The End of Ideology and American Social Thought, 1930-1960

The End of Ideology and American Social Thought, 1930-1960 PDF Author: Job L. Dittberner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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The End of Ideology and American Social Thought, 1930-1960

The End of Ideology and American Social Thought, 1930-1960 PDF Author: Job L. Dittberner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description


Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism

Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism PDF Author: Howard Brick
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299105501
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
What causes a generation of intellectuals to switch its political allegiances--in particular, to move from the opposition to the mainstream? In U.S. history, it is the experience of the "Old Left" intellectuals, who swung from avowal of socialism or Communism in the 1930s to apology for American liberalism in the 1950s, that raises this question pointedly. In this highly original and broadsweeping study, Howard Brick focuses on the career of Daniel Bell as an illustrative case of political transformation, combining intellectual history, biography, and the history of sociology to explain Bell's emerging thought in terms of the tensions between socialists and sociological theory. The resulting work will be of compelling interest to Marxists and American intellectual historians, to sociologists, and to all students of twentieth-century American thought and culture. Daniel Bell's route to political reconciliation was a tortuous one. While it is common wisdom to cite World War II as the force that welded national unity and brought Depression-era radicals to an appreciation of democratic institutions, the war actually turned the young Bell to the left. Opposing the centralized power of American business and military elites at war's end, Bell shared the "new radicalism" that infused Dwight MacDonald's Politics Magazine and motivated C. Wright Mills' early work. Nonetheless, by the early 1950s, Bell had declared the demise of American socialism and endorsed the welfare reforms of the Fair Deal. Brick's study finds, however, that the "new radicalism" of the mid-1940s helped to shape Bell's mature perspective, giving it a richness and critical edge often unrecognized. Brick finds that the heritage of modernism, as manifested in social theory, knit together the process of political transformation, combining disdain for the false promises of liberal progress, estrangement from society at large, and reconciliation with a reality perceived to be full of unconquerable tensions. Brick locates the foundations of Bell's mature social theory in the historical context of his early work--particularly in the political concessions made by the social-democratic movement, in the face of the Cold War, to the reconstruction of capitalist order in the West. The crucial turning point, in World politics as in Bell's thinking, can be located in the years 1947-49. After that point, the different strands of Bell's thinking came together to represent the contradictions in the perspective of a social democrat trapped by the "iron cage" of capitalism, who saw in his political accommodation both the road to progress and the rupture of his hopes. This peculiar paradigm, shaped by the experiences of deradicalization, lies at the heart of Daniel Bell's social theory, Brick finds. At the present critical point in American history, as a new generation of leftist intellectuals undergoes a process similar to that of Bell's generation, Brick's work will be especially important in understanding the historical phenomenon of deradicalization.

The End of Ideology and American Social Thought, 1930-1960

The End of Ideology and American Social Thought, 1930-1960 PDF Author: Job L. Dittberner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Ideology
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Age of Contradiction

Age of Contradiction PDF Author: Howard Brick
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801487002
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
In Age of Contradiction, Howard Brick provides a rich context for understanding historical events, cultural tensions, political figures, artistic works, and trends of intellectual life. His lucid and comprehensive book combines the best methods of historical analysis and assessment with fascinating subject matter to create a three-dimensional portrait of a complicated time. In one of the only books on the 1960s to put ideas at the center of the period's history, Brick carefully explores the dilemmas, the promise, and the legacy of American thought in that time.

When America Was Great

When America Was Great PDF Author: Kevin Mattson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135936757
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
A sweeping intellectual history that will make us rethink postwar politics and culture, When America Was Great profiles the thinkers and writers who crafted a new American liberal tradition in a conservative era -- from historians Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and C. Vann Woodward, to economist John Kenneth Galbraith and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. A compelling tale that will redefine the word "liberal" for a new generation, Mattson retraces the intellectual journey of these towering figures. They served in the Second World War. They opposed communism but also wanted to make America's poor visible to the affluent society. Contrary to those who characterize liberals as naïve or sentimental "bleeding hearts," they had a tough-minded and nuanced vision that stressed both human limitations and hope. They felt America should stand for something more than just a strong economy.

Defining the Age

Defining the Age PDF Author: Paul Starr
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231555172
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
The sociologist Daniel Bell was an uncommonly acute observer of the structural forces transforming the United States and other advanced societies in the twentieth century. The titles of Bell’s major books—The End of Ideology (1960), The Coming of Post-Industrial Society (1973), and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976)—became hotly debated frameworks for understanding the era when they were published. In Defining the Age, Paul Starr and Julian E. Zelizer bring together a group of distinguished contributors to consider how well Bell’s ideas captured their historical moment and continue to provide profound insights into today’s world. Wide-ranging essays demonstrate how Bell’s writing has informed thinking about subjects such as the history of socialism, the roots of the radical right, the emerging postindustrial society, and the role of the university. The book also examines Bell’s intellectual trajectory and distinctive political stance. Calling himself “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative in culture,” he resisted being pigeon-holed, especially as a neoconservative. Defining the Age features essays from historians Jenny Andersson, David A. Bell, Michael Kazin, and Margaret O’Mara; sociologist Steven Brint; media scholar Fred Turner; and political theorists Jan-Werner Müller and Stefan Eich. While differing in their judgments, they agree on one premise: Bell’s ideas deserve the kind of nuanced and serious attention that they finally receive in this book.

Critical Crossings

Critical Crossings PDF Author: Neil Jumonville
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520335112
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
The period immediately following the Second World War was a time, observed Randall Jarrell, when many American writers looked to the art of criticism as the representative act of the intellectual. Rethinking this interval in our culture, Neil Jumonville focuses on the group of writers and thinkers who founded, edited, and wrote for some of the most influential magazines in the country, including Partisan Review, Politics, Commentary, and Dissent. In their rejection of ideological, visionary, and romantic outlooks, reviewers and essayists such as Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, Harold Rosenberg, and Daniel Bell adopted a pragmatic criticism that had a profound influence on the American intellectual community. By placing pragmatism at the center of intellectual activity, the New York Critics crossed from large belief systems to more tentative answers in the hope of redefining the proper function of the intellectual in the new postwar world. Because members of the New York group always valued being intellectuals more than being political leftists, they adopted a cultural elitism that opposed mass culture. Ready to combat any form of absolutist thought, they found themselves pitted against a series of antagonists, from the 1930s to the present, whom they considered insufficiently rational and analytical to be good intellectuals: the Communists and their sympathizers, the Beat writers, and the New Left. Jumonville tells the story of some of the paradoxes and dilemmas that confront all intellectuals. In this sense the book is as much about what it means to be an intellectual as it is about a specific group of thinkers. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1991.

Daniel Bell

Daniel Bell PDF Author: Malcolm Waters
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113484557X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 199

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Book Description
Comprehensive and clear exposition of a key but controversial figure. Bell is one of the leading conservative critics of contemporary culture. More or less invented the concept of post-industrial society. Key ideas series commands a market niche Endorsement from Barry Smart

The Other New York Jewish Intellectuals

The Other New York Jewish Intellectuals PDF Author: Carole S Kessner
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 081476357X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
Irving Howe. Saul Bellow. Lionel Trilling. These are names that immediately come to mind when one thinks of the New York Jewish intellectuals of the late thirties and forties. And yet the New York Jewish intellectual community was far larger and more diverse than is commonly thought. In The Other New York Jewish Intellectuals we find a group of thinkers who may not have had widespread celebrity status but who fostered a real sense of community within the Jewish world in these troubled times. What unified these men and women was their commitment and allegiance to the Jewish people. Here we find Hayim Greenberg, Henry Hurwitz, Marie Syrkin, Maurice Samuel, Ben Halperin, Trude Weiss-Rosmarin, Morris Raphael Cohen, Ludwig Lewisohn, Milton Steinberg, Will Herberg, A. M. Klein, and Mordecai Kaplan, and many others. Divided into 3 sections--Opinion Makers, Men of Letters, and Spiritual Leaders--the book will be of particular interest to students and others interested in Jewish studies, American intellectual history, as well as history of the 30s and 40s.

The New York Intellectuals Reader

The New York Intellectuals Reader PDF Author: Neil Jumonville
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135927529
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description
In the early 1930’s in a small alcove at City College in New York a group of young, passionate, and politically radical students argued for hours about the finer points of Marxist doctrine, the true nature of socialism, and whether or not Stalin or Trotsky was the true heir to Lenin. These young intellectuals went on to write for and found some of the most well known political and literary journals of the 20th century such as The Masses, Politics, Partisan Review, Encounter, Commentary, Dissent and The Public Interest. Figures such as Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, Susan Sontag, Dwight MacDonald, and Seymour Lipset penned some of the most important books of social science in the mid-twentieth century. They believed, above all else, in the importance of argument and the power of the pen. They were a vibrant group of engaged political thinkers and writers, but most importantly they were public intellectuals committed to addressing the most important political, social and cultural questions of the day. Here, with helpful head notes and a comprehensive introduction by Neil Jumonville, The New York Intellectuals Reader brings the work of these thinkers back into conversation.