
Ian Afflerbach
A revisionist history of American liberalism, from the Great Depression to the Cold War.
In Making Liberalism New, Ian Afflerbach traces the rise, revision, and fall of a modern liberalism in the United States, establishing this intellectual culture as distinct from classical predecessors as well as the neoliberalism that came to power by century's end. Drawing on a diverse archive that includes political philosophy, legal texts, studies of moral psychology, government propaganda, and presidential campaign materials, Afflerbach also delves into works by Tess Slesinger, Richard Wright, James…
A revisionist history of American liberalism, from the Great Depression to the Cold War.
In Making Liberalism New, Ian Afflerbach traces the rise, revision, and fall of a modern liberalism in the United States, establishing this intellectual culture as distinct from classical predecessors as well as the neoliberalism that came to power by century's end. Drawing on a diverse archive that includes political philosophy, legal texts, studies of moral psychology, government propaganda, and presidential campaign materials, Afflerbach also delves into works by Tess Slesinger, Richard Wright, James Agee, John Dewey, Lionel Trilling, and Vladimir Nabokov. Throughout the book, he shows how a reciprocal pattern of influence between modernist literature and liberal intellectuals helped drive the remarkable writing and rewriting of this keyword in American political life.
From the 1930s into the 1960s, Afflerbach writes, modern American fiction exposed and interrogated central concerns in liberal culture, such as corporate ownership, reproductive rights, color-blind law, the tragic limits of social documentary, and the dangerous allure of a heroic style in political leaders. In response, liberal intellectuals borrowed key values from modernist culture—irony, tragedy, style—to reimagine the meaning and ambitions of American liberalism.
Drawing together political theory and literary history, Making Liberalism New argues that the rise of American liberal culture helped direct the priorities of modern literature. At the same time, it explains how the ironies of narrative form offer an ideal medium for readers to examine conceptual problems in liberal thought. These problems—from the abortion debate to the scope of executive power—remain an indelible feature of American politics.
Well written and lively throughout, Making Liberalism New is a pleasure to read.
Clear-eyed, illuminating, and deeply insightful, Making Liberalism New expertly challenges an altogether dominant academic narrative about liberalism's naïveté, cruelty, and simple-mindedness by demonstrating that 'modern liberalism' anticipated—and incorporated—every significant criticism launched against it by the contemporary Left. This book will enrich conversations about the relationship between liberalism and radicalism and will complicate the knee-jerk equivalency of liberalism with neoliberalism.
A lucid and compelling account of the mutually informing relationship between liberalism and modernism in twentieth-century American culture. Making Liberalism New illuminates the key role of modernist aesthetics, especially irony, in literary engagements with liberalism, while also underscoring the enduring relevance and changing forms of liberalism's constitutive tensions. An important new book that bridges modernist studies and American studies.
Preface: What We Talk about When We Talk about Liberalism
Introduction: Making Liberalism New
Part 1: A Liberal Modernism
1. Liberalism Incorporated: Intellectuals, Abortion, and the Critique of
Preface: What We Talk about When We Talk about Liberalism
Introduction: Making Liberalism New
Part 1: A Liberal Modernism
1. Liberalism Incorporated: Intellectuals, Abortion, and the Critique of Possessive Individualism
2. Racial Liberalism: Native Son and the Problem of "Color-Blind" Law
Part 2: A Modern Liberalism
3. The Inward Turn: Tragedy, Documentary, and the Making of the Postwar Liberal Imagination
4. Ending in Style: JFK, Nabokov, and the Triumph of a Liberal Aesthetic
Conclusion: What's Left of Liberalism? (Or: What's So New about Neoliberalism?)
Works Cited
Notes
Index
with Hopkins Press Books