In order to tell the literary history of “progressive liberalism” in the twentieth-century American novel, this chapter traces the career of the word “liberalism” from progressivism’s synonym during the Progressive Era to its antonym ever since the Cold War. This conceptual history has underwritten not only the history of American political thought, but also that of the American novel in the twentieth century. It was in the literary imagination – from the realist and, even more crucially, the naturalist novel of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the multicultural novel of the late twentieth century – that the changing meanings of “progressive” and “liberal” were developed and tested. By the same token, these political categories provided a vocabulary for politically placing and adjudicating individual works and even whole genres and literary developments – efforts that became increasingly central to literary studies as the discipline became self-consciously politicized. In particular, the chapter pays attention to canonical novels by Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, Ralph Ellison, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Mary McCarthy, and Toni Morrison.

Chapter 2 sets the stage for the analysis of my three cases, by delineating an account of utopianism that manages to withstand the objections raised by anti-utopian critics, both from the Left and the Right. I hold that these detractors miss their target insofar as they fail to acknowledge the actual complexity of utopianism. While utopias can, under specific circumstances, turn out to be impractical or dangerous, it is wrong to assume that this is necessarily and always the case. Drawing on groundbreaking work in utopian studies, I thus claim that anti-perfectionist utopias set into motion forms of social dreaming that productively educate our desire for things to be otherwise. The chapter then continues by investigating what can be considered utopianism’s paramount function: the production of estrangement. In a further step, I scrutinize the other two purposes that utopian visions of the Anthropocene cater to, namely galvanizing (eutopias) and cautioning (dystopias) an audience. Chapter 2 ends with an intermezzo elaborating on utopian practices – social experiments that perform collective life “against the grain.”

The introduction begins with a critical biographical overview of Aron’s career as a whole. This overview, which opens with an account of Aron’s emergence in the 1970s as an anti-totalitarian icon, serves as a point of entry into the larger questions addressed throughout the book. Both the 'French liberal revival' and Aron’s specific contribution to it have, it is argued, previously been treated more in laudatory evaluative terms than critical analytical ones. While the liberal status of Aron’s political thought has been largely taken for granted, the French liberal renaissance has been analysed on its own terms such that its claims for the historical illiberality of French political culture in particular have often been taken at face value. These points lead into a brief historiographical review which links the literature on Aron and the liberal revival to recent debates around the history of French and European liberalism more broadly.

This chapter considers Raymond Aron’s position in the intellectual history of liberalism from several angles. It argues that in relation to the Dreyfusard liberalism of his teachers’ generation his attitude was mostly critical but that he played a crucial role in the formulation of what has since come to be known as cold war liberalism. The chapter also offers a critique of the notion of a ‘French liberal revival’ and concludes by considering the implications of Aron’s oeuvre for the crisis of liberalism in the early twenty-first century.

This chapter explores the origins, development and applications of Aron’s theory of totalitarianism from the 1930s to the 1950s. It begins by discussing how Aron’s earliest theorisations of totalitarianism and political religion emerged from critical dialogues with the works of Élie Halévy and Carl Schmitt such that by the eve of the Second World War Aron had arrived at an understanding of totalitarianism as a pathology of modern democracy. The chapter then considers how Aron’s theory of totalitarianism developed with the onset of the Cold War and how this impacted on his understanding of the meaning of modern democracy as a constitutional, pluralist, multi-party regime. It concludes with a discussion of Aron’s theory of totalitarianism in relation to that of Hannah Arendt, explaining how and why Aron came to de-emphasise notions of totalitarianism and secular religion in his work following the death of Stalin in 1953.

This chapter focuses on Aron's contribution to ‘end of ideology’ theory. Aron played an important role in reorienting the Congress for Cultural Freedom towards this theme in 1955. But, as this chapter shows, the possibility of a post-ideological politics had interested him since the late 1920s. The chapter thus begins by explaining how and why Aron came to be preoccupied with this theme via his involvement in the overlapping peripheries of neosocialist and neoliberal thinktanks in the interwar years. It then considers how his involvement in these circles informed Aron’s writings on the theme of post-war economic planning in some of his writings in the 1940s. After discussing Aron’s involvement in the ‘end of ideology’ debate within the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the chapter considers the implications of this debate for Aron’s views on decolonization, challenging the view that Aron was the theorist of a ‘liberal retreat from empire’. Finally, it considers how Aron’s dissatisfaction with the end of ideology, together with the emergence of the New Left, led him to become increasingly concerned with the need for a revival of normative political theory in the later 1950s.