Book
The twilight of the American enlightenment : the 1950s and the crisis of liberal belief
Publication Information
New York : Basic Books, [2014]
Physical Description
xxxix, 219 pages ; 22 cm
Summary
"Historian George Marsden examines the faltering attempts by the country's brightest minds to establish a new national identity and purpose for postwar America, and explains how their efforts--and eventual failure--helped to shape the society we live in today. As Marsden shows, the nation's challenges heavily influenced political debates and American art during the 1950s. Playwrights and novelists in particular reflected on the simultaneous conformity and alienation of modern man, with authors such as Dwight MacDonald and James Baldwin lamenting the new 'mass man,' whom mass media had robbed of all individualism. So too did sociologists Erich Fromm and David Riesman, whose idea of a 'lonely crowd' seemed to sum up the inauthenticity of mainstream America. Political philosophers including Walter Lippmann, meanwhile, feared that the pragmatism of thinkers such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Daniel Bell--who rejected wholesale ideologies in favor of a relativistic, selective politics--had left the nation directionless at a crucial moment in American history"--