|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Richard Pells, Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age: American Intellectuals in the 1940s and 1950s (Harper and Row, 1985; Wesleyan University Press, 1994) An examination of the intellectuals living and working between the end of WWII and Vietnam — C. Wright Mills, Dwight MacDonald, Arthur Schlesinger, Daniel Boorstin, Hannah Arendt, Norman Mailer, Paul Goodman, and Edmund Wilson among others — who resisted the reigning conservatism through their writings in magazines like Dissent, The New Republic, and Partisan Review. Pells examines American intellectuals' diverse reactions to the Cold War, McCarthyism, the threat of a nuclear holocaust, the rise of a distinctly middle-class lifestyle, and the psychological backlash against middle-class values that culminated in the New Left. Proceeding chronologically, he creates an account of how the disillusionment of the 1940s led to the quiet conformity of the 1950s, which in turn laid the foundations for the eruptions of the 1960s. Reviewers criticized Pells for failing to distance himself from the intellectuals he was writing about. David Hollinger, writing in the American History Review, called the work "banal and moralistic," yet also acknowledged that "this is a significant work of scholarship by a serious and able historian." James Nuechterlein wrote in Commentary that Pells "has not mastered [the ideological cross-currents of the period], he has instead become their victim." MORE: Amazon |
|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||