The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism. By Michael Kimmage. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009. xvi, 419 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-674-03258-3.)

Abstract

Michael Kimmage has written a perceptive book on the intellectual history of Cold War anticommunism. His contribution to the burgeoning genre is a comparative study of two of the era's most influential public intellectuals, Lionel Trilling and Whittaker Chambers. Rarely have these two been studied together in so much depth. The result is a valuable addition to scholarship. Kimmage's core contention is that after World War II a “twofold conservative turn” occurred in the United States, exemplified and produced by Trilling and Chambers (p. 3). The Right turned toward the center, Kimmage contends, modifying the isolationist, antimodernist, and anti-intellectual traditions that had long characterized its public doctrine. At the same time, the Left turned away from the radicalism of the “red decade” and re-embraced gradualist models of democratic change. Kimmage persuasively argues that in both cases the newfound anticommunism of erstwhile radicals acted as the catalyst. While Kimmage is conscious of anticommunism as “an infinity of ideas” that “intensified latent disunities” in Cold War America, he nevertheless maintains that there were significant shared assumptions linking the anticommunist Left and Right (pp. 269, 212). His exhaustively detailed account of Trilling's and Chambers's biographical journeys aims to prove that the two men and their communities were essentially in agreement about the nature of communism, the anticommunist duties of the intelligentsia, and the Cold War uses of religion. Moreover, both men staked a “favorable relation to American power, defining its aims and worrying about its limits” (p. 14).