5). Taking as his starting point Russell Jacoby's well-known jeremiad on the fate of public intellectuals in an academic-centered universe, Vanderlan seeks to examine what it meant to be a public intellectual in a world where the constraint on thought came from the mass media institutions for which intellectuals wrote, rather than the scholarly community and its disciplinary limits.Footnote ⁴ The mid-century era of intellectual life has taken on a different complexion than it had for contemporaries, largely because it has become an object of nostalgia in a world where intellectual life has supposedly been completely taken over by the university. In this view, academic life now seems less a space of independence from the corrupting forces of the marketplace, and more a site of irrelevance and insularity. Where Vanderlan differs from Genter is in his focus on the history of intellectuals, rather than on a concern with broader forms of thought and culture. His method is biographical, focusing on the lives and careers of his principal actors, rather than on the combination of close textual reading and contextual juxtaposition of fields of discourse that one finds in Late Modernism.

Vanderlan's principal argument is that the variety of intellectuals who worked for Henry Luce's magazines in the period from the 1920s through the 1950s were what he calls “interstitial intellectuals,” who found both limitations and real conditions of possibility within the mass-circulation periodicals of the era. As much as someone like Dwight Macdonald, who cut his teeth at Time, Inc., created an ideal of the autonomous intellectual in his “high-modernist” phase, in order to do so he had to rewrite his own early incentive and motives for working for Time. The idea that writing for Luce was a form of “selling out,” of compromising one's critical intellect for a paycheck, was, according to Vanderlan, a retrospective idea by which Macdonald obscured both his earlier motives and the complexity of his experience as an interstitial intellectual, particularly in the early 1930s. Vanderlan makes a good case that Time and Fortune offered journalists and writers an opportunity to engage a significant public, to bring a distinctive point of view to public affairs, to have “influence,” even as editorial policy and form set limits on what could be said.

The cast of characters in Intellectuals Incorporated includes names canonical—Macdonald, Archibald MacLeish, James Agee, Walker Evans, Daniel Bell; “middlebrow”—Whittaker Chambers, William Whyte, John Hersey, Theodore White; and obscure—T. S. Matthews, Russell Davenport, Ralph Ingersoll. By putting some of these canonical figures in the context of those such as Davenport and Ingersoll who subsumed their intellectual aspirations more fully within the framework that Time, Inc. offered, Vanderlan suggests something of the range and options open to intellectuals, and the ways in which those options became narrower in the transition from the Great Depression to the Cold War. As Luce moved from an ethic of “inform and instruct” in the 1920s and 1930s to an alignment with Republican Party policies in the 1950s, the range of permissible reporting narrowed significantly and Time and Fortune became less hospitable to critical or reflective perspectives.

Playing the equivalent role that Kenneth Burke plays in Late Modernism— unjustly neglected culture hero—is Archibald MacLeish, who comes to stand for a model of engaged intellectual life and criticism within the institutions of mass culture. In fact, Vanderlan's attempt to recuperate MacLeish's reputation from the general image of him as a “middlebrow” establishment intellectual, a reputation that owes much to Macdonald's characterization of MacLeish in his famous essay on masscult and midcult,Footnote ⁵ loses sight of historical distance and crosses the line into advocacy:

As this passage indicates, Vanderlan is of the school of intellectual history that looks to history for a useable past, a model of critical intellectual engagement for intellectuals in the present. The question whether thinkers in the past were “right” or not pushes against a historical treatment that aims to understand how and why they came to the ideas they had. Recognizing that the social conditions of intellectual life have changed, the desire to vindicate MacLeish is offered here as a basis for an alternative to the conception of autonomy associated with Macdonald. Recent scholarship has made it clear that Macdonald's model of critical intellect often shared a great deal with those, like MacLeish, that he imagined as having renounced independent aesthetic criteria for middlebrow success and a brand of political didacticism.Footnote ⁶ But Vanderlan finds it useful to set Macdonald and MacLeish against one another as alternative models of intellectual engagement.

The conclusion Vanderlan reaches is that “Irving Howe's ideal of the intellectual vocation—‘the idea of a life dedicated to values that cannot possibly be realized by a commercial civilization’—is as vital as ever. What has become clearer in the years since Howe wrote is that the search for such values can only take place from within commercial civilization” (23). This, I think, is Vanderlan's version of late modernism. Rejecting the notion of an autonomous sphere of values independent of mass culture, Vanderlan's argument is that in the contemporary world there is no space outside commercial civilization. Like the late modernists who argued that the only possible grounds of freedom lay within society and its cultural forms, Vanderlan's lesson from the experience of intellectuals in the belly of the mass-culture beast is that commercial forms have become the only way to communicate critical ideas to a substantial public in the kind of society in which we live. Time magazine looks a lot better, according to Vanderlan, when the alternative is not Partisan Review, but the academic journal and the scholarly conference. Of course, a certain irony attends the attempt to make this point in an academic monograph.

The real strength of Vanderlan's book, however, lies in the way in which he connects the journalistic work that intellectuals engaged in at Time, Inc. with the development of distinctive cultural forms, culminating in the boundary-crossing work of writers like Hersey and Agee, and the photography of Evans. Luce's publications rejected the mainstream journalistic credo of “objectivity,” and insisted that journalism should always have a point of view. One consequence was that the writers at Time and Fortune pioneered a new approach to nonfiction representation. Long before Tom Wolfe announced the “new journalism” of the 1960s and 1970s, with its self-conscious adaptation of the techniques of fiction, its first-person insertions of authorial presence, and its emphasis on experiential narrative, the writers for Fortune, in particular, were already practicing an aesthetic that bridged “fact” and “poetry.” The notion that the 1960s marked a moment of radical disjuncture between the canons of “objectivity” in journalism and the genre-defying work of writers like Wolfe and Joan Didion is not historically supportable.

Out of this mixture of imaginative literature and fact-based reporting one of the distinctive and important texts of this era was born—Agee and Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (162). The point that Vanderlan makes—and it is worth emphasizing—is that Famous Men grew out of the approach to reporting developed at Fortune, contrary to what we might call the “high-modernist” reading which suggests that the editors sent Agee and Evans to Alabama on a “straight” reporting assignment, but rejected the result when Agee brought his independent and idiosyncratic intelligence to bear on the project. While it is true that Agee's fragmented and broken confessional narrative, which circled round and round the ethics of representation, could not have been published in Fortune, it is because it simply pushed the form too far. The better way to understand the genesis of Famous Men is to see it not in opposition to, but as an extension of, the journalistic forms in which Agee was steeped in his work for Fortune. In one of his strongest arguments, Vanderlan demonstrates that without the Luce magazines, this text could not have been produced—it came into being in large measure because of this context, rather than in spite of it. And Agee, who was one of the first cohort of modernists to establish film criticism as a serious intellectual form, and in doing so challenge the idea associated with some high modernists that Hollywood was nothing but kitsch, appears as a perfect exemplar of Genter's late modernism.

In both Genter and Vanderlan, religion as a matter of intellectual life and thought is mostly absent—the pattern of thought is predominantly secular. In Jason Stevens's God-Fearing and Free, this pattern is inverted. Religious tropes, themes, symbols, and concerns are everywhere, even where one might expect them the least. And yet this is not a history of religion, if what we understand by that is a focus on religious institutions, leadership, theology narrowly conceived, religious experience, or any of the conventional forms by which religion is frequently identified and segregated from secular thought. This is a religious history that spends more time with Robert Mitchum than with Harold Ockenga, with Whittaker Chambers than with Carl F. H. Henry, with Karen Horney than with Pius XII. The concern is with religious tropes, sensibilities, habits, and patterns of thought and feeling, rather than, say, how denominational leaders responded to the politics and social conditions of the Cold War era. This strikingly original work imagines a “spiritual history” of the Cold War by using a method somewhere between discourse analysis and the old American studies myth-and-symbol approach. It finds religion not just in the “countermodernist” political theology of Reinhold Niebuhr and the evangelical upsurge of Billy Graham, for instance, but also in the novels of Shirley Jackson and Flannery O'Connor, the political conversion narratives of ex-communists, the anti-utopian liberal “realism” of political thought, the Freudian analysts at high tide, film noir, and the mass-culture critique of 1950s social thought. Its vision is simultaneously extraordinarily broad and at the same time focused on extended close readings of a select group of texts.

In contrast to those who imagine the “culture wars” of our own times as a battle over the legacy of the 1960s, Stevens argues that it was the culture of the Cold War that defined such conflicts. The postwar world in all its manifestations turned its back on the utopian projects of earlier models of social, political, and religious aspiration. The dominant trope of the era across political divides of left and right, according to Stevens, was “the loss of innocence” and the recuperation of a fallen world in which tragedy, irony, doubleness, and contradiction were the preferred modes of perception and understanding. The critique of Protestant modernism came from both Niebuhr's neo-orthodoxy and Graham's resurgent evangelicalism, which were united in ways that belied their surface opposition to one another. Everywhere the progressive and modernist legacy of the first half of the twentieth century was refigured as a kind of naive utopian project, whose unanticipated outcomes exposed the failures of an optimistic Enlightenment creed. Stevens's new consensus history of the Cold War era—his affirmation of a common religiously informed sensibility across the political divide of right and left—is not the old liberal consensus. Rather, it is one in which enemies attack one another in the same language, accusing one another of being insufficiently committed to an understanding of the sinful and fallen nature of the world, either too naive or too psychologically manipulable to face “reality.” This is what he means by identifying the origins of the culture wars in mid-century anti-utopian religious feeling and thought.

There are many gems in Stevens's book, not the least of which is his simultaneously culturally substantive and formally attentive reading of Charles Laughton's film adaptation of The Night of the Hunter as “an unprecedented hybrid of noir and sentimental melodrama” (123). This is a brilliant model of how to read a film as a cultural document, and it's a startlingly original and revealing reading as well. For my purposes, here, however, Stevens's discussion of the modernist critique of mass culture and social conformity is probably the most important section of the book, for it addresses all of the concerns that Genter and Vanderlan see as characteristic of mid-century modernism. Focusing on the ways in which liberal secular intellectuals targeted “fundamentalism” as a form of mob mentality opposed to critical reason, and the parallel intellectual defense of Christianity against “kitsch religion,” Stevens demonstrates the extent to which the religious ambivalences of modernist thought informed the broad mass-culture critique of the era. He situates the Hollywood productions of Inherit the Wind and Elmer Gantry as two sides of the critique. Stevens's analysis of these films as expressions of modernist critiques of mass culture would be more potent if both films were not, in Macdonald's terms, “middlebrow” works, taken with their own self-assured seriousness and didactic purpose rooted in Victorian certainties. The former drew on “high modernism,” with its smug defense of freedom and intellectual autonomy against the religiously based unreason of the masses—an unreason, according to Stevens, spelled out in works like Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life; the latter appealed to a “late modernist” consciousness that religion was necessarily bound up with the dominant cultural tendencies of capitalist society. The denunciation of religion for its hypocrisy and manipulation of gullible dupes fails to recognize that it is not religion, but the dominant cultural ethos, that is the problem; Elmer Gantry, in Stevens's view, renders Inherit the Wind innocent.

In identifying these Cold War cultural patterns as the defining habits of mind that have come to structure our present, Stevens's book is as much a work of contemporary cultural criticism as a work of cultural history. The same could be said of Genter and Vanderlan, if not quite to the same extent. In his epilogue, titled “Putting an End to Ending Our Innocence,” the extended critique of Niebuhrian realism, of a chastened sense of limits, and rejection of utopian thinking as naive come to a head. For Stevens, the invocation of a vague “utopia” seems to encompass a broad variety of political idealisms and their commitments to visions of social justice. It is difficult to conclude, despite the author's protest to the contrary, that this does not align Stevens with the left. Embracing James Baldwin as a prophetic voice, Stevens asserts that the entire discourse of tragic, ironic realism, of yet another “end of American innocence,” has both served the ends of power and injustice and accommodated the public to a passive quiescence in the name of a smarter and more religiously astute way of being. In contrast, Stevens calls for

Some will likely find the linking of Graham and Howe here deeply unfair to Howe and his continuing commitment to a socialist ideal in an inhospitable world, but Stevens is seeking a path out of old debates and positions. He is less interested in taking sides in the cultural and political debates of the past—as both Genter and Vanderlan do in their own ways—than in finding a way out of them.

Stevens's call for an anti-anti-utopianism, an end to the end of innocence, seems an echo of the attempt identified by Trilling to get “beyond culture.” Since the aspiration is not to “return to innocence” or to some myth that preceded modernism, but to somehow realize the limits of a way of thinking that stresses limits, to see modern tragic modes of thinking as themselves myths, it's difficult to see our way out. For those of us who are unreconstructed modernists, willing or no, the sign above the door reads “No Exit.” The believers in postmodernism see an opening—if they would only renounce freedom, they might be free. Innocent indeed.