Whatever Happened to the Social in American Social Thought? Part 2

Abstract

The liberal social thought of the long 1950s is best seen as an attempt to combat the threat that the United States, as a modern mass society, could succumb to totalitarianism. Widely discussed texts likeEscape from Freedom, The Vital Center, The Lonely Crowd, andThe Origins of Totalitarianismannounced the threat. Academic and theoretical studies worked to provide social supports for now weakened individuals or to find behavioral evidence that Americans still functioned as liberal democrats, but they did so by subordinating individual autonomy and mutual social responsibility to social systems, the market, and elites. Although social liberalism revived during the 1960s, the Great Society fused social liberalism to the Cold War state; the movements for civil rights and social inclusion, fueled by the desire for authenticity, veered into individualistic, identitarian channels; and radical calls for participatory democracy magnified both desires for authenticity and fears of American totalitarianism. Until the end of the century the totalitarian frame of liberal social thought continued to encourage visions of the future as a monolithic totality, to steer liberal social thinkers into individualistic channels, to hobble mutualistic conceptions of the social, and to weaken the ability of social liberals to respond to the conservative backlash that grew through the century and beyond.