Cold War Liberalism Research Articles

On Recent Developments in the New Historiography of (Neo)Liberalism

Over the last twenty years or so several new waves of research on the history of liberalism have emerged. The novelty of this should not be exaggerated as broad scholarly interest in liberalism has in fact been increasing at a remarkable rate since the 1980s. Nevertheless, it is clear that the historiography of liberalism has broken much new ground since around the turn of the century. This has been driven partly by the influence of larger developments in the humanities and social sciences. The global and post-colonial turns, for instance, have helped to reshape the historiography of liberalism by provoking debates over the extent of its complicity in slavery and colonialism, while also drawing attention to the contribution of theorists from the global south. But even much of this ‘normal’ innovation has been driven at least indirectly by a growing sense that liberalism is in crisis. The War on Terror, the financial meltdown of 2008 and the global rise of populist authoritarianism are the obvious staging posts in liberalism's journey from post-Cold War triumphalism to contemporary fears for its imminent demise. And it is not a coincidence that the end of the end of history has seen the beginning of a new historiography of liberalism. Since the early 2000s the emergence of new sub-fields like the histories of ‘Cold War liberalism’, human rights and neoliberalism can all be seen in different ways as responding to liberalism's unfolding crisis.

Cold War carceral liberalism and other counternarratives: the case of Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country

ABSTRACTThis article traces a transnational cultural genealogy of postwar and early Cold War liberalism specifically shaped by prisons. Central to this genealogy is Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country, the South African novel that became a metonym for the tradition of South African political liberalism and liberal anti-apartheid fiction. The novel’s carceral aspects have never been discussed in relation to Paton’s prison reform articles from the same period, or within the framework of carceral studies. Reading the novel alongside Paton’s prison writings highlights the constitutive role of the carceral state – a regime of modern power spread across different sites – in liberal reformist agendas of the 1940s and 1950s. This case study traces Cold War carceral state building on a cultural terrain and provides opportunities to reflect on evolutions of present day “carceral solidarities” – modes of culture and politics mediated by an expanding and globalized carceral state.

Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism by Mark Steven, and: Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture by Evan Kindley

Reviewed by: Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism by Mark Steven, and: Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture by Evan Kindley Stephen Hahn Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism. Mark Steven. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2017. viii + 254 pp. $49.45 (cloth). Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture. Evan Kindley. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2017. 164 pp. $35.00 (cloth). Making sense of William Carlos Williams's political commitments continues to be of interest in all its rather complicated forms and iterations. One recent, ambitious approach is that of Mark Steven in Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism, a book apparently timed to appear in October 2017 on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Appear it did, staking a claim on links connecting Williams, Pound, and Zukofsky not just as modernist poetic innovators and experimenters, and thus literary revolutionists of sorts, but as poets deeply implicated in the politics of communist revolution in the twentieth century. Less specifically devoted to Williams, and somewhat in contrast to Steven's enlistment of Williams as a revolutionist through the implications of style and genre, Poet Critics and the Administration of Culture by Evan Kindley, portrays the attenuation of the radical impulses of modernism as the twentieth century wore on and Cold War liberalism as a strategic safe zone for careerists in poetry. [End Page 47] Links between the three writers who are the primary focus of Steven's narrative, with Williams as a sort of pivot, are pretty well known, and Steven does not focus on the biographical with respect to Williams except to note his participation in the Greenwich Village milieu of the 1920s. The section on Pound treats the arc of Pound's engagement with Lenin and Soviet Communism in the early Cantos through to an ambiguous closure, in Steven's complicated troping about Canto 74, concluding that "communism, as manifest in the USSR, names the force that satirically brushes Pound's fascist tendency back against itself, generating a contradictory form that is unable to reconcile its political ambition with its historical content" (96). The passage indicates the level of abstraction at which Steven proceeds while offering a Marxian interpretation of major work by Williams in the middle section of the book. (I think "interpretation" rather than "analysis" is the appropriate term to describe these procedures, but more of that in a moment.) It also indicates the dialectical troping characteristic of Steven's mode of argument. Finally, Zukofsky appears as an actual communist although his "lines seem to know that" their "endorsement of communism" is "ultimately an idealism." The self-reflexiveness of Steven's phrasing here and throughout the book makes his critical judgments seem weighty, but it is difficult at points like this not to think that it might be good to admit the self-contradiction of divided ambitions and, in Zukofsky's case (perhaps in Pound's), to posit that the struggle to unite modernist poetic ambition and political determinism in one big work was not just "wrong from the start" (to paraphrase "Mauberly"), and undone by history, but necessarily so. Encountering Steven's modes of argumentation might give one pause well before the section of Red Modernism devoted to Williams (97–161), humorously subtitled "Moscow on the Hudson." Indeed one might balk at the marshalling of philosophical, stylistic, rhetorical and other forces together in the introduction on "Modernism's Communism," where a rhetorical sleight of hand accomplishes an intrinsic connection between revolution in poetry and political and economic revolution, as in the Bolshevik Revolution. Really? Something there is that doesn't quite trust the connection. And yet perhaps there is something after all to be learned from the struggle to connect. Steven sees all three writers as operating in the genre of the epic, which takes some arguing despite the traditional and casual use of the word in the twentieth century to describe long poems in English that invoke or enlist history or politics and/or treat in part some agony or antagonism of a hero in an arguably world-historical context. Steven's premises are difficult [End Page 48] to untangle sequentially and in any short form...

Raymond Aron's "Machiavellian" Liberalism.

Recent interest in Raymond Aron has focused on his "Cold War Liberalism," but he is neither a neo-liberal nor a Hayekian libertarian. Instead, this article will argue that Aron is a "Machiavellian" liberal - that his democratic theory is underpinned by an engagement with Pareto, Mosca, and Michels. First, it will reconstruct Aron's dialogue with Pareto. Second, it will explore his overlooked sociological writings on the ruling classes. Third, it will extend the thesis of a postwar French "Machiavellian Moment" to the Centre Raymond Aron, and ask in conclusion whether his theory of democracy can still shed light on today.

The American Soviet Jewry Movement's "Uneventful" 1968: Cold War Liberalism, Human Interest, and the Politics of the Long Haul

The American Soviet Jewry Movement's "Uneventful" 1968: Cold War Liberalism, Human Interest, and the Politics of the Long Haul

Civil Rights in New York City: From World War II to the Giuliani Era by Clarence Taylor

Reviewed by: Civil Rights in New York City: From World War II to the Giuliani Era by Clarence Taylor David Lucander Civil Rights in New York City: From World War II to the Giuliani Era. By Clarence Taylor. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011, 282 pages, $18.00 Paper, $65.00 Cloth. As the metropolitan area with the largest African American population in the United States, New York City holds a special place in this country's history of race relations. Indeed, New York City often serves as an entry point for discussions of urban issues such as poverty, gentrification, police brutality, under-performing schools, and the various forms of activism combating these societal ills. Likewise, as the center of artistic production associated with the Harlem Renaissance and the birthplace of hip hop, New York City has long been recognized as the cultural capital of Black America. Somehow, however, New York City's seminal place in the story of the civil rights movement has been largely overlooked. Recent historiography has paid increasing attention to civil rights activism and race relations in the urban north, and this edited volume directs its focus squarely on New York City. As a group, these article-length essays reveal that New York City has been, and is, a center of civil rights activism and should be considered alongside Montgomery and Selma whenever one thinks about the geography of the struggle against racism or the civil rights movement. Edited by Clarence Taylor, professor emeritus at Baruch College, this collection of ten independent chapters is a valuable addition to those studying the history of New York City. Further, scholars exploring the struggle for civil rights in the north, urban history, and general African American history will find Civil Rights in New York City an important contribution to the field. Each of the writers featured is the author of a book-length study about his or her subject. In this regard, Civil Rights in New York City functions as a scholarly mixtape—it is both an entry into more detailed works as well as a streamlined single-volume synopsis of several longer studies. Taylor's introductory essay provides context for the larger events shaping the period covered in this book. He identifies four key aspects of the northern struggle for civil rights: a secular left that included various stripes [End Page 133] of radicals, religious communities, Black Nationalism, and the ethos of Cold War liberalism. The introduction is cogently written and accurately describes the book's contents, but it could be improved with a general discussion about the post-World War II history of New York City or a detailed exploration of the city's racial landscape. Civil Rights in New York City is especially strong in the themes of schools, society, and politics. In a separate essay, Clarence Taylor uncovers the history of radical teachers advancing an anti-racist curriculum during the Roosevelt era and revisits the political debate about school integration during the late 1960s. Daniel Perlstein's article offers a new interpretation of Bayard Rustin's role in the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville crisis, while Martha Biondi poignantly writes about how City University's open enrollment policy expanded the Black and Latino middle class. Biondi's article is a standout within this group. She builds on solid but oft-neglected research about open admissions by adding her own oral histories with student activists of that period. The result is a convincing argument about the socially transformative power of higher education and a subtle reminder that working in schools is a way to make a living while making a difference. Mayoral leadership is another recurrent subject in this volume. Jerald Podair writes about Rudolph Giuliani's "One City, One Standard" policy and the rise of aggressive policing tactics that resulted in racially disproportionate use of "stop and frisk" tactics. In Podair's assessment, Giuliani's "race-neutral policy decisions led to race-skewed results" (215) in criminal justice, municipal spending priorities, and poverty relief. Wilbur C. Rich recounts racial conflagrations such as the Red Apple and Crown Heights incidents during the David Dinkins era. Likewise, many of the events discussed in this book directly pertain to...

Absence of Bikini, or the Cold War Boyology in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies

ABSTRACTThis article argues that running through William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), there is a historical subtext of “Bikini”—that is, Bikini as an emblem of twofold reification of colonial history and female sexuality that symptomizes Cold War liberalism’s amalgamating sexual and international politics. Employing a queer theoretical analysis of the child and a new historicist approach to the Cold War literature eclectically, this article situates Golding’s text in the historical context of Bikini nuclear testing to examine how the text is underpinned by the hitherto neglected metanarratives of male homoeroticism and nuclear warfare. It also investigates how these metanarratives are censored out and rendered invisible by the novel’s own narrative technology and aesthetic ideology of “innocence,” an ideology that played a pivotal role in legitimating the ideology of Cold War liberalism.

Cold War Culturalism and African Diaspora Theory: Some Theoretical Sketches

This article provides some theoretical sketches of the epistemological and intellectual impact of the Cold War on African Diaspora Theory. Starting in the 1950s, anticommunism/antiradicalism overwrote and built upon extant technologies of antiblackness that dispossess, subordinate, and marginalize the majority of African descendants in the United States and in the Global South. While concessions were made to a certain group of Blacks—particularly Cold War Liberals in the United States and Developmentalists in the Global South—these exceptions were directly contingent upon the repression of labor, radicalism, and any forms of mobilization that challenged the pedagogy of the Cold War state. Those who received entitlements from the dominant regime became complicit with the deployment of violence against those they were complicit in “niggerizing.” As a result, the Black radical tradition has been subsumed in African Diaspora Theory, rendering the latter insufficient for critical engagement with the material conditions of the Black subaltern.

“I’ve Got a Hunch We’re Going Around in Circles”: Exceptions to American Exceptionalism in Hollywood Korean War Films

Hollywood Korean War films primarily aimed at integrating American citizenry into national narratives of cohesion and teleology by displacing contradictions onto the exteriority of American identity. The films dismiss the Korean War as not worth fighting for, yet simultaneously propose that fighting is the only viable option to cope with the futility of war. This paper argues that this closed rationality of we-fight-simply-because-we-fight is a symptom of cold war liberalism. And the cold war subject, caught in the circular movement of finding-while-missing the meaning, prefigures a postmodern subject of drive that transcends the fundamental lack in the process of subjectivization and finds satisfaction in the endless circular movement with no destination. Crucially, American exceptionalism functions as the state fantasy in this process of denying/displacing inconsistencies inherent to the imagined national identity. This circular rationality, which constitutes the paradigmatic subject-position of latecapitalist American culture, was constructed in the early years of the cold war, and its cultural manifestations can be traced in Hollywood films about the Korean War.

Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World. By Robert B.Rakove. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 291 pp.

Kennedy, Johnson, and the Nonaligned World. By Robert B. Rakove. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 291 pp. Fifty-some years after his assassination, John F. remains enigma. Was he the brash and impulsive president who brought the world to the brink of World War III with the Cuban Missile Crisis? Or was he the brave challenger of the American military-industrial complex who would have prevented the Vietnam War? Various studies portray him as Cold War liberal, or liberal Cold Warrior, or come up with pithy phrases to summarize the man and his foreign policy. Robert B. Rakove's book jumps into the murky waters of this passionate historiography. Instead of focusing on crises such as the Bay of Pigs, he examines lesser-known aspects of Kennedy's diplomacy (the Indian seizure of Goa, settlement of the Western New Guinea impasse) to illustrate what he refers to as a foreign policy without official name that, even so, profoundly shaped the modern history of United States foreign (xxi). Rakove christens this important policy engagement and argues that himself was its primary intellectual force. Backing away from the John Foster Dulles view of neutralism as something that was dangerous and immoral, sought to engage with the leaders of the nonaligned world. Utilizing the famed Kennedy charm, he often met one on one with important leaders from Asia and Africa and demonstrated understanding of their reluctance to choose sides in the Cold War. also used foreign aid as crucial tool, not necessarily to pull the nonaligned nations into the American sphere of influence but to ensure that simply by remaining independent of the communist bloc, such nations would eventually understand the intrinsic advantage of closer relations with the West (xxi). With Kennedy's death in 1963, his successor, Lyndon Johnson, abandoned engagement, instead pursuing an inexorable collision course with the nations and governments his predecessor had done so much to court (55). Unlike Kennedy, Johnson felt that mollifying strong American allies--who, not coincidentally, were also the strongest colonial powers--was more important than trying to pacify nonaligned leaders whose commitment to the United States seemed tenuous. While Rakove is to be congratulated for producing tight and readable summary of U.S. policy toward nonaligned nations during the Kennedy--Johnson years, the argument that engagement was real and powerful (if ultimately failed) departure in U. …

The World Comes to Iowa in the Cold War: International Writing Program and the Translation of Mao Zedong

This essay investigates the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa under the directorship of Paul Engle and Hualing Nieh during the Cold War. It argues that the exchange and translation of literature at Iowa had been enabled and circumscribed by Cold War politics, interrogating the proximity between US Cold War agenda and Iowan literary ideal by critiquing Cold War liberalism embodied by Engle and Nieh. Their translation of Mao Zedong’s poems epitomizes a political and literary archive of the Cold War, symptomatically illustrating the figure and signification of “China” in the US imagination, and demonstrating the intimacy between literary production and political endeavor. Reading Nieh and Engle’s translation of Mao’s poems as letters of the US Empire specifically scripted through and within Cold War geopolitics, this essay interrogates the neutrality of creative writing and literary translation foundational to and claimed by the International Writing Program since its establishment in 1967.

Cold War Liberal Pluralism and Its Legacy. George Kennan and Henry Kissinger Revisited

With intensified speculation about a new Cold War, the question of whether there is any sound basis for detente between the West and Russia has been at the heart of contentious international debates. Centrally these have included nato expansion into the Eastern bloc and the way forward from the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine. In this context, two of the staunchest critics of what they believe are the ill-conceived initiatives in us foreign policy towards the post-Soviet government have been the Americans, George Kennan and Henry Kissinger. Both men have railed against triumphalist varieties of liberalism, and especially what they see as their country’s overactive democratization zeal in the wake of the Second World War. Both men have argued for a more informed pluralistic liberalism, in the hope of fostering a stable global order beyond the sectarian extermination programs and ruinous total wars of the last 100 years. The article considers the plausibility and prescience of their views.

A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars

There is no shortage of great books about post-1960s American political culture. Andrew Hartman's history of the culture wars ranks among the best. Hartman manages to transcend the worldviews of his subjects, other than to confirm the existence of the culture wars as a distinct moment in American history. His is not the final word on that moment. It is, however, among the most reliable accounts thus far. For Hartman, the culture wars occurred in the shadow of the 1960s—that is, in response to the resonant “liberation” motif of that era. The still-potent belief that culture holds the key to social and political transformation began on the left. Ultimately, though, forces on the right embraced the cultural turn for their own purposes. Neoconservatives (Cold War liberals turned liberation-phobes) styled themselves as the catalytic converters in this process, and they play an outsized but justifiable role in Hartman's narrative. Among other things, they allowed conservatives to assume “ownership of the rhetoric of [racial] colorblindness” (p. 113). To be sure, such moves only achieved political impact once the newly christened Christian Right came on board. The resulting coalition was fraught on matters such as education, as neoconservatives favored “standards” and traditionalists favored localism or parents’ rights.

Michael Oakeshott’s Cold War Liberalism. Edited by Terry Nardin. New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. 197p. $90.00 cloth.

Michael Oakeshott’s Cold War Liberalism. Edited by Terry Nardin. New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. 197p. $90.00 cloth.

Cold War Transgressions: Christian Realism, Conservative Socialism, and the Longer 1960s

This essay examines the convergence of the Protestant left and traditionalist right during the 1950s. Reinhold Niebuhr and the World Council of Churches challenged Cold War liberalism from within. As they did, they anticipated and even applauded the anti-liberalism of early Cold War conservatives. While exploring intellectual precursors of the New Left, this essay forefronts one forgotten byproduct of the political realignments following World War II: The transgressive politics of “conservative socialism.” Furthermore, this work contributes to growing awareness of ecumenical Christian impact within American life.

Untimely Subjects: White Trash and the Making of Racial Innocence in the Postwar South

This article analyzes the role that categories of racial transgression—specifically, the reviled “white trash” of the rural South—play in the historical construction of racial innocence in America. Writing in 1963, James Baldwin diagnosed innocence as the alchemy by which white Americans turn otherwise visible racial inequality into stories of redemption, virtue, and progress. In this article, I use shifting historical constructions of white trash from the Progressive Era to the post–World War II era to unearth the relationship between transgression and innocence. Beginning in the 1940s, white trash underwent a significant transformation that smoothed the reentrenchment of racial innocence during the era of Cold War liberalism and civil rights. Once figures of suspect racial “purity,” white trash in the postwar period operated as a repository of intractable antiblack violence, mobism, and retrogression. Their movement from racial contaminant to guilty white, I argue, brings into sharp relief the class-inflected transformation of racial innocence during the critical civil rights years: the New South’s commitment to “color-blind” law-and-order and economic progress were together formative of the protection of emergent white middle-class interests in the postwar South and a new kind of racial innocence that has since settled into contemporary national discourses on race.

Making and Unmaking the Working Class: E. P. Thompson and the “New Labor History” in the United States

For both political and historiographical reasons, E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class had a great impact on the new radical US history at its moment of gestation. Thompson's Socialist Humanism appealed to younger radical historians seeking to break with both Cold War liberalism and a highly structuralist form of Marxism. His looser conception of class and his emphasis on culture shaped a new more flexible conception of class formation. Yet Thompson's interrogation of class analysis, and the racial and ethnic complexity of the process in the United States, encouraged an emphasis on “unmaking” in the American context. If we have deconstructed and greatly complicated the notions of class and class formation, this process started not with postmodern theory but rather with The Making. The experience of class, which resides at the center of the book, also draws our attention to the emotional dimension of class.

The Tank Driver who Ran with Poodles: US Visions of Israeli Soldiers and the Cold War Liberal Consensus, 1958–79

Gender & HistoryVolume 26, Issue 3 p. 620-641 Article The Tank Driver who Ran with Poodles: US Visions of Israeli Soldiers and the Cold War Liberal Consensus, 1958–79 Shaul Mitelpunkt, Shaul MitelpunktSearch for more papers by this author Shaul Mitelpunkt, Shaul MitelpunktSearch for more papers by this author First published: 13 October 2014 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-0424.12091Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Volume26, Issue3Special Issue: ‘Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges’, Gender & History 26, 3 (2014)November 2014Pages 620-641 RelatedInformation

From College Readiness to Ready for Revolution! Third World Student Activism at a Northern California Community College, 1965–1969

The history of the creation of academic ethnic studies departments in the 1960s often focuses on relationships between popular social movements and activists on campuses of research universities. This history often neglects the emergence of ethnic studies programs at community colleges serving working-class students. Community colleges were the public institutions of higher education that enrolled (and still enroll) the greatest number of working-class students (of color). There are more than one hundred community colleges across California, which serve as the primary entry point to higher education for Latinas/os. This article presents a history of battles over ethnic studies at the College of San Mateo in California in order to explore the dialectic of reform and revolution as it unfolded there. Postwar liberalism created new opportunities and offered new promises by opening up new spaces for Latinas/os and other students of color. Yet these transformations also laid the groundwork for frustration because of both structural and ideological limitations in these institutions. Frustrations with Cold War liberalism played an important role at the College of San Mateo in promoting a greater embrace of revolutionary politics among students of color from working-class backgrounds. The struggle at San Mateo also illuminates an often forgotten dimension of the Chicana/o movement—its affinities for inter-ethnic anti-racist coalitional work. In contrast to Southern California and other locations in the West and Southwest, in the Bay Area cultural nationalism rarely became the ideological touchstone for Latina/o radicalism. Chicanas/os in Northern California often lived, worked, and organized alongside Latinas/os from Central America, thereby contributing to a more expansive political identification. La Raza Unida Party in Northern California, for instance, defined Raza as anyone with roots in Latin America, while San Francisco State University implemented a Department of Raza Studies instead of Chicana/o Studies. At the same time, a distinctly Third Worldist discourse shaped Latina/o politics, born of the interconnections that existed between various communities of color in the region. While a regional movement of Third World students existed in the Bay Area that included Berkeley, San Francisco State, San Jose State, Laney Community College, and a host of inner-city high schools, this essay places the College of San Mateo at the center of the story.

Camp sites: sex, politics, and academic style in postwar America

Reading across the disciplines of the mid-century university, this book argues that the political shift in postwar America from consensus liberalism to New Left radicalism entailed as many continuities as ruptures. Both Cold War liberals and radicals understood the university as a privileged site for doing politics, and both exiled homosexuality from the political ideals each group favoured. Liberals, who advanced a politics of style over substance, saw gay people as unable to separate the two, as incapable of maintaining the opportunistic suspension of disbelief on which a tough-minded liberalism depended. Radicals, committed to a politics of authenticity, saw gay people as hopelessly beholden to the role-playing and duplicity that the radicals condemned in their liberal forebears. Camp Sites considers key themes of postwar culture, from the conflict between performance and authenticity to the rise of the meritocracy, through the lens of camp, the underground sensibility of pre-Stonewall gay life. In so doing, it argues that our basic assumptions about the social style of the postwar milieu are deeply informed by certain presuppositions about homosexual experience and identity, and that these presuppositions remain stubbornly entrenched despite our post-Stonewall consciousness-raising.