THE SEARCH FOR HISTORICAL MEANING
Hegel and the postwar American Right
Paul Edward Gottried
Dekalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986.
170 pp., $27.00 (cloth)
The fifteen years between V-J Day and the inauguration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy as president have come, in the surprising light of retrospect, to take on the appearance of a golden age of cultural vitality in American history. Ironically, the suggestion of such a judgment would have been greeted with shock, or more likely with a snigger, by the most respected American intellectuals of the time. To borrow the deathless words of Newton Minow of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC,) they beheld not vitality, but a vast wasteland when they contemplated the spectacle of America in the 1950s. They were disgusted by Americans' excessive and increasing conformism, by the plodding and uninspiring "modern Republicanism" of Dwight David Eisenhower, by the cancerous growth of huge sprawling suburban tracts like Levittown on Long Island, by the emergence of a vulgar and voracious "consumer culture," by the numbing emptiness of television programming, and, in general, by an American way of life that, in the words of John Kenneth Galbraith, opted for "private splendor" at the expense of public squalor. Needless to say, a society so mired down in the muck of material preoccupations, and so relentlessly and mindlessly egalitarian in its tastes and prejudices, could never sustain the sort of lofty and serious qualities of mind that made for genuine achievement in the realm of high culture.
Viewed from the perspective of the 1980s, though, through the dark prism of the intervening decades - years of military humiliation in an unpopular and badly bungled war, of chronic economic stagnation and inflation, and of the ignominious retreat of lofty and serious qualities of mind from the world of high culture - those postwar years have slowly acquired a sheen that their contemporary chroniclers would never have granted them. Nowhere is this more evident than in the life of the mind. The decrepit state of the contemporary American novel, for example, stands in striking contrast to the many fine novels of the 1950's, when American literature reaped the benefits of an extraordinary efflorescence of Jewish and Southern fiction, embodied in the likes of Saul Bellow and Flannery O'Connor. Poets like W.H. Auden and Randall Jarrell, literary critics like Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson, historians like Richard Hofstdter, sociologists like David Riesman - all were at the peak of their powers in those years, and the fresh currents of modernism in the visual arts that transformed New York into the art capital of the world had not yet degenerated into empty trendiness and publicity-mongering.
All of the names mentioned above were affiliated, in varying degrees, with the political and cultural Left. Indeed, historiographical convention leaves little doubt that the intellectual history of these years can be summarized precisely as the historian Richard Pells did in the title of his recent study of the period: The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age. But, as Paul Gottfried argues in his stimulating study The Search for Historical Meaning, we should add the names of some of the most venerable founders of the postwar conservative intellectual movement to the list as well. For conservative intellectuals no less than liberals, the 1950s were an extraordinarily fertile
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