The Société Européenne de Culture's Dialogue Est-Ouest 1956: Confronting the ‘European Problem’

Abstract

This essay, which is part of an ongoing monographic study of the Société Européenne de Culture, looks at the SEC's relationship with Europe's communist intelligentsia during the first phase of the Cold War. European intellectual life during this period is generally associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Yet the SEC, the membership of which included some of Europe's most eminent figures, ranging from Camus and Jaspers, to Adorno and Merleau-Ponty, to Lukács and Sartre, can be seen as having provided a reference point particularly for the European left, not least because of its unique openness to communist participation. Giving special attention to the Dialogue Est-Ouest (Venice, March 1956), one of the earliest encounters between Europe's eastern and western intellectuals since before the war, this essay considers how the SEC's engagement with contemporary Marxist theory there not only embedded the dialectic as the SEC's operational method. It also provided an early indication of that institution's imminent shift from a preoccupation with universal values to an awareness of cultural difference and diversity, as a result of the critique of current western liberal ideology and its cultures, undertaken by the SEC in light of the Thaw.