The Twilight of the American Enlightenment

December 9, 2013
Under the surface of a seemingly placid era roiled a cauldron of doubts and discontent, according to this penetrating study of post-war intellectual ferment. Bancroft Prize–winning historian Marsden (Fundamentalism and American Culture) surveys the social and cultural developments that made the 1950s an unsettling time for contemporary thinkers: the menace of nuclear war; an affluent but shallow consumer society; the displacement of traditional authority and community by individualism; a new creed of science and psychology that eclipsed conventional religious doctrine; television. He sets these trends against a reigning orthodoxy of pragmatic liberalism that, he argues, hewed to the Enlightenment ideals of America’s founders while abandoning their belief in a rational moral order, a theme that he explores through engaging, perceptive critical exegeses of the writings of contemporary public intellectuals, including Walter Lippmann, Betty Friedan, B. F. Skinner, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Through these critiques Marsden provocatively diagnoses the decay of a liberal ideology unmoored from philosophical foundations, a decay, he contends, that set the stage for the cultural revolution of the 1960s and a resurgent religious right in the 1970s. Marsden’s erudite, sophisticated, but very accessible study reveals the suppressed spiritual hunger of a secular age.