“The Lonely Frontier of Reason:” liberalism and its critics at the International Association for Cultural Freedom’s 1968 “confrontation”

ABSTRACT

Amid controversy over race relations and the Vietnam War, American liberalism faced enormous criticism in the 1960s. In 1968, ninety of the world’s leading social scientists attended a conference sponsored by the International Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF) to discuss the Cold War, Vietnam War, Black Power, the New Left, postindustrial society, and America’s relations with the world. The conference, which the IACF billed as a “confrontation,” offered a microcosm of the views of an embattled liberal establishment and its critics. Although the conference was ostensibly held to address America’s political problems, participants focused principally on the role of intellectuals in American society, the emergent counterculture, and growing opposition to technocratic management and rationality. Because liberal intellectuals equated their political views with rationality and discounted dissenting views to the left and right as irrational, they feared not only for the survival of liberalism, but of reason itself.

KEYWORDS:

• Liberalism
• rationality
• counterculture
• technocracy
• social science
• intellectuals
• new left
• black power

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Records of the conference are contained in the International Association for Cultural Freedom Records, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center, Regenstein Library, The University of Chicago (henceforth IACF papers) and the Shepard Stone papers, Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth University (henceforth Stone papers). The IACF published many of the papers and discussions from the conference in François Duchêne (ed.), The Endless Crisis: America in the Seventies (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970).

2. de Vries, “The 1967 Central Intelligence Agency Scandal,” 1075–92.

3. The Congress for Cultural Freedom has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention. See Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle; Saunders, The Cultural Cold War; Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? ; Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer; Scott-Smith, The Politics of Apolitical Culture; Lasch, “The Cultural Cold War: A Short History, 63–114; Mattson, When America was Great, 9. On the career of Shepard Stone, see Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe; Menand, The Free World: Art and Culture, 707–17. For news accounts of the 1967 scandal over the CCF’s ties to the CIA, see “Ex-Official of C.I.A. Lists Big Grants to Labor Aides,” New York Times, May 8, 1967; “C.I.A. Tie Confirmed by Cultural Group,” New York Times, May 10, 1967; de Vries, “The 1967 Central Intelligence Agency Scandal.”

The Ford Foundation contributed funding to the CCF and to the IACF. On the founding of the IACF, see the Ford Foundation, “Congress for Cultural Freedom,” September 1967, Stone papers, Box 58, Folder 39; Gloria Emerson, “Cultural Group Once Aided by CIA Picks Ford Fund Aide to be its Director,” New York Times, October 2, 1967; ‘Gloria Emerson, ‘Cultural Group Announces a Choice of New Head, New York Times, October 3, 1967, 9; Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars, 250–55; Saunders, Cultural Cold War, 411–13.

4. Schlesinger, The Vital Center; “Our Country and Our Culture”. See also Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America, 3–32.

5. Bell, The End of Ideology On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas, 373. On the “managerial optimism” of Daniel Bell, John Kenneth Galbraith, and other American liberals, see Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe, 290. For a critique of Bell’s “end of ideology” thesis, see Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” 63–72.

6. Matusow, The Unraveling of America, 3–13.

7. On post-WWII liberalism, see Matusow, Unraveling of America; Mattson, When America was Great: The Fighting Faith of Liberalism, 14; Brick, Age of Contradiction: American Thought and Culture; Fowler, Enduring Liberalism: American Political Thought; Gillon, Politics and Vision: The ADA and American Liberalism; Brinkley, Liberalism and Its Discontents, ix-xii; Boyle, The Shattering: America in the 1960s; Cowie, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2016), esp. 9–13. For an account of how suburbanization and the transition to a post-industrial society changed liberalism, see Lily Geismer, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation. Paul Sabin examines the role of citizen advocates in remaking liberalism and undermining Americans’ trust in government in the 1960s and 1970s. Paul Sabin, Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2021).

8. Gerstle, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” 1043–73, esp. 1045–47; 1070–73. See also Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation, 238–67.

9. Max Weber’s contention that rationalization was the hallmark of modern government and society supplied one of the foundations of modern social science. Weber, “Bureaucracy,”956–1005. For an analysis of Weber’s concept of rationality, see Kalberg, “Max Weber’s Types of Rationality, 1145–79. On the centuries-long development of “political rationality” in the West, see Foucault, “‘Omnes et Singulatim:’ Toward a Critique of Political Reason,” 298–325. For a succinct analysis of Foucault’s understanding of political rationality and governmentality, see Cornelissen, “What is Political Rationality?” 125–62; for more extensive analyses, see Lemke, Foucault’s Analysis of Modern Governmentality; Lemke, Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique; Burchell, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Economic geographer Bent Flyvbjerg has also analyzed the inseparability of “rationality” and power. Flyvbjerg, Rationality and Power: Democracy in Action, 2. See also Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter.

10. Bell, End of Ideology, 376.

11. Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, 6, 417. The best-known criticism of intellectuals trading their scholarly objectivity for political influence remains Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals.

12. Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 316. On the debate over intellectuals’ relationship to power, see Brick, Age of Contradiction, 18, 29–33, 169–72; Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals . For an effort to measure intellectuals’ role in government, see Townsley, “A History of Intellectuals and the Demise of the New Class, 739–84. On intellectuals as social critics, see Theodore Roszak (ed.), The Dissenting Academy (New York: Pantheon, 1968); Mills, “Letter to the New Left.” Andrew Jewett argues that some intellectuals and students believed that universities should remain autonomous from contemporary society and political debates to ensure that universities could be sites for social criticism. Jewett, “The Politics of Knowledge in 1960s America,” 51–81.

13. Bell, End of Ideology, 16. For perhaps the most influential expression of distrust of the masses, see Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” Harper’s Magazine 229, no. 1374 (Novermber 1964), 77-86; expanded in Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965), 3-40.

14. Kraft, “Intellectuals Show Impatience with the New Administration”. See also Jacoby, The Age of American Unreason, 151–53; Rieder, “The Rise of the ‘Silent Majority,’” 243–68.

15. Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals”; also in Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, 323–66 and in Roszak, Dissenting Academy, 254–98; Mills, “Letter to the New Left.”

16. Lowi, The End of Liberalism, esp. ix-x, 79, 85, 97, 287–97.

17. Purcell, The Crisis of Democratic Theory, 238–42, 253–59.

18. Gillon, Politics and Vision, 149–50, 186, 195, 223; Brick, Age of Contradiction, 124–36.

19. Jumonville, Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Postwar America, 221–29. For a discussion of the older generation’s defense of “reason,” see Poirier, “The War Against the Young: Its Beginnings,” 143–66.

20. Those who worried in the 1960s that Americans would reject reason would likely agree with Susan Jacoby’s contention that irrational and unfounded views of politics, society, and science have gained adherents in recent decades. Jacoby, Age of American Unreason, 131–82.

21. IACF, “The Crisis of Rationality,” IACF papers, Box 574, Folder 28, 4–5; Stone papers, Box 54, Folder 29 Box 58, Folder 40. As Volker Berghahn observes, “The Crisis of Rationality” was deeply indebted to Daniel Bell’s ideas about postindustrial society and its opponents. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars, 267–68; “Post-Industrial Society: The Crisis of Rationality,” 5–15.

22. Raymont, “80 World Intellectuals to Hold Seminar on Problems of U.S.,” 2; Raymont, “Intellectuals Gather to Discuss Nixon’s Problems,” 72; “Seminar Studies U.S. Woes,” New York Times, December 3, 1968, 47, 61. Ultimately, the IACF spent $80,000 to host the conference. For a profile of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, see Shenker, “Servan-Schreiber Dreams Big,” 34-35ff; Servan-Schreiber, The American Challenge; Servan-Schreiber, “The American Challenge,” Harper’s, July 1968.

23. Jeleński, “Note on the Seminar ‘The United States, its Impacts and its Image,’” April 3, 1968, p. 1–2, IACF papers, Box 460, Folder 7. This document quotes a draft proposal for the conference dated March 6, 1968; Note on the meeting of Carl Kaysen, Shepard Stone, Diana Michaelis, and K. A. Jelenski, March 27, 1968, Stone papers, Box 60, Folder 13; see also the proposal for a “Seminar on the Impact and the Image of the United States,” Stone papers, Box 60, Folder 42.

24. Jeleński, “Note for Shepard Stone on the American Seminar,” March 26, 1968, IACF papers, Box 460, Folder 7.

25. While Peretz’s views were to the left of most of the conference participants,’ he was a liberal Democrat who had worked for the presidential campaign of Sen. Eugene McCarthy.

26. Brown later described his political views as “the right wing of the New Left.” Sam Brown, telephone conversation with the author, March 8, 2021. Brown had previously been the spokesman for the National Student Association (NSA), an organization that, along with the CCF, was exposed in 1967 as a recipient of funding from the CIA. Brown strongly condemned the NSA’s ties to the CIA. In 1969, he organized the Vietnam Moratorium to protest the war in Southeast Asia. On the CIA’s funding of the NSA, see Sol Stern, “NSA: A Short Account of International Student Politics & the Cold War, with Particular Reference to the NSA, CIA, Etc.,” Ramparts, March, 1967, 29–39.

27. The IACF invited presidential candidate Richard Nixon, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, senators Eugene McCarthy and George McGovern, former secretary of defense Robert McNamara, and New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. All declined the invitation.

28. See Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority. Some conference participants hoped that a Nixon victory would enhance the conference’s importance; see Konstanty A. Jeleński to Daniel Bell, October 1, 1968; Jeleński to Zbigniew Brzezinski, October 1, 1968, IACF papers, Box 460, Folder 4.

29. Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, opening address, IACF papers, Box 462, Folder 5; Stone papers, Box 60, Folder 45; “Introductory Remarks,” Endless Crisis, 62. See also Jumonville, Critical Crossings, 221–29.

30. Galbraith, in Endless Crisis, 69; IACF papers, Box 462, Folder 4; Stone papers, Box 60, Folder 16.

31. Galbraith, The New Industrial State, 8.

32. Galbraith, in Endless Crisis, 76, 77; Galbraith, “American Politics: The New Context,” in IACF papers, Box 462, Folder 4, pp. 1, 3, 5–6; Stone papers, Box 60, Folder 16.

33. Galbraith, in Endless Crisis, 80; IACF papers, Box 462, Folder 4; Stone papers, Box 60, Folder 16.

34. Crozier, in Endless Crisis, 205; Michel Crozier, “The Lonely Frontier of Reason,” The Nation, May 27, 1967, 690–91. Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon.

35. Crozier, in Endless Crisis, 205. See also Raymont, “Sociologist Sees Intellect ‘Peril,’” 11.

36. Bell joined the Harvard faculty the following year. Bell, in Endless Crisis, 128; Bell, “Structural Changes in the United States,” IACF papers, Box 462, Folder 4; Stone papers, Box 60, Folder 27; Endless Crisis, 186–92; Bell, “Notes on the Post-Industrial Society (I),” 24–35, esp. 30, and Bell, “Notes on the Post-Industrial Society (II),” 102–18, esp. 105, 107, 118; Bell, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, 366. On the growth of and changes to higher education, see Jencks and Riesman, The Academic Revolution(New York: Doubleday, 1968), 1–60.

37. Bell, “Notes on the Post-Industrial Society (II),” 105.

38. Bell, “Columbia and the New Left,” 61–101; quotation from 100.

39. Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, xiii.

40. Roszak, Making of a Counter Culture, xii. A few of the conference participants endorsed an anti-technocratic sensibility. Harvard political scientist Stanley Hoffmann criticized the excessive growth of bureaucracy and Americans’ “misapplication of rationality to areas of life in which it has no business.” Hoffmann, in Endless Crisis, 149.

41. Bell, “The Sensibility of the Sixties,” 120–45; quotation from 143 (Originally published as “Sensibility in the Sixties,” Commentary, June 1971.) See also “Post-Industrial Society: The Crisis of Rationality,” 14–15; Bell, “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,” 11–38; Bell, “The Revolt Against Modernity,” 42–63. For Bell’s retrospective consideration of the 1960s, see Bell, “The Cultural Wars: American Intellectual Life,” Wilson Quarterly 16, no. 3 (Summer 1992): 74–107.

42. Brzezinski,’ “Revolution and Counterrevolution,” 25. Brzezinski coined the term “technetronic.”

43. “Comment: Anti-Revolutionaries,” Time, June 28, 1968. For a pointed critique of both the Time article and Brzezinski’s ideas, see Richard Poirier, “The War Against the Young,” The Atlantic, October 1968. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1968/10/the-war-against-the-young/376264/

44. Brzezinski, “The American Transition,” 20; Zbigniew Brzezinski, “America in the Technetronic Age: New Questions of Our Time,” IACF papers, Box 462, Folder 4; Brzezinski, in Endless Crisis, 192–99. See also Brzezinski, “America in the Technetronic Age,” Encounter, January 1968, and Brzezinski, Between Two Eras: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York: Viking, 1970). See also Rasmussen, The New American Revolution.

45. Peretz, in Endless Crisis, 133. Peretz, “Some Notes on the Present and Future and Power and Wealth in America,” in Endless Crisis, 199–203; IACF papers, Box 462, Folder 5.

46. Peretz, in Endless Crisis, 131 (emphasis in original).

47. Peretz, in Endless Crisis, 133. Peretz, “Some Notes on the Present and Future of Power and Wealth in America,” 199–203; IACF papers, Box 462, Folder 5; Stone papers, Box 60, Folder 25. John Maddox, editor of Nature, and Martin Meyerson, chancellor of the State University of New York, criticized Peretz’s view of American society and disdain for postwar affluence, reminding him that millions of American citizens and consumers had eagerly embraced prosperity and purchased homes, automobiles, and television sets. Maddox and Meyerson, in Endless Crisis, 139–41.

48. The most influential statement of the New Left critique is Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement (1962), available at:

http://www.progressivefox.com/misc_documents/PortHuronStatement.pdf. On the New Left, see Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left; Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); for histories critical of the New Left, see Brinkley, Liberalism and its Discontents, 222–36; O’Neill, The New Left: A History(Hoboken, N.J: Wiley-Blackwell, 2001). On students’ political engagement in the 1960s, see Menand, The Free World, 695–700.

49. Kennan, “Rebels Without a Program,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, January 21, 1968, 23ff; Kennan, Democracy and the Student Left.

50. Kennan, “Rebels Without a Program,” 23, 60, 62.

51. Kennan, IACF papers, Box 62, Folder 5; Stone papers, Box 60, Folder 49; in Endless Crisis, 83.

52. Kennan, in Endless Crisis, 93; IACF papers, Box 62, Folder 5; Stone papers, Box 60, Folder 49.

53. Peretz, in Endless Crisis, 89.

54. Brown, in Endless Crisis, 93.

55. Hellman, in Endless Crisis, 91–92.

56. Lifton, in Endless Crisis, 162.

57. Shils, in Endless Crisis, 169, 171.

58. Discussions of American foreign relations at the conference focused almost exclusively on the Cold War. Scholars briefly considered America’s relations with Europe, Latin America, and Asia, but, only a year and a half after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the Middle East was conspicuously absent from the conference agenda, as was Africa.

59. Brzezinski, “Selective Disengagement,” IACF papers, Box 462, Folder 3; Stone papers, Box 60, Folder 19, in Endless Crisis, 216–19. Harvard political scientist Stanley Hoffmann similarly advised American policymakers to exercise “self-restraint” and to recognize the limits of American power and the right of other nations to choose their own form of government. Hoffman, “The Nation’s Dilemmas: A Critique,” IACF papers, Box 462, Folder 5; Stone papers, Box 60, Folder 20; in Endless Crisis, 221–24.

60. Servan-Schreiber, in Endless Crisis, 213, 215.

61. Schlesinger, in Endless Crisis, 286. Political scientist Joseph Nye later termed this cultural influence “soft power.” Joseph Nye, “Soft Power,” Foreign Affairs 80(Autumn 1990): 153–71. Henry Kissinger, whom president-elect Richard Nixon had recently named to head the National Security Council, spoke at the conference, but was too circumspect to offer any detailed suggestions about the future course of American diplomacy and strategy. Poised to join the growing list of professors who migrated from Cambridge to Washington, Kissinger offered only a few bromides about the president-elect’s willingness “to hear every point of view.” Kissinger, IACF papers, Box 462, Folder 5; Stone papers, Box 60, Folder 46; in Endless Crisis, 289–90.

62. Servan-Schreiber, “Introductory Remarks,” in Endless Crisis, 62–63.

63. Kennan, in Endless Crisis, 87; “Excerpts from Kennan’s Speech at Princeton Cultural Freedom Seminar,” New York Times, December 4, 1968, 93; Israel Shenker, “Kennan Analysis Coolly Received,” New York Times, December 4, 1968, 93.

64. On the Civil Rights Movement and protest, see Thomas J. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); Elizabeth Hinton, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion since the 1960s (New York: Liveright, 2021).

65. Phillips, Emerging Republican Majority, 1. On race relations and liberalism in the 1960s, see Averbeck, Liberalism is Not Enough: Race and Poverty.

66. The underrepresentation of African-American scholars did not go unnoticed. Historian John Hope Franklin urged the IACF to include more Black speakers. John Hope Franklin to Shepard Stone, October 29, 1968, IACF papers, Box 460, Folder 5; Peter Buttenwieser to Shepard Stone, December 4, 1968, IACF papers, Box 460, Folder 4.

67. Innis, in Endless Crisis, 98–99.

68. Oakes, in Endless Crisis, 103–04. Oakes was one of the few non-academicians invited to attend the conference.

69. Peretz, in Endless Crisis, 112.

70. Cruse, in Endless Crisis, 115–17.

71. Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, esp. 9–10, 370–73, 451–75, 563–65. See also the essays collected in Cruse, Rebellion or Revolution? (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1968), esp. 68–138, 193–258.

72. Cruse, Stone papers, Box 60, Folder 51, pp. 30–31.

73. Giugni, in Endless Crisis, 122.

74. Albornoz, “The Concept of Black Power in the United States” (published in Serie Politica, August 1967), IACF papers, Box 462, Folder 4; Stone papers, Box 60, Folder 18; Endless Crisis, 124.

75. Brown quoted in Walter Goodman, “The Liberal Establishment Faces the Blacks, the Young, the New Left,” New York Times Magazine, December 29, 1968, 31.

76. Brown, in Endless Crisis, 283–85.

77. Schlesinger, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom.

78. Schlesinger, in Endless Crisis, 287.

79. Schlesinger, in Endless Crisis, 287. Schlesinger’s use of the word “betrayal” likely alludes to Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals. For a spirited defense of the political commitment of Schlesinger, Galbraith, and liberalism generally, see Mattson, When America was Great, 165–71.

80. Crozier, in Endless Crisis, 293.

81. Goodman, “The Liberal Establishment Faces the Blacks, the Young, the New Left,” 8-9ff. Goodman’s article irked Shepard Stone, who described it as “serious and interesting in substance, malicious in approach.” Stone to Diana Michaelis, January 3, 1969, Stone papers, Box 60, Folder 6. The Times also offered other downbeat assessments of the conference: Shenker, “Intellectuals Look at the World, the U.S. and Themselves, and Find All 3 in Trouble,” 52; Israel Shenker, “A Hit and Myth Gathering of Intellectuals,” New York Times, December 8, 1968, sec. 4, p. 2.

82. Buckley, “The Anti-Nixon Clambake.”

83. Newfield, “Corporation of Scholars, Ltd.,” 83–90; quotations on p. 85 (emphasis in original); the list of scholars who were not in attendance is on p. 125.

84. Billington, “A Ferment of Intellectuals,” 95. After the conference concluded, some participants lamented that the meeting had not produced any significant new proposals regarding America’s future. See “Intellectuals Hit Seminar Failures,” Harvard Crimson, December 6, 1968. A few weeks after the conference, IACF director Shepard Stone wrote hopefully to Daniel Bell that the meeting might help usher in a new Zeitgeist, inspiring intellectuals to become more politically engaged and propose solutions to society’s problems, rather than confine themselves to critique. Shepard Stone to Daniel Bell, December 31, 1968, IACF papers, Box 460, Folder 4.

85. Shepard Stone to conference participants, January __, 1969 (n.d.). Stone papers, Box 60, Folder 1. See also Stone to Carl Kaysen, December 21, 1968, IACF papers, Box 460, Folder 7. Crozier, in Endless Crisis, 167, 208.

86. For a perceptive consideration of the “disaggregation” of American politics and thought since the 1960s, see Rodgers, Age of Fracture, esp. 5.