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Whatever Happened to the Social in American Social Thought? Part 1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2021

Dorothy Ross
Dorothy Ross*
Affiliation:
History Department, Johns Hopkins University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

The efforts of liberal thinkers to incorporate mutualistic social principles into Americans’ understanding of liberalism extended through the century, but the strongest and most holistic conceptions of the social sphere took hold during the New Deal era and World War II. Contrary to recent accounts that locate the weakening of that social liberal project in the 1970s and attribute it to underlying economic changes, this article builds on two generations of historiography to argue that the decline began during the long 1950s when totalitarianism changed the political context of social thought. The theory of mass society that developed to explain the rise of totalitarianism replaced the citizens of liberal democratic theory with the anxious, rootless masses of modern society and forecast the collapse of liberal democracy into totalitarianism. Americans cast totalitarianism as the antithesis of America, its Other in the narrative of American identity, a threat both without and within. In that context, mutualistic conceptions of the social sphere were put on the defensive and individual liberty was valorized. Liberal intellectuals, trusting in American capitalism and in the weak social state, focused on the threat of McCarthyite anti-intellectualism and mass irrationality. Their commitment to social democracy weakened and their chief concern shifted to the no-longer-autonomous individuals of modern society.

Type
Essays
Information
Modern Intellectual History , Volume 18 , Issue 4 , December 2021 , pp. 1155 - 1177
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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4 Rodgers, Age of Fracture, 185, 220; see also 198, 271.

5 Brick, Transcending Capitalism, 10; Dorothy Ross, “Socialism and American Liberalism: Academic Social Thought in the 1880s,” Perspectives in American History 2 (1977–8), 5–79.

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