A Brief History of Cold War Liberalism

ABSTRACT

In recent years, a flurry of books that explore the history and theory of liberalism have appeared. Nevertheless, there has been surprisingly little scholarship examining the history of ‘Cold War liberalism’ — one of the most important instantiations of twentieth-century liberalism — as a phenomenon in and of itself, and the work that has been done has mostly focused on a small coterie of American and Western European intellectuals. This essay is a first step attempt to articulate a broader history of Cold War liberalism, tracing the ideology’s origins and influence from the 1910s until the 1980s. We focus on three distinct elements of the history of Cold War liberalism: its embrace of anti-democratic politics and how this informed the creation of the national security state; its linking of reform to the imperatives of national security; and its decline and transformation in the 1970s and 1980s.

KEYWORDS:

• Cold War
• liberalism
• anti-communism
• neoconservatism
• neoliberalism

Notes

¹ Patsy Widakuswara, ‘“Build Back Better World”: Biden’s Counter to China’s Belt and Road’, Voice of America, 4 November, 2021, https://www.voanews.com/a/build-back-better-world-biden-s-counter-to-china-s-belt-and-road/6299568.html.

² For books on liberalism geared toward a popular audience, see: Mark Lilla, The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (New York: Harper, 2017); Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (New York: Basic Books, 2019); James Traub, What Was Liberalism? The Past, Present, and Promise of a Noble Idea (New York: Basic Books, 2019); and Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022). For scholarship that explores the history and theory of liberalism, see Larry Sidentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Edmund Fawcett, Liberalism: The Life of an Idea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); Patrick J. Deneen, Why Liberalism Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018); Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018); and Katrina Forrester, In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019).

³ For scholarship on Cold War liberalism, see Mark L. Kleiman, A World of Hope, A World of Fear: Henry A. Wallace, Reinhold Niebuhr, and American Liberalism (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000); Jonathan Bell, The Liberal State on Trial: The Cold War and American Politics in the Truman Years (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004); Kevin Mattson, When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism (New York: Routledge, 2004); Malachi H. Hacohen, ‘Jacob Talmon between Zionism and Cold War Liberalism’, History of European Ideas 34, no. 2 (June 2008), 146-157; Jan-Werner Müller, ‘Fear and Freedom: On “Cold War Liberalism”’, European Journal of Political Theory 7, no. 1 (January 2008), 45-64; Malachi Haim Hacohen, ‘“The Strange Fact That the State of Israel Exists”: The Cold War Liberals between Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism’, Jewish Social Studies 15, no. 2 (Winter 2009), 37-81; Arie M. Dubnov, ‘Anti-Cosmopolitan Liberalism: Isaiah Berlin, Jacob Talmon and the Dilemma of National Identity’, Nations and Nationalism 16, no. 4 (October 2010), 559-578; Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), chapter 1; Amanda Anderson, ‘Character and Ideology: The Case of Cold War Liberalism’, New Literary History 42, no. 2 (Spring 2011), 209-229; Johannes Voelz, ‘Cold War Liberalism and the Problem of Security’, in Winfried Fluck and Donald E. Pease, eds., ‘Towards a Post-Exceptionalist American Studies’, special issue, REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature 30, no. 1 (December 2014), 255-281; Terry Nardin, ed., Michael Oakeshott’s Cold War Liberalism (New York: Palgrave, 2015); Aurelian Crăiuţu, Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), chapter 3; Ari N. Cushner, ‘Cold War Comrades: Left-Liberal Anticommunism and American Empire, 1941-1968’ (PhD thesis: University of California at Santa Cruz, 2017); Ruth Feldstein, Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930-1965 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), 80-84; Jan-Werner Müller, ‘What Cold War Liberalism Can Teach Us Today’, The New York Review of Books, 26 November, 2018, https://www.nybooks.com/online/2018/11/26/what-cold-war-liberalism-can-teach-us-today/; Iain Stewart, Raymond Aron and Liberal Thought in the Twentieth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Jan-Werner Müller, ed., Isaiah Berlin’s Cold War Liberalism (Singapore: Palgrave, 2019); Jan-Werner Müller, ‘Calming the Ideological Storms? Reflections on Cold War Liberalism’, in Vladimir Tismaneanu and Bogdan C. Iacob, eds., Ideological Storms: Intellectuals, Dictators, and the Totalitarian Temptation (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2019), 465-485; Dillon Stone Tatum, ‘Liberal Pessimism: An Intellectual History of Suspicion in the Cold War’, in Tim Stevens and Nicholas Michelsen, eds., Pessimism in International Relations: Provocations, Possibilities, Politics (Cham: Palgrave, 2020), 67-81; Malachi Haim Hacohen, ‘The Jewishness of Cold War Liberalism’, in Abigail Green and Simon Levis Sullam, eds., Jews, Liberalism, Antisemitism: A Global History (New York: Palgrave, 2020), 387-410; Iain Stewart, ‘Raymond Aron and the Contested Legacy of ‘Cold War Liberalism”’, Renewal 28, no. 3 (September 2020), 43-47; Michael Brenes and Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, ‘Legacies of Cold War Liberalism’, Dissent 68, no. 1 (Winter 2021), 116-124; Joshua L. Cherniss, Liberalism in Dark Times: The Liberal Ethos in the Twentieth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021); Dillon Stone Tatum, Liberalism and Transformation: The Global Politics of Violence and Intervention (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021), chapter 5; Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Michael Franczak, ‘Cold War Liberals, Neoconservatives, and the Rediscovery of Ideology’, in Christopher McKnight Nichols and David Milne eds., Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), 412-434; Samuel Moyn, Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023). There is, of course, a significant amount of work on the history of liberalism during the Cold War, which in various ways overlaps and intersects with the aforementioned literature, though it may nevertheless be considered distinct in terms of its focuses and emphases.

⁴ Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (Blacksburg: Wilder Publications, 2010 [1922]); John Dewey, ‘Public Opinion’, review of Public Opinion, by Walter Lippmann, New Republic 30, no. 387 (3 May, 1922), 286–288; Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2011 [1925]); John Dewey, ‘Practical Democracy’, review of The Phantom Public, by Walter Lippmann, New Republic 45, no. 574 (2 December, 1925), 52–54; John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens, GA: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1954 [1927]). Also see Daniel Bessner, Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018), chapter 3.

⁵ For investigations of the shifting meaning of the idea of ‘public opinion’, see Stephen Wertheim, ‘Reading the International Mind: International Public Opinion in Early Twentieth Century Anglo-American Thought’ in Daniel Bessner and Nicolas Guilhot, eds., The Decisionist Imagination: Sovereignty, Social Science, and Democracy in the Twentieth Century (New York: Berghahn, 2019), 27-63; David Allen, Every Citizen a Statesman: The Dream of a Democratic Foreign Policy in the American Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2023).

⁶ Allen, Every Citizen a Statesmen, 174-185.

⁷ Hans Speier, ‘The American Soldier and the Sociology of Military Organization’, in Robert K. Merton and Paul F. Lazarsfeld, eds., Studies in the Scope and Method of “The American Soldier” (Glencoe: Free Press, 1950), 116.

⁸ Hans Speier, ‘Historical Development of Public Opinion’, American Journal of Sociology 155, no. 4 (January 1950), 387.

⁹ Speier, ‘Historical Development of Public Opinion’, 387.

¹⁰ Ibid.

¹¹ John Gans, White House Warriors: How the National Security Council Transformed the American War of War (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2019).

¹² Bessner, Democracy in Exile, 10.

¹³ The term ‘military-intellectual complex’ comes from Ron Theodore Robin, The Making of the Cold War Enemy: Culture and Politics in the Military-Intellectual Complex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001).

¹⁴ Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism, 175.

¹⁵ Gary Gerstle, ‘The Protean Character of American Liberalism’, American Historical Review 99, no. 4 (October 1994), 1052-3.

¹⁶ Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, ‘Executive Orders’, in John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, eds., The American Presidency Project (Santa Barbara,1999-2003), https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/executive-orders.

¹⁷ Landon R.Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), chapter 5.

¹⁸ On liberals’ support for civil rights in the context of U.S. foreign policy, see Brenda Gayle Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Affairs, 1935-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Penny Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Jonathan Rosenberg, How Far the Promised Land?: World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); and Manfred Berg, “The Ticket to Freedom”: The NAACP and the Struggle for Black Political Integration (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007).

¹⁹ ‘President Urged to Create F.E.P.C.’, The New York Times, 15 January, 1951. On Humphrey’s longstanding support for civil rights and fair employment, see Carl Solberg, Hubert Humphrey: A Biography (New York: W.W. Norton, 1984).

²⁰ See Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and ‘Nation Building’ in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). On the liberal faith in the mixed economy, see Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., ‘Where Does the Liberal Go From Here?’, The New York Times Magazine, 4 August, 1957, 36.

²¹ Tatum, Liberalism and Transformation, chapter 5.

²² See Stuart Schrader, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019); Elizabeth Hinton, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion since the 1960s (New York: Liveright, 2021).

²³ See Daniel Rodgers, Age of Fracture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011); Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela, Daniel J. Sargent, eds., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Thomas Borstelmann, The 1970s: A New Global History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Christian Caryl, Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21^st Century (New York: Basic Books, 2013); Barbara Zanchetta, The Transformation of American International Power in the 1970s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

²⁴ See the special issue of Humanity on the NIEO, ‘Toward a History of the New International Economic Order’, special issue, Humanity 6, no. 1 (Spring 2015). For an extended discussion of the relationship between development and the NIEO, see Christopher Dietrich, Oil Revolution: Anticolonial Elites, Sovereign Rights, and the Economic Culture of Decolonization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

²⁵ For US policy toward the NIEO across administrations, see Michael Franczak, Global Inequality and American Foreign Policy in the 1970s (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022). For the NIEO’s larger role in Global South/Third World politics and thought, see Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), especially chapter 5. For prominent European neoliberals’ (or ‘ordoliberals’) opposition to the NIEO, see Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), especially chapter 7 and conclusion.

²⁶ Irving Kristol, ‘The “New Cold War’, The Wall Street Journal, 17 July 1975, Clipping, Commodities – International, Box 50, L. William Seidman Files, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

²⁷ For more on Commentary, see Michael Franczak, ‘Losing the Battle, Winning the War: Neoconservatives versus the New International Economic Order, 1974-82’, Diplomatic History 43, no. 5 (November 2019), 867-89.

²⁸ For the use of the term ‘world order politics’, see Jimmy Carter, ‘Address to the Conference on Nuclear Energy at the United Nations in New York City’ (speech, 13 May, 1976), Wooley and Peters, eds., The American Presidency Project

²⁹ C. Fred Bergsten, Georges Berthoin, and Kinhide Mushakoji, The Reform of International Institutions: A Report of the Trilateral Task Force on International Institutions to the Trilateral Commission (New York: The Trilateral Commission, 1976), 2.

³⁰ Michael Franczak, ‘Human Rights and Basic Needs: Jimmy Carter’s North-South Dialogue, 1977-81’, Cold War History 18, no. 4 (November 2018), 447-64 and Franczak, Global Inequality, chapters 4-6.

³¹ For a discussion of the ‘lost decade’, see José Antonio Ocampo, ‘The Latin American Debt Crisis in Historical Perspective’, in Joseph E. Stiglitz and Daniel Heymann, eds., Life after Debt: The Origins and Resolutions of Debt Crisis (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 87-115.

³² For the origins, evolution, and alternative applications of the Washington Consensus, see John Williamson, ‘The Strange History of the Washington Consensus’, Journal of Post Keynesian Economics 27, no. 2 (Winter 2004–2005), 195–206.

³³ Nicholas Stern with Francisco Ferreira, ‘The World Bank as “Intellectual Actor”’ in Devesh Kapur, J.P. Lewis, and Richard Webb, eds., The World Bank: Its First Half Century, vol. 2, Perspectives, (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press), 535.

³⁴ Ronald Reagan, ‘Inaugural Address’ (speech, Washington, DC, 20 January, 1981), Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/inaugural-address-1981.

³⁵ For a recent analysis of the relationship between tax cuts for the wealthy and income inequality, which finds that the former leads to the latter, see David Hope and Julian Limberg, ‘The Economic Consequences of Major Tax Cuts for the Rich’, Socio-Economic Review 20, no. 2 (April 2022), 539-559.

³⁶ Ronald Reagan, ‘Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, F.L.’ (speech, 8 March, 1983), Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-annual-convention-national-association-evangelicals-orlando-fl.

³⁷ Ronald Reagan, ‘Remarks and a Question-and-Answer Session at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville’ (speech, 16 December, 1988), Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-and-question-and-answer-session-university-virginia-charlottesville.