“The Lonely Frontier of Reason:” liberalism and its critics at the International Association for Cultural Freedom’s 1968 “confrontation”

Abstract

ABSTRACT Amid controversy over race relations and the Vietnam War, American liberalism faced enormous criticism in the 1960s. In 1968, ninety of the world’s leading social scientists attended a conference sponsored by the International Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF) to discuss the Cold War, Vietnam War, Black Power, the New Left, postindustrial society, and America’s relations with the world. The conference, which the IACF billed as a “confrontation,” offered a microcosm of the views of an embattled liberal establishment and its critics. Although the conference was ostensibly held to address America’s political problems, participants focused principally on the role of intellectuals in American society, the emergent counterculture, and growing opposition to technocratic management and rationality. Because liberal intellectuals equated their political views with rationality and discounted dissenting views to the left and right as irrational, they feared not only for the survival of liberalism, but of reason itself.