Diagnosing the Crisis of Modernity: Historical Thought in the Midcentury United States

Abstract

After the First World War there was a period of intense intellectual interest in theorizing the experience of historical time on both sides of the Atlantic, caused by social disruption, new technologies and political instability and the unfulfilled expectations of 18th and 19th century progress. This study focuses on thinkers in this period, focusing primarily on Americans and to a lesser degree Europeans and European exiles. Thinkers in this period found themselves in the need of a new historical idiom for discussing social and political developments, and were self-conscious about the role of historical concepts and historical myths in the modern world around them. Within this environment, 19th century optimism about progress and pessimism about mass society fed into a discourse about propaganda, expertise, social decay, political domination and ultimately totalitarianism. This dissertation looks at how a series of intellectuals, including Lewis Mumford, Ortega y Gasset, Walter Lippmann, Hannah Arendt and Christopher Lasch, participated in a discourse about the experience of modern historical time and its relationship with new forms of social decay and political domination. This dissertation maintains that many of the common historiographical categories, either the history of conservatism or the history neo-liberalism, are ill-fitting categories popular in the literature, and that midcentury social and political discourse can’t be understood so cleanly on ideological lines demarcated by later historians interested in developing critical genealogies of their political rivals. It also maintains that the social and political thought of the Cold War and onward can’t be understood without assessing the effects of, and intellectual interest in, the disorienting experience of modern history, a topic well-understood in some academic literatures today but often overlooked in domestic American historiography. It also finally argues that the history of mass society criticism has been broadly overlooked in the historiography of the 20th century, but was a critically important component of social and political thought across ideological lines up until roughly the nineteen-sixties at the very latest.