The Twilight of the American Enlightenment

by George Marsden

  3. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, viii, 208–209.

  4. Ibid., 173, 186 (emphasis in original). Fromm’s outlook was related to that of the heavy-duty intellectual theorists of the “Frankfurt School,” Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse. He shared their concern over “the authoritarian personality,” as Adorno and his coauthors put it in their massive sociological and theoretical study (T. W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford, The Authoritarian Personality [New York: Harper, 1950]). These philosophers decried “the enlightenment,” but they themselves had great confidence in social scientific methods. Fromm had broken with these theorists over a number of issues. He also differed from them in that he could write engagingly in English.

  5. Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1965 [1955]), 309, 311, 64, cf. 17–19, 29–66, 122, 139–146, 315.

  6. The brilliant intellectual historian Perry Miller had recently brought attention to the jeremiad as a favorite American Puritan genre. Miller himself celebrated Puritan intellectualism, joining others of his generation in lamenting America’s decline to anti-intellectualism. See, especially, his two volumes on the subject, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939), and The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953).

  7. The Sane Society had gone through sixteen printings by 1966. Mainstream reviewers tended to be impressed by its insights, but they did point out that some of its psychological categories for interpreting history were speculative. See, for example, the review by Joseph Wood Krutch, New York Times, September 4, 1955, 9. Fromm’s most popular book, The Art of Loving (1956) was a sort of how-to book. Learning how to love was an art, he suggested, and learning that art (and the alternatives to it) was the key to countering modern alienation.

  James Hudnut-Beumler, in Looking for God in the Suburbs: The Religion of the American Dream and Its Critics, 1945–1965 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994), 91, said that Riesman borrowed the concepts (although apparently not the exact phrases) “inner-directed” and “other-directed” from Fromm’s Man for Himself (1947), and that Fromm adopted them from Martin Heidegger.

  The commentator was Eric Larrabee, in “David Riesman and His Readers,” in Culture and Social Character: The Work of David Riesman Reviewed, Seymour Martin Lipset and Leo Lowenthal, eds. (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1961), 406. The Time cover appeared on September 27, 1954, for the cover story entitled “Freedom—New Style.”

  8. This topic has been covered in many works. Martin Halli­well, American Culture in the 1950s (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2007), provides a useful overview of culture at all levels. Another convenient introduction is David Castronovo, Beyond the Gray Flannel Suit: Books from the 1950s That Made American Culture (New York: Continuum, 2004).

  9. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1961 [1950]), xxxiii, 9–19, 19–24, 58–62, 37.

  10. William Whyte, The Organization Man (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957 [1956]), 11, 3, 7, 17, 31–32, 35, 13, 437, 443, 448.

  11. Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (New York: D. McKay, 1957), 200. Historian David Potter offered a more academic and judicious assessment of the role of advertising in his People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954). Potter put the subject in a historical framework, arguing that what had long made the United States distinctive was the presence of unprecedented abundance.

  12. Vance Packard, The Status Seekers (New York: Pocket Books, 1961 [1959]), 316.

  13. This example is taken from Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (New York: Free Press, 1960), 35. Bell noted only that it was the December 1958 issue of Reader’s Digest. The Reader’s Digest circulation at the time was 12 million; Women’s Day’s circulation was 5 million.

  14. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997 [1963]). Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1952) was part of the discourse of the alienation of modern people as it related to African Americans. Though it was influential, it did not have the direct social impact of Friedan’s work. In Friedan’s book, as in other works on “modern man” in the era, African Americans remained invisible.

  15. This summary of Friedan’s early career draws on David Halberstam’s account in The Fifties (New York: Random House, 1993), 592–598.

  16. Friedan, Feminine Mystique, 425, 429, 434, 441, 450, 459–460.

  17. The song “Me and Bobby Magee” was written by Kris Kristofferson and Fred Foster and originally performed by Roger Miller in 1969.

  Chapter Three: Enlightenment’s End? Building Without Foundations

  1. John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1934), 48.

  2. Walter Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955).

  3. Walter Lippmann, Preface to Morals (New York: Macmillan, 1929); Walter Lippmann, The Cold War: A Study in U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Harper, 1947).

  4. Lippmann, Essays in the Public Philosophy, 19–20, 100, 92, 156, 93–94.

  5. Carl Binger, Lippmann’s friend from childhood, used this phrase for his title in “A Child of the Enlightenment,” in Walter Lippmann and His Times, Marquis Childs and James Reston, eds. (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1959), 21–36.

  6. His classic summary of this idea is in William James, “What Pragmatism Means,” Lecture II in a series of eight lectures on pragmatism that were published as Pragmatism, a New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking: Popular Lectures on Philosophy by William James (New York: Longmans, Green, 1907). See also William James, The Meaning of Truth: A Sequel to “Pragmatism” (New York: Longmans, Green, 1909), and the exposition in James T. Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking?” Journal of American History 83, no. 1 (1996): 100–138. Kloppenberg contrasts James’s realism to more radical pragmatists, such as Richard Rorty of the late twentieth century.

  7. Quoted from Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962 [1913]), 82–83, in John Patrick Diggins, The Promise of Pragmatism: Modernism and the Crisis of Knowledge and Authority (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 326; quoted from Walter Lipp­mann, Drift and Mastery (New York: Henry Holt, 1914), 285, in Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “Walter Lippmann: The Intellectual v. Politics,” in Walter Lipp­mann and His Times, Marquis Childs and James Reston, eds. (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1959), 196.

  8. Lippmann, Preface to Morals, 12, 144.

  9. Joseph Wood Krutch, The Modern Temper: A Study and a Confession (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929); Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1932).

  10. Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), 310–326, regarding Lippmann’s views of the New Deal, as well as Lippmann’s book on the subject, The Good Society (Boston: Little, Brown, 1937). Conservative reviews hailed his affirmation of a “higher law.”

  11. Paul Blanshard, American Freedom and Catholic Power (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949); William F. Buckley, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom (Chicago: Regnery, 1951). Meanwhile, Father John Courtney Murray was in the process of rehabilitating the Catholic image in a series of scholarly presentations, which were eventually gathered into his influential We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960). In these presentations he argued that the natural-law ideals of the founders had continuities with the ideas of Thomas Aquinas and Catholicism.

  12. During the late 1930s, Lippmann had been temporarily attracted to Catholicism; see Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 491–492. Edward A. Purcell Jr., in The Crisis of Democratic Theory: Scientific
Naturalism and the Problem of Value (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1973), 154, noted that, at least when Lippmann first started talking about natural law in the late 1930s, his concept of natural law was not even metaphysical but was based on a historical and cultural process of rational deductions from immutable principles. Lippmann was not alone among prominent non-Catholic thinkers in advocating natural law; Robert Hutchins, former president of the University of Chicago, and Hutchins’s friend and associate Mortimer Adler were the best known. See Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, 494–495, for a summary of the reviews.

  13. Archibald MacLeish, “The Alternative,” Yale Review 44, no. 4 (1955): 492, 495.

  14. Walter Lippmann, “A Rejoinder,” Yale Review 44, no. 4 (1955): 499–500 (emphasis in original).

  15. Schlesinger, “Walter Lippmann: The Intellectual v. Politics,” 219–222.

  16. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), 254, 156, 256.

  17. Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), 22–36, 372–374. Nathan Liebowitz, in Daniel Bell and the Agony of Modern Liberalism (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985), 9–39, puts Bell’s views into context and associates them with those of Seymour Lipset, Edward Shils, and Raymond Aron.

  18. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., “Sources of the New Deal,” in Paths to American Thought, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Morton White, eds. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 389; Daniel Bell, “Introduction,” in The New American Right, Daniel Bell, ed. (New York: Criterion Books, 1955), 4, 17, 27. The essay was also in Bell, End of Ideology. Daniel J. Boorstin developed a very similar reading of American history in The Genius of American Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). Boorstin wrote, for instance, “A pretty good rule of thumb for us in the United States is that our national well-being is in inverse proportion to the sharpness and extent of theoretical differences between our political parties” (p. 3).

  19. Robert Booth Fowler, Believing Skeptics: America Political Intellectuals, 1945–1964 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978). Purcell, Crisis in Democratic Theory, offers a particularly trenchant analysis of this dominant outlook, which he designates as “relativist democratic theory.” See also Richard H. Pells, The Liberal Mind in a Conservative Age (New York: Harper and Row, 1985).

  20. Robert Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 45, 151; Louis Hartz, quoted from “Democracy: Image and Reality,” in Democracy in the Mid-20th Century, W. N. Chambers and R. N. Salisbury, eds. (St. Louis: Washington University, 1960), 29, in Purcell, Crisis of Democratic Theory, 258.

  21. Schlesinger, Vital Center, 190, 191.

  22. Edward Purcell observed that “civil liberties and civil rights could well have helped reform-minded intellectuals overlook the fundamental status quo orientation of their theory.” Purcell, Crisis of Democratic Theory, 255.

  23. This paragraph and the next are dependent on David Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 27–28, 207n, quoting Schlesinger, Vital Center, 20, 190. Chappell sees the influential book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy, by Gunnar Myrdal, with the assistance of Richard Sterner and Arnold Rose (New York: Harper Brothers, 1944), as among the leading instances of faith in the progressive acceptance of the “American creed,” promoted through education, as the best hope for resolving race (p. 42).

  24. See, for example, Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988).

  25. On personalism, see the quotation from Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom (New York: Perennial Library, 1964 [1958]), 82, quoted in Ira G. Zepp Jr., The Social Vision of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1989), 173; for God placing moral laws within the structure of the universe, see Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 128, quoted in Zepp, Social Vision, 198. Zepp offers a careful survey of these philosophical and theological views. He observes, “Whatever else King firmly believed, he affirmed the moral structure of the universe” (p. 198).

  26. King, Strength to Love, 115, and other quotations, quoted in Zepp, Social Vision, 196, 211.

  27. Martin Luther King Jr., I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World, James Melvin Washington, ed. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1986), 89.

  Chapter Four: The Problem of Authority: The Two Masters

  1. William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1962 [1958]), 34, 36, 275, 269, 276, 279, 271, 4–7.

  2. I am indebted to Richard Lints’s helpful account of “foundationalism” in Progressive and Conservative Religious Ideologies: The Tumultuous Decade of the 1960s (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 145–149.

  3. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (New York: Dover, 1952 [1946]), 46, 119, 107–108.

  4. See, for instance, Nicholas Wolterstorff, “Scholarship Grounded in Religion,” in Religion, Scholarship, and Higher Education: Perspectives, Models and Future Prospects, Andrea Sterk, ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 3–15. Cf. Lints, Progressive and Conservative Religious Ideologies.

  5. B. F. Skinner, “Baby in a Box,” Ladies’ Home Journal, October 1945.

  6. B. F. Skinner, Walden Two (New York: Macmillan, 1948); Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1932); B. F. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 427.

  7. Skinner, Science and Human Behavior, 5, 7, 9, 5, 20, 439.

  8. Various other earlier figures, such as Karen Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan, whom Rogers acknowledged as predecessors, provided theories of personality that were more positive than Freud’s. Rogers’s post-Freudian optimism also has similarities to Erich Fromm’s. Jason W. Stevens, God-Fearing and Free: A Spiritual History of America’s Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 185–219, provides a detailed account of these developments.

  9. Carl Rogers, Client-Centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications, and Theory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951), 4, 6.

  10. “Some Issues Concerning the Control of Human Behavior: A Symposium, Carl R. Rogers and B. F. Skinner,” Science 124 (1956): 1057–1065; republished in Richard I. Evans, Carl Rogers: The Man and His Ideas (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965), xliv–lxxxviii.

  11. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1928); Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934); Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, and Clyde E. Martin, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948); Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy, Clyde E. Martin, and Paul H. Gebhard, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Philadelphia, W. B. Saunders, 1953).

  12. The idea that the 1960s accelerated trends already under way is the argument of Alan Petigny in The Permissive Society: America, 1941–1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Other works cited here are Grace Metalious, Peyton Place (New York: Messner, 1956); Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1958); D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover (New York: Grove Press, 1959).

  13. Benjamin Spock, The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (New York: Pocket Books, 1946); Thomas Maier, Dr. Spock: An American Life (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1998), 200.

  14. The quotations are from the first edition, page numbers not given, in Maier, Dr. Spock, 129, 136. Cf. Petigny, Permissive Society, 39–40, 227 (emphasis in original).

  15. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Warner, 1979, 22, 114, 116, 119, 103.

  16. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits o
f the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 47. For an insightful and more recent take on aspects of these trends, see David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). Brooks relates his analysis specifically to the social critiques of the 1950s.

  Chapter Five: The Latter Days of the Protestant Establishment

  1. Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 87, citing George Gallup and D. Michael Lindsay, Surveying the Religious Landscape: Trends in US. Beliefs (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1999), 7, 19; Sidney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 952.

  2. John K. Jessup, ed., The Ideas of Henry Luce (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 282. Luce sometimes did make a distinction, but he also often lapsed into conflation, as in “God of Our Fathers,” a centennial speech at Lake Forest College in which he spoke of the specifically Presbyterian heritage, but ended by saying, “We Americans, in relation to the future, stand about where Joshua stood,” essentially equating America’s mission with that of ancient Israel. Jessup, ed., Ideas of Henry Luce, 324.

  3. David Sarnoff, “The Fabulous Future,” and John von Neumann, “Can We Survive Technology?” in The Fabulous Future: America in 1980, by the Editors of Fortune (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1956), 18, 37. In Sarnoff’s view, moreover, “the interdependence of people in a world shrunk by science inevitably requires broader mental concepts, which would lead to great ethical and moral stature—which in turn stimulate man’s spiritual growth” (p. 26).

  4. Henry R. Luce, “A Speculation About 1980,” in The Fabulous Future: America in 1980, by the Editors of Fortune (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1956), 183–184; “the public philosophy” quotation is from a speech at St. Louis University, November 16, 1955, quoted in Jessup, ed., Ideas of Henry Luce, 166–167.