The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War

by Louis Menand

In his follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Metaphysical Club, Louis Menand offers a new intellectual and cultural history of the postwar years.

The Cold War was not just a contest of power. It was also about ideas, in the broadest sense—economic and political, artistic and personal. In The Free World, the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize–winning scholar and critic Louis Menand tells the story of American culture in the pivotal years from the end of World War II to Vietnam and shows how changing economic, technological, and social forces put their mark on creations of the mind.

How did elitism and an anti-totalitarian skepticism of passion and ideology give way to a new sensibility defined by freewheeling experimentation and loving the Beatles? How was the ideal of “freedom” applied to causes that ranged from anti-communism and civil rights to radical acts of self-creation via art and even crime? With the wit and insight familiar to readers of The Metaphysical Club and his New Yorker essays, Menand takes us inside Hannah Arendt’s Manhattan, the Paris of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Merce Cunningham and John Cage’s residencies at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College, and the Memphis studio where Sam Phillips and Elvis Presley created a new music for the American teenager. He examines the post war vogue for French existentialism, structuralism and post-structuralism, the rise of abstract expressionism and pop art, Allen Ginsberg’s friendship with Lionel Trilling, James Baldwin’s transformation into a Civil Right spokesman, Susan Sontag’s challenges to the New York Intellectuals, the defeat of obscenity laws, and the rise of the New Hollywood.

Stressing the rich flow of ideas across the Atlantic, he also shows how Europeans played a vital role in promoting and influencing American art and entertainment. By the end of the Vietnam era, the American government had lost the moral prestige it enjoyed at the end of the Second World War, but America’s once-despised culture had become respected and adored. With unprecedented verve and range, this book explains how that happened.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Art, Politics, Philosophy, American History, Cultural

Audiobook

First published April 20, 2021

About the author

Louis Menand, professor of English at Harvard University, is the author of The Metaphysical Club, which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in History. A longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Tony]

This is a sprawling cultural history, American- and European-centric, of that time after the Second World War. The author, Louis Menand, won all the awards for his earlier book: The Metaphysical Club. I read that one and unlike most others found it numbing. But this new book spoke to my time, and I saw that he even mentioned The Beatles, so I had at it.

The thing about sprawling books, though, is that they, well, they sprawl. So there were topics and figures that had me fairly engaged: George Kennan, Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Andy Warhol, those Beatles, Jackson Pollock. But I slept through others: John Cage, James Baldwin, C. Wright Mills.

But I learned things, like:

-- All of Sartre’s works were put on the Vatican’s Index of prohibited books; Mein Kampf was not.

-- Classified job ads in The New York Times were segregated by gender until 1968. And: In 1963, more than 80 percent of college faculty were men (a higher percentage than in 1920); 95 percent of physicians were men; 97 percent of lawyers were men; more than 97 percent of United States senators, members of Congress, and ambassadors were men. . . . In 1963, of 78 federal judgeships, none was held by a woman; of 307 federal district court judges, two were women. Of approximately 9,400 state legislators, 341 (4 percent) were women. Three states (Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina) did not allow women to serve on juries.

-- Thurgood Marshall had this to say about Martin Luther King, Jr: I think he was great as a leader. . . . As an organizer he wasn’t worth a shit.

-- Paperback publishers commissioned covers for books like Brave New World and The Catcher in the Rye from the same artists who did the covers for Strangler’s Serenade and The Case of the Careless Kitten.

-- The star of Les Enfants du paradis, Arletty, was imprisoned for “horizontal collaboration” with an officer in the Luftwaffe. (Arletty had a memorable way of expressing her lack of repentance. “My heart belongs to France,” she said, “but my ass belongs to the whole world.”)

-- Today, in America, everyone says, “It is what it is,” which is meant to sound profound but really just means the speaker can’t form an independent thought. Isaiah Berlin said it better: Everything is what is, liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or culture, or human happiness or a quiet conscience.

This I already knew:

As a campaigner John F. Kennedy was willing to align himself loosely with the civil rights movement, but ending racial segregation was not one of his priorities. In his inaugural address, Kennedy mentioned civil rights obliquely and only once, implied in a promise to uphold “those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.” The last six words were added at the request of two aides, Harris Wofford and Louis Marin, who told Kennedy that he needed to make a gesture to the Black voters who had supported him. . . . Kennedy had never heard of the Freedom Riders. He is supposed to have said to Wofford: “Can’t you get your goddamned friends off those buses?”

There is only one thing that I disagreed with, when the author wrote this: The Beatles were never artists and never thought of themselves in those terms. That’s bullshit, and demonstrably wrong. John Lennon famously said this: I'm an artist, and if you give me a tuba, I'll bring you something out of it. And they quit touring, at a time when they were exploring music that had never been imagined.

I don’t know how to grade this book by Goodreads’ stars. I suspect it will win a lot of awards.

[Bagus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I could forgive the length of this book which is almost 944 pages for the rich contents inside it. Written by the Pulitzer Prize winner Louis Menand, this book offers an interesting point of view to the Cold War period beyond the spectrum of the political sphere. It focuses on two subjects which influence human’s lives, art and thought. It begins with a brief description of the origin of the Cold War, which could be traced by a recommendation sent by George Kennan who was a US diplomat in the Soviet Union and the person who first advocated a policy of containment of Soviet expansion soon after the end of World War II. His writings inspired Truman Doctrine and US foreign policy of containing the Soviet Union.

However, many of the ideas in this book, both for art and thought originated even far before the Cold War. Some of them could be traced into European artistic influence (Paris as the world art capital in the 1920s) and the aftereffect of World War II (existentialism which gives the individual the power to change their own situations and gain freedom). Hence, I am in the opinion that this book is more about the styles of art and the thoughts that influence much of our lives in the 20th century rather than focusing solely on the Cold War since even the explanation of Cold War phenomenon only appeared in several chapters. It highlights several artistic movements, literary movements, and philosophical ideas in many parts of the world with really nice bridging from one idea to another.

Besides the abnormal length, another problem that I have regarding this book is mainly about its tendency to focus on art and thought movements only in Western bloc during the Cold War. It doesn’t describe well some literary movements that are in place in the Eastern bloc such as Socialist Realism (in the Soviet Union and its satellite states in Eastern Europe, mainly championed by Andrei Zhdanov and György Lukács), Epic Theatre (practised by Bertolt Brecht and his theatre company Berliner Ensemble in East Germany), dissident writers and artists in the Eastern bloc (I had some expectation like this book describes Václav Havel's role in overthrowing communism in Czechoslovakia), or even the curious case of Boris Pasternak who won controversial Nobel Prize of Literature in 1958 (this book at least mentioned the story of Anna Akhmatova’s brief relationship with Sir Isaiah Berlin, but it’s mainly told to highlight Berlin’s achievements).

Nevertheless, this book is indeed interesting new research on the Cold War period. I like the way it provides me with rich intertextuality of ideas, which help me to expand my vocabularies of modern art and thoughts as well as providing me with further book recommendations to be read. Louis Menand writes articulately without making the readers confused about terminologies or historical facts. Each chapter of this book could be read independently. For example, readers who are interested with Sartre’s idea on existentialism could turn to Chapter 3 - Freedom and Nothingness, those who are interested with analysis on Kerouac’s On the Road and Beat generation could check Chapter 4 - Outside the Law, and those who are interested with John Cage’s musical invention which was based on the twelve-tone system could turn to Chapter 8 - The Emancipation of Dissonance.

This book will be intriguing for people with interest in modern art, modern thoughts, politics, and even the reasoning for the rise of consumerism in the 1960s. Many of the ideas in this book are simply derivative from other books published in the past. However, the way the author could connect those ideas with geopolitical issues of the Cold War is a merit in itself which expand further the discussion that we could have regarding the Cold War beyond the political sphere.

[J Earl · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War from Louis Menand is a sweeping survey that looks at how and why perceptions about the United States, both domestically and internationally, changed so completely during these years.

First, as he makes clear in his Preface, this is neither a history of the Cold War nor is it about Cold War culture specifically. It is about "art and thought" during this period and how it helped to mold new ways of thinking and being. The Cold War was, as Menand says, just one of many factors. So don't expect specifically a history of or explicit connections to the Cold War for every person or movement mentioned. The connections are there throughout and a perceptive reader will see them, but since the tensions between the "East and West" weren't the only, or even always the primary, factor it isn't overly emphasized.

Also, if you're worried about the length of the book, don't be. First of all, by the Kindle measurement, the body of the text ends at 73%, so barely over 700 pages make up the body of the book. While all of the notes are useful if you want to read further, very few include additional commentary (there are actually some footnotes in the text for those types of notes) so the pages with the notes do not add to the amount of reading. In addition, each chapter is centered on a particular movement and/or group of people, so each can be read almost like a self-contained essay. This makes the book one that allows a reader to read chapters at their leisure and return to the book later without losing too much of the flow. That said, it richly rewards reading over a few days so you can better appreciate the big picture.

Finally, and this is important, Menand doesn't treat the period as if in a vacuum. He discusses what came before and how it helped shape what happened during this period. Sometimes as a logical continuation, sometimes as a response to, but never as something created from nothing. If you expected a book to discuss a period of history, especially when focusing on art and thought, without delving into what came before, you haven't read many meaningful history books, at least not very well.

Because the sweep is so broad, there will be some areas where Menand uses less than nuanced interpretations when making his point. Not so much wrong or mistaken, but things that don't take everything into account. I didn't find these to be particularly problematic, a person can only go in depth so far on this many topics, at some point he has to rely on previous work. I only noticed this in a couple chapters where I have done more research and reading, and I think that will be the case with other readers for whom some of these movements represent part of their personal scholarly past. It does not, however, detract from the larger arc of the book and doesn't make a reader feel that something has been misrepresented.

I highly recommend this for readers who enjoy intellectual history, literary history, and art history. Art in this case is using the broad definition, music, painting, etc. I think a casual reader would enjoy reading this book essentially as a collection of connected essays.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

Somewhere between 3.5 and 4. This great cube of print reads like a collection of essays loosely organized around a set of associated themes rather than the sustained development of any sort of claim about them. As for what these are, the title broadly points the way: “freedom,” “art,” “thought,” and “the Cold War,” though discussion of the last one involves hardly any attention paid to the Soviet Union and touches on the Cold War directly only now and then, so it’s more the designation of a historical period (and, essentially stopping at about 1970, an inaccurate one at that) than a subject in its own right. In some ways, it’s a straightforward chronicle of the intellectual and social development of midcentury American high culture—Abstract Expressionism, literary theory, the Beats, 1960s Hollywood, Pop Art, etc.—through an extremely detailed account of the lives of some of its associated luminaries, not all of the details of which will feel precisely germane to the ostensible subject at hand. In other ways, it’s a sometimes shallow and underdeveloped and sometimes brilliant analysis of minute aspects of that culture. It’s a miscellany of fascinating facts, tidbits, and gossipy character sketches—so much so, really, that though it’s always engrossing in the moment, it feels a bit like drinking water from a firehose, and virtually everything Menand discusses in the course of this ceaseless torrent is swiftly forgotten (at least by me). For reasons of memory as well as analytical synthesis, then, I’d have liked to see more connective tissue throughout this book: brief passages suturing chapters together, more explicit statements about higher-order interconnections, more visible gesturing toward aggregations and emerging patterns, and, ideally, a concluding chapter that actually worked like a conclusion. But with such a magisterial project, an obviously towering research achievement and a consistently absorbing read, it’s hard to fault it too much for ultimately reading like an anthology rather than a monograph.

[Craig Werner · Rating 3 out of 5]

I began this with very high hopes; Menand's The Metaphysical Club deserves its reputation and, as his work for the New Yorker shows, he can write well. But the more I read, the more my disappointment grew. It's much closer to two stars than four. The reasons are multiple. First, for a book that purports to be about the Cold War, the balance is extremely skewed. There's essentially nothing about the 1980s, very little about the 1970s and hundreds (I'm pretty sure that's literal, though I didn't count) of pages about the pre-1945 period. Some of that's justified, context and all. But a lot of it is tied to my second criticism, which is that there's a huge amount of detail unconnected to any idea or cultural movement. We know much much more than I want to about who took what classes from who and who the teachers' teachers were and who they slept with and on and on. At times I felt like I was reading a gossip column writ large. It didn't help that Menand's notion of the world is organized so tightly around the New York/Paris axis. Important sites, obviously. The whole story, not even kind of. And his sense of who matters reflects the New York Intellectual consensus circa 1975, as do many of his judgements such as the infuriating stereotype of James Baldwin's work having gone down the drain after the mid-1960s. Finally, when Menand's writing about topics I know well, he's frequently just wrong. He can't decide whether Betty Friedan is first or second wave feminist or women's libber or what not. (And his excuse for more or less ignoring women who didn't sleep with major figures until past page 500 because that was the way it was at the time is beynond irritating.). His explanation that Baldwin went to see Elijah Muhammad because of the attention drawn to the Nation of Islam by Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali is just flat wrong--the dates don't work.

By the end, I was gritting my teeth, but I got enough detail I didn't know--and I respect the rest of Menand's career enough-- that I can't, quite, bring myself to give it a thumbs down.

[Radiantflux · Rating 5 out of 5]

2nd book for 2022.

The conceit of the book is that it is a cultural history of thought and culture in the "free world" during the Cold War period. This is book is not comprehensive—either in time or space. Menand does offer an excellent, if limited cultural history of the US (in particularly New York) as well as Europe (nearly exclusively the UK or Paris) between the end of Second World War and the late 1960s. This is a book about books, and is an excellent starting point for those who want a broad outline of new Western ideas, and the people behind them, in the first two-and-a-half decades after the end of the Second World War.

Personally, I have added Claude Lévi-Strauss Tristes Tropiques and Hannah Arendt The Origins of Totalitarianism to my reading list for 2022—as well as some French New Wave and Bonnie and Clyde.

5-stars.

[Courtney Ferriter · Rating 5 out of 5]

** 5 stars **

I would give this book more than five stars if I could. As soon as I finished it, I immediately wanted to go back and reread it (a feeling I almost never have) and I will certainly return to it again in the future. This is a staggering work of scholarship that is also highly readable and engagingly written.

Menand primarily traces a history of artists and thinkers--mostly in the U.S., Britain, and France--during the early to mid-Cold War period, all of whom have a vested interest in exploring the concept of freedom and in critiquing the foundations of their various subjects, whether they are involved in art, philosophy, film, music, dance, literary theory, language, literature, etc. To this point, he observes that "the ice we walk on is never not thin" (511). Despite all of these destabilizing and revolutionizing efforts, however, Menand demonstrates that by the time the U.S. has become deeply enmeshed in the Vietnam War in the 1960s, the very freedom that artists and intellectuals have enjoyed has become so taken for granted that they "who were imagined to constitute the vanguard of social change turned out, as a class, to be doing the work of the state" (717).

Despite the fact that this book is specifically about the Cold War period, it feels timely and like it is speaking to the contemporary cultural moment in the West, as political tensions continue to mount and as countries around the world elect autocratic (or wannabe autocrat) leaders who show us that we have been taking democracy for granted, too. Menand includes an epigraph to the book from Zora Neale Hurston: "Many a man thinks he is making something when he's only changing things around." That quotation along with the question of what freedom really means are just two of the things I will be pondering over for a while thanks to this book.

Would recommend for readers who appreciate discussion of big-picture ideas like freedom and the avant-garde, who enjoy intellectual history, and/or who have an interest in thought/culture in the West during the Cold War period.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Menand has written a deeply researched and informative book about the postwar period. He wanted to write about the years he grew up in, to better understand the cultural evolution that shaped his own worldview. I am roughly his age, so it spoke to me in much the same way. I commend it to anyone interested in avant-garde music, art, film, criticism, and poetry. Menand also writes in depth about male Black novelists. He has strong opinions, especially toward the end. But the depth in his chosen topics is evident. This is an impressive work, and would be a useful reference book to have on your shelves.

If, however, you want information about theater, design, other novelists, and most television, look elsewhere. And most irksome to me, you should expect his authorial decision to focus one chapter on discrimination against women to essentially erase women from all the chapters on artistic fields. They do show up in philosophy and criticism.

As you read (or listen, as I did) your strongest impression may be the networks that connected these people. Much of the story is told through these connections: who taught whom, who introduced a to b, who then introduced a to c, who then invited d to this institute or that gallery. Menand is interested in the two-way flow of ideas between Europe and the United States, so he writes at length about émigrés and writers’ sojourns in Paris. The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made make appearances, particularly Kenan, even though they were not cultural figures. Perhaps more as a counterweight to the avant-garde artists—it’s a long book and I can’t remember all the details.

Menand states his purpose as using a few cultural icons to explore the environment that generated their work, and then to follow their influence. These turn out to be the Beats, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, selected New York artists (mainly Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollack) and New York art criticism, John Cage, Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Susan Sontag, the French existentialists, the New Wave (Truffaut and the U.S. response: Bonnie and Clyde), Pauline Kael, the Free Speech movement, Black writers (male, particularly expatriots in Paris), the Black Mountain set, etc. In short, the usual suspects. But he delves into background material that shows how their influence spread, and he also debunks some myths. In the course of examining these lives and movements he goes in some depth into related topics: popular sociology, censorship of literature with varying degrees of erotic content, advertising and material culture, the CIA’s role in art and political groups, and so on.

The book is admirably researched and constructed. It certainly is Menand’s right as an author to define his focus and boundaries. But about page 535 I began to ask myself ‘Where are the women artists?’ Ah, one only needs to ask. On page 542 Menand commences his chapter on women. Here he cites discrimination statistics, and examines two misogynistic examples in detail. His purpose is apparently to anchor the subsequent discussion of the women’s movement and to explain the vacuum in the other chapters. Instead of citing areas where women artists did make a difference despite the discrimination, Menand chooses to write at length about Norman Mailer’s stabbing of his wife (he was not charged with anything) and the physical abuse of women in the comics, cover art, and literature. I was unaware of the comic book issues that resulted in legislation and the continuing denigration of graphic literature, so it was informative. But each of these could have been covered in a paragraph or two, leaving room for some evidence of achievement by women. No.

In defining the fields he was going to cover, Menand arguably left out the very areas where women did break through. You could say that the physical environment that people lived and worked in was deeply influenced by women designers: Florence Knoll, Ray Eames, Eileen Gray, Anni Albers, and others. But the profound shift in mid-century aesthetics is ignored. Nor does he discuss the theater, and thus no Lillian Hellman, no Lorraine Hansberry, Claire Booth Luce, Vinette Carroll, Cheryl Crawford, etc. He barely notices television, so no women with a good deal of agency as producers, writers, directors and actors: Hazel Scott, Gertrude Berg, Lucille Ball and her writer Madelyn Pugh, Dinah Shore (omitted here from a list of variety show hosts), Betty Comden, and Loretta Young, to name a few. They may not have been avant-garde, but they were examples visible to other women. No Marlo Thomas, who reportedly developed her TV show from reading The Feminine Mystique.

In literature and journalism Menand chooses not to mention Southern Gothic, so no Carson McCullers or Flannery O’Connor. No Rebecca West, Rachel Carson, Iris Murdoch, Gwendolyn Brooks, Claire Booth Luce, Mary McCarthy, Ayn Rand, etc. Joan Didion gets named as a reviewer of Mailer. Anna Akhmatova gets a few pages, but they are embedded as a romantic episode in Isaiah Berlin’s life and as an example of his selective, opaque autobiographical writing.

In music, there is not one mention of Nadia Boulanger, despite her profound influence on postwar composition. Certainly he mentions no American women composers. Menand mentions the ‘girl groups’ that were a precursor to Presley, in one line. (He does discuss crossover music between the Black playlists and stations and rock, but for the most part Black artists are ignored.)

In art, the omissions are, in my opinion, inexcusable. In dozens of pages on the New York art scene, Menand mentions only Lee Krasner more than once, and that as facilitator: networker and caretaker of Pollack. If you read Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art you will find the critical place that women artists such as Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Krasner, Elaine de Kooning played as artists. They were daily colleagues of the male artists that Menand discusses. In a book that focuses on networks, this is blatant. Nor does he mention other pathbreaking artists such as Louise Nevelson or Faith Ringgold. Diane Arbus appears once, in a list.

I don’t so much argue with Menand’s decision not to choose one of these women as the primary figures who radically changed their field. I argue with him leaving them out of the story entirely, or at best including them in one line as also-rans. I understand that his focus is on people who influenced others at the time. But these women did influence others. They are getting left out of the story once again, in a book that seemed to reach for a more complete picture. Menand would probably argue ‘Look, I gave lots of pages to Arendt, Sontag, Kael, and Beauvoir.’ But where are the artists?

[Michael Reilly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Menand sets out in this book to describe the intellectual and artistic scene in America and Western Europe from the end of World War 2 in 1945 to the rise of the hippies in 1967.

This is intellectual history. Menand explains that "Intellectual history explains art and ideas by examining the condition of their production and reception." That is a misleading definition, at least for the way Menand does it. Menand doesn't start with art and ideas. He begins with the artist and thinkers. Where did they come from? How did they grow up? Where did they go to school or work? Then he tracks their ideas or their art and asks where it came from and what did it lead to.

This is a fun book to read. Menand loves to capture the quirks and failings of his subjects. One of the running gags, (although this is not really a "running gag" kind of book) is that artist and thinkers keep claiming that they were moved or inspired by seeing things that Menand shows they could not have seen when they said they did. Thinkers are inspired by attending lectures that happened before they went too that school. Artists are inspired to paint a piece by art painted after the piece. Menand takes a genial attitude towards this kind of thing. It is just intellectuals being intellectuals.

The scope of this book is amazing. Abstract expressionism, the political theories of Hannah Arendt and Isiah Berlin, Mercer Cunningham and modern dance, James Baldwin and Richard Wright, Norman Mailer and William Burroughs, the Beatles, John Cage, Andy Warhol and Pop Art, Goddard and Truffaut and French cinema, Alan Ginsburg, Susan Sontag, Jack Kerouac, Pauline Kael , Lionel Trilling, Sartre, Betty Friedan and a bunch more, all get detailed discussions outlining their life, art and thought.

This is a book not an encyclopedia. Menand brilliantly weaves all of these stories together. He loves showing the connections across countries and specialties. For example, John Cage, the composer, seems to have known everyone. He had a major role in modern dance and avant-garde theater. The abstract expressionist, Jackson Pollock and Rauschenberg in particular, inspired Cage and he inspired them. Menand carefully unwinds all of these complicated relationships.

One of the striking features of most of his subjects is a complete lack of a sense of humor. The Beatles and Ginsburg where not really part of the high intellectual world. The rest of the crowd took themselves very seriously. Menand, in a low key way, pokes fun at much of the self importance.

Menand is a great explainer. He manages to give as-clear-as-possible explanations of things like, the theories of abstract painters, existentialism, Sontag's theory of "Camp", or the auteur theory of film criticism. He is also appropriately skeptical of some of the dubious theories.

One interesting strategy Menand adopts is his tone. This is not a debunking book. He treats his subjects as serious thinkers and artist. It is also not a hagiography. When he thinks Andy Warhol is being phony, he says it. He says it politely, but he says it. He has favorites like Cage, Baldwin and Pollock . He has people he is not as much a fan of, like Sontag, Trilling and Mailer.

Menand loves odd facts.

John Cage appeared on an Italian quiz show when he was doing concerts in the country. He won five million lira ($6,000) for naming the twenty four types of white spored mushrooms. He was, on the side, an expert in mushrooms. He names them in alphabetical order to show off.

Or this trivia question; What educational background did at least one member of the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Cream, Led Zeppelin, the Kinks, the Jeff Beck Group, The Animals and Donovan have in common? They each had a member who went to art school.

Vocabulary word. In a section on the American car industry of the 1950s, Menand mentions that, "the industry term for all tail fins, hood ornaments , oversized bumpers, protruding tailpipes, chrome detailing-nonfunctional design elements on cars -was "borax" (adj. "borageous" )

One quibble. Menand says that Northrup Frye believed in the 1950s that "the critic's first task is to identify the memes". "Memes" is anachronistic. Richard Dawkins invented that word in the 1970s. It is a notoriously slippery word and it does not fit well into literary theory, but, in any case, it wasn't what Frye was thinking of in the 1950s.

This is a smart, fascinating and serious book of intellectual history. Menand is a sprightly and clear writer. He is the perfect guide through this interesting and confusing territory.

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

pedestrian analysis interspersed with interesting anecdotes––in short: a 700-page collection of extended, only tangentially related, New Yorker articles.

[Hadrian · Rating 3 out of 5]

What the fuck is an homage?
-Jack Warner, on Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

To summarize: 880 pages on art, literature, and philosophy from the United States and some parts of Europe (really, New York and Paris) from the late 1940s to the 1960s. The bookend essays are on George Kennan and the Vietnam War; the middle essays cover painters, the Beatniks, rock music, Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, the second-wave feminists, "Rock Around the Clock", Andy Warhol, and so on. Some analytical depth is lost but for the sake of stories and personal connections.

Menand is fond of anecdotes, of connections between different artists and intellectuals. The book can be dipped into for bits and pieces and I will very likely return to it for good stories. Some of the stories are poignant and tragic, say the time where Isaiah Berlin met the poet Anna Akhmatova in St. Petersburg. Many are obscurer, and fascinating - the time John Cage went on an Italian game show, for example. One of the very best chapters is on the give-and-take between the French new wave cinema and the Hollywood studios. Hence the quote.

A central theme, to the extent that there is one and it can be defined across so many fields, is "freedom" - in the political sense, that is obvious. That theme is almost cliche, considering how closely tied art and politics were in the Cold War. But considering how many stories there are of personal opportunism and artists snubbing the old structures of galleries and studio distribution and popular appeal, a slightly more expansive definition of freedom can be allowed for the reader to think about: freedom from institutional mores and conventions - or if art could become more purely like a commodity. This is hinted at.

Many things are hinted at - the descriptions of artistic movements seem a bit too brief - I suspect this is for space and editorial reasons if Menand could he could have gone for much longer. But there are criticisms and movements that are only alluded to - details about personal violence or more visceral critiques are sometimes described and then passed over.

There is a lot here to like, although a guiding theme or broader criticism is only hinted at, and ending at Vietnam is abrupt. But there is just enough here out of all its characters and topics that it inspires readers to go further.

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I began The Free World with the idea the book would examine the free culture of the Cold War west set against the tightly-controlled culture behind the Iron Curtain. Instead I found a cultural history of the west during the 2 decades following WWII, particularly American culture, dominant at the time because American cultural institutions had been allowed to thrive during the war, unrestricted by the conflict. Postwar was a time of rapid social and cultural change in which the Cold War itself wasn't so much a competitive field as an enduring product of the freedoms the west's cultural dynamic reflected.

There are chapters on abstract painting, literary criticism, the civil rights movement, feminism, Beat literature, dance, film, and much more. These and other iconic groundswells in western culture are distilled into clear summaries bringing them into sharp focus as elements in themselves as well as shifting parts of the cultural whole for the period. Such analysis makes this invaluable history.

Much of it is related as story, the story of how individual disciplines progressed fueled by those figures most influential. How did Jackson Pollock become Jackson Pollock? How did James Baldwin and Susan Sontag become the enormously important influences they were at the time and remain today? Menand describes how their intellectual and artistic ideas became the cultural history of the period. And they represented areas--rock and roll, painting, dance--whose trends followed the individuals driving them. His explaining Duchamp of Warhol or Kerouac as figures behind their respective movements is not only useful but often provides new ways of seeing them.

There were some surprises for me. Menand cites Beat literature as being more influential to western ideas--rather than being literarily innovative--than I'd previously thought. The anthropology of the period, too, had a lot to teach us about freedoms. Most of us are familiar with the rise of rock and roll but few of us, perhaps, think of it as an export we imported back from Britain in a rejuvenated spirit. Movies, too. At the end of the war Hollywood was by far the most important producer of movies and was filling European theaters with them for populations hungry for popular entertainment. But Menand convincingly tells how French auteur methods, best personified in the film Bonnie and Clyde, re-directed American films away from the big, empty blockbusters of the late 50s and early 60s to give movies new life and style.

There's a light dose of politics, too. Where America was headed in those years was Vietnam. The book gives a sobering assessment of why we should not have fought there. It fits with Menand's message that America's 20th century artistic freedoms--embodied in Kerouac, Pollock, Betty Friedan, Lionel Trilling and Susan Sontag and all the rest--acted as a foil against totalitarian thought and as inspiration to resist an authoritarian future. Our work was to set the example, not to confront directly. Ideas like this, whether completely right or not, fill the book and make it a terrific read.

[Jeremy Silverman · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this consistently fascinating and lively intellectual history, Menand presents in good detail the lives, thoughts, works, and achievements of the thinkers, writers, artists, movers and shakers, from the middle years of the 20th Century. No doubt one could identify some prominent figures who might have been left out, but it could require some effort to do so. While the focus is indeed centered on the post-war/Cold War years in America and Western Europe up through Johnson’s escalation in Vietnam, he doesn’t hesitate to go back as far as is necessary or, at times, to look to other parts of the world to provide the needed background of whatever aspect of life or thought he is writing about.

I’m only about 4 years Menand’s junior, and I grew up with a father who, although a salesman all his life, was politically active on the left and had strong intellectual and artistic interests. It gave him great joy to share with his sons his interests in the thinkers, writers, artists, composers, moviemakers, and activists. While I was 10 years old in 1966, many of the individuals Menand discusses in The Free World were those whose names and works I heard at least something about even then. Later, in many cases at least, I read their books, saw their paintings, watched their movies, marched with them in demonstrations, etc. What a pleasure then to get re-acquainted with old friends, learn more about them, and meet a host of new ones too from that period.

This a big (Audio) book—almost 35 hours long. While, inevitably, there is a part of me feeling the press from other books I’m eager to get to, it’s telling when, as in this case, another part of me is continually checking with dread on the “hours left in the book,” feeling increasing distress about having soon to leave something so thoroughly enjoyable.

[Veronica Sadler · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars

Incredibly diverse subject matter, Menand goes all over the world and through a few decades with the grace of very fluid mind. It has a meandering quality and he slides into one idea and notable person to another with our much succinct closures. I quite enjoyed the ride, however.



Writing: A
Research and Accuracy: A+
Thesis: B+

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Wide-Ranging, Provocative Survey

Author Louis Menand has written a provocative book. He describes it as a post-World War II history of ideas: the condition of their production and reception. As such, it is an extraordinarily wide-ranging review of culture in the period of the Cold War and every reader will find reason to support or to challenge some of the author’s political and cultural judgments. It is also somewhat disjointed, jumping around from “the arts” as they might traditionally be defined to observations about changes in demographics, levels of education, income distribution, and channels of distribution of culture.

Menard explores every aspect of the arts, high brow and low, during the period. Prior to World War II, the arts and world culture were tethered to Paris. To a large degree in the late 1940s and 1950s the avant garde in artistic expression moved to New York. Composers such as John Cage and Arnold Schoenberg challenged the conventions that preceded them. In the visual arts it was Jackson Pollack, Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, and Jasper Johns. Although their works became centerpieces of art shows in New York, virtually none of these artists were displayed in European museums at the time. However, it is also striking how quickly many of these artists have slipped into critical obscurity in the years since.

Subsequent art movements rose quickly. It took Abstract Expressionism ten years to achieve critical and artistic success, the author observes. It took American pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol only ten months to achieve similar recognition. The process could be corrupted. Art dealer Leo Castelli would sell a new artist’s painting cheaply to a recognized art critic. The critic would write a favorable review and then all the artist’s works, including that owned by the critic, would appreciate in price.

Poetry, one might think, is a very personal art form and the individual who reads a poem may find that it resonates or fails to do so. But as universities flourished in the postwar period and added substantially to their liberal arts teaching staff, the author observes that there was pressure to explain how poetry works and what makes it good or bad. New Criticism arose as a way of making readers’ assumptions explicit and consistent. Lines were drawn between”Structuralism” and “Deconstruction.” The Modern Language Association established rules of “academic rigor” that could be stifling rather than enlightening.

Menard explores a number of other art forms, including the work of authors such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin who addressed race in America. There is an interesting section on the rise of the paperback book and the lifting of censorship of books deemed pornographic (these titles previously available only in Paris). Movies and movie criticism, especially that of critic Pauline Kael, come under the author’s analysis.

One example of the author’s sense of humor. He describes typical readers of The New Yorker as, “proud of their education and their taste…[but] culturally insecure…They were eager not to like the wrong things, or to like the right things for the wrong reasons.” This was a formula for commercial success and The New Yorker commanded premium advertising rates.

In foreign policy, Menard argues that America was seen as virtuous in the immediate aftermath of World War II but then lost its moral compass. Diplomat George Keenan contended that the essential condition of international politics is anarchy. With no mechanism for the international rule of law. America’s foreign policy needed to be guided by cold consideration of the nation’s own interests, not by legal or moral principles. The Iron Curtain, Menard provocatively asserts, was viewed by US policy makers as a permanent example of the coercive nature of Communism and preserved a status quo not without its benefits to Western liberal democracies. While American propaganda in the 1950s and 1960s encouraged uprisings in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, Western powers did nothing in the way of intervention when such uprisings occurred.

At the end of the book the author has a damning attack on American policy in Vietnam as guided neither by morals nor by American self-interest.

A review can only scratch the surface of the many areas explored by Menard in this book of 727 pages (not including footnotes). There is much to digest here, and on occasion there are sections that seem indigestible. But this is a book that is impressive in its ambition and wide-ranging in its judgements about art and thought in our time.

[Alex Goodall · Rating 4 out of 5]

As any good Cold Warrior might hope, Louis Menand gets his defence in first. This is not a book about the "cultural Cold War”, he explains in his preface - that is, the way that culture was mobilised by Cold War rivals as part of their efforts to get one up on each other. Nor is it a book about “Cold War culture”, the ways that the norms of the Cold War influenced cultural life.

In fact, the book is not really much about the Cold War at all. It begins with a discussion of Kennan and realist thinking about containment in the late 1940s and ends with arguments about opposition to Vietnam in which Kennan returns, but between these points the Cold War appears only infrequently as a contextual theme. “Art and Thought in the Cold War”, the subtitle, is more a nod to the fact that the book is about art and thought that happens to happen in the first half of the Cold War than it is suggesting the Cold War itself made a lot of difference. Indeed, a lot of what Menand shows is how changes in this period result not from Cold War pressures but from a set of internal logics that often date back to earlier periods, especially the interwar years; and the unplanned effects of the massive disruptions of the Second World War, not least the mass migration of cultural figures from Europe to America. Even when artistic products get taken up by Western governments and promoted as evidence of the cultural fertility of Western democracy, Menand shows that most of the time the artists themselves were fairly indifferent to politics; art came first.

Menand could have called this book “Art and Thought in Midcentury”, then - he’d have been as accurate and the book would have been just as interesting, though perhaps it would have sold fewer copies. If there is a driving force behind the incredible volume of cultural production in this exceptionally fertile period, Menand implies it is the extraordinary transformation of culture as an industry following the explosive growth of affluent bourgeois classes around the world. (Many artists and thinkers in this book often come across as canny entrepreneurs and self-promoters rather than anti-capitalist radicals.)

Finally, this is not anything that we might describe as a global history of art and thought in the Cold War. Menand focuses almost exclusively on the Western bloc, and within that largely on the United States and, secondarily, France... although that still gives him plenty to work with.

And this is the thing most to praise about the book: the sheer range of material he covers. Painting, literary theory, political theory, music, anthropology, literature, and huge amounts more are swept through at breakneck speed. There are around 150 pages of bibliography available on his website if you want to get a sense of how much reading this book is based on. At times he arguably goes too fast - the brief introduction to structuralism and Levi-Strauss was bravura, to my mind, but he struggled more to encapsulate existentialism and deconstruction in the few paragraphs he allotted himself, fairly understandably. But this book is plenty long enough and there isn’t much other choice if one picks such a massive picture to fill in. People might similarly complain that figures or movements are missing or that the emphasis is off here or there, but everyone would have their own preferences and personally I like seeing how each of our frames of reference are a little different.

If I did have a complaint, it’s that I don’t really feel that the whole thing hangs together especially powerfully. He says in his intro that, “The book I ended up writing is a little like a novel with a hundred characters. But the dots do connect.” If that’s true, I think the reader has to do quite a lot of work in connecting them. At times, this book feels a lot like it’s been written by someone who has got very good at doing individual _New Yorker_ pencil portraits, which makes sense, since that’s what Menand does. At other times, it feels like it's the collected lectures from an accomplished professor delivering an undergraduate survey module, which also makes sense, since Menand does that, too. But at one or two moments it also feels like just one damn thing after another.

If you like the history of ideas and culture you’ll probably enjoy reading Menand’s lively romp. You’ll probably feel smarter for reading the book. You’ll probably feel that Menand is smarter still. With a book of such ambition perhaps the whole thing should be a bit more than the sum of its parts, but nevertheless the individual parts do still add up to a lot.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

The intellectual and political history: outstanding. The art, film, and criticism stuff: boring. Let me start with the downsides to this book that I generally liked. It's crazy long, and there's not much on an overarching argument (I'll explain what I think the argument is below). It ends pretty abruptly, without an attempt to sum up the major themes/meanings. It is much less coherent as a book than the Metaphysical Club, which clearly explores the roots and development of pragmatism after the Civil War in the US.

Also, a good third of the book is about modern art, music, film, literary theory, all topics I just don't care about. Most modern art and John Cage-type music is, frankly, bullshit; it's a commentary on art rather than art itself; it's horrible to look at and listen to; it's meaningless and stupid and requires essentially no skill. I now have a working knowledge of these fools, who were almost to a man (and yes they are almost all white dudes) pretentious, dysfunctional, solipsistic weirdos. So I listened politely to these sections of the book, but I just don't care or see these folks as relevant or worthwhile. This is why I'd recommend listening to this one; unless you want to read 200-300 pages on these hacks, listening is a much better use of your time.

Still, the long sections on pointless artwork are worth plowing through for the rich and sprawling intellectual history of this book. This is Menand's true strength, and he develops a couple of compelling themes. One is the transnational nature of ideas in the postwar period. The free world was a creation of the swirling set of ideas between Western Europe and the US, and Menand later adds thinkers from the decolonizing world to this exchange. He shows ideas, art forms, and other cultural forms pinging back and forth across the Atlantic in fascinating ways.

Second, Menand emphasizes that a great deal of the philosophy and political thought of this era was a response to totalitarianism and its horrendous human rights abuses. In fact, most of the major intellectual figures of this time period were European refugees, former prisoners of war, or actual camp survivors. His profiles are Sartre, Arendt, Camus, Orwell, and many others are absolutely fascinating, and he's great at explaining their views but also constructing their biographies. This was probably my favorite theme in the book: Menand emphasizes that thinking about totalitarianism as the antithesis of liberal democracy had two dimensions. There was the threat from without, or the geopolitical challenge of Nazi fascism and then Soviet communism, and the threat from within, or various tendencies in U.S. society and politics that, if exacerbated or radicalism, might drag the US into totalitarianism. Conservatives like Burnham thought this would be the managerial state and the ideology of liberalism; liberals thought it would be creeping McCarthyism but also the threat of a radicalized left; figures like C. Wright Mills further out on the left thought it was regimentation, social control, and the deadening of individualism by the "power elite." Either way, this is a great resource for people thinking about intellectual history between 1945-1965.

The third and last interesting theme is the slow broadening of the conversation to marginalized groups. Menand acknowledges that men of the era, liberals as well as conservatives, even some of the most profound thinkers of the era, were almost all oblivious to women's lives and the systematic obstacles that stood in their way. His portraits of Friedan, Sontag, and Beauvoir are outstanding in showing the slow formation of cracks in male complacency and domination. He does the same for people of color, profiling Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Cesaire and others as they wrestled with identity, decolonization, racism, and other problems, all in a transnational context. I have a much better understanding of their ideas and significance now.

This is intellectual history for people who already like intellectual history. It is rewarding if a bit inchoate, but I wouldn't say it's for beginners or even the average history buff. In academic terms, he helped me "periodize" these 20 years, or conceptualize it as a discrete time period with themes and currents that are different from other time periods. He shows that the Western world was far from staid or stable before the eruptions of the 1960s. I'm glad I picked it out, although I would have liked to have seen more of an argument rather than just a long and mostly interesting chronicle of these major thinkers and artists.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Cold War was the back drop for a great portion of the lives of people of my generation. It was the framework for all events, both nationally and internationally for 4 decades. During the war in Vietnam and the campus protests of the 60’s, it seeped into homes and family life, giving rise to the generation gap. The world was divided into two spheres, good and evil and knowing which side you were on was a necessity. The binary nature of discourse meant that you had no choice but to be on one side or the other. The margins became sharply defined and any thoughts of trying to find a middle ground were met with suspicion and even hostility.

This book takes a different approach. Rather than the political and military history of the period it looks at the arts and intellectual trends, activities that, by their nature, deliberately seek to go outside the margins. It is an ambitious project. Menand states that to organize this he took into account three dimensions: underlying social forces (economic, geopolitical, demographic, technological); what was happening ‘on the street’ and; “what was going on ‘in people’s heads’ meaning what they understood it means to make a painting or address an injustice or interpret a poem in those years.” It is complicated and at times seems to jump from one figure to another. He says: “The book I ended up writing is a little like a novel with a hundred characters. But the dots do connect.” It took me several months of interrupted reading, which may be why I haven’t connected all the dots. Nevertheless, many chapters of the book are a treasure of cultural history.

I was struck by the fact that in the 1950s the top 10% of wealthiest Americans was taking less than 35% of national income and real income was roughly the same for top 10% and the remaining 90% of earners. What a far cry from more recent figures. Menand cites this as one of the reasons that the focus of social reform shifted from workers rights to other minority rights (race and gender) and the geography of protests moved from the factory gate to the nation’s campuses. The debacle represented by the war in Vietnam added to this as well.

I found the changes described in the visual and dancing arts difficult to follow due mainly to my own ignorance in these areas. The history of the rise of consumerism is certainly enlightening.

Given the enormity of the task the Menand set for himself it is too much to ask, but I think there needed to be something said about the remarkable changes in science and technology that also took place during the Cold War and that also played a role in how people lived and perceived the world. A cultural history of the late 20th century seems incomplete without it.

Historians assert that our views tend to be shaped by the events and ideals that were dominate when we arrive at political consciousness, usually in the teens or early twenties. My generation’s dawning of political consciousness began with the assassination of President John Kennedy. Anyone alive on that day can remember what they were doing when they heard of that event (just as a more recent generation’s arrival at political consciousness pivots around September 11, 2001 or the current pandemic). At those times in our lives as we are, individually, trying to establish our own identities, these larger events form the background to our developing consciousness and we scarcely have time to assimilate the wider meanings of them. Menand says that one of the reasons for writing his book was to “…fill in the blanks in my own story. It was (as all history writing ultimately is) a way of understanding my own subjectivity.” I think this is not only true of writing history, but also of reading history. I found this book illuminated many aspects of my own life.

[Frank Stein · Rating 4 out of 5]

Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club remains one of my favorite books. It combines lucid insights into the evolution of pragmatic philosophy with the real life biographies of its main thinkers. It demonstrated how life and thought intersected and influenced each other. This book makes a similar effort. It tries to show how intellectual thought, art, and life all intersected in the years from 1945 to 1965. While the first book centered on the insular world of Boston, this one centers on New York, where an explosion of small magazines and cheap paperback books gave non-academic intellectuals a surprising influence over the public.

The basic premise of the book is that "freedom" was the defining attribute of all intellectual and cultural movements in this period, and it makes its case. Of course the influence of both Nazi and Soviet Totalitarianism made freedom particularly important, but the book also shows that the movement of many intellectuals away from the Popular Front politics of the 1930s, and often from direct Communist Party memebership, led them to renounce cultural politics in general, except insofar as those politics were focused on individual liberation. A surprising number of these intellectuals revolved around the Great Books scholar Lionel Trilling at Columbia University, who was a Communist fellow-traveller under Sidney Hook until, who, along with Hook, retreated in face of what Trilling called the "Stalinoid mind of our time," which they thought was spreading in the U.S.. Allen Ginsburg was Trilling's student, and much of the early Beats lionized him (the feeling was not mutual.) Trilling was later close to writers like Isiah Berlin of Oxford, Norman Podhertz of Commentary and Norman Mailer of the Village Voice (Trilling signed a letter in Time along with Alfred Kazin, James Baldwin, Jason Epstein (founder of Anchor books "quality paperbacks") and others that Mailer's stabbing of his wife should not dent his literary reputation.) Trilling had earlier gone to DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx along with Irving Howe (founder of Dissent magazine), where later James Baldwin went. A large number of artists, on the other hand, went through Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Started by a Classics Professor John Andrew Rice in 1933, it was later lead by Josef Albers of the Bauhaus and attracted pepole like Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and John Cage.

A lot the book has this sense of an endless series of intellectual chains and squabbles. It's a "higher gossip" on some level. The problem is that so much that emerged from this world seems trivial, or, to use a term I usually avoid, decadent. John Cage's music and Merc Cunnigham's associated anti-ordered dancing seem gimicky, as does much of the Abstract Expressionists and John Jaspers and Robert Rauschenberg inflected pre-pop artists. The "New Poets" and the Beats are near unreadable today. The "structrualist" through emerging out of Levi-Strauss and reworked by Jacques Derrida is impenetrable (the Paris connection remained another strong one is this book, often through Paul Statre, whose 1945 post-liberation lectures cemented the idea of self-justifying freedom and living "for oneself.")

All of these authors' and artists' desire for "personal expression" over all led them to excuse the inexcusable, from Martin Heideigger's and Paul de Man's Nazism to Norman Mailer's abuse to Eldrige Cleaver's rape and on and on. As Menand seems to recognize himself in his last chapter on the 1960s student movement, where Tom Hayden could ask for revolution just for personal satisfaction, this goal of untrammeled freedom seemed to be an intellectual and political dead in. In any case, many of these artists and intellectuals returned a form of Marxism or "New Left" cultural Marxism, inflected with that sense of personal freedom and enlightenment from the earlier movements, after the Vietnam war politicized everything again. So it's to Marxism and back-again, but with a new individualistic tinge.

Although the book generates sparks it cannot rival the Metaphysical Club because the output of the intellectual movements he describes are not of the same caliber as those in the earlier book, and most of these artists' work served to separate art from the people themselves. The fact that so many of these people dominated intellectual and artistic life, at least as they increasingly defined these worlds' themselves, remains even more mystifying after I finished the book than before.

[Paul Wigle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed Louis Menand's The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War.
It's mostly a history of of the USA and its influence on the world between WWII and the collapse of the USSR.
It highlights how willingly engaged the USA was -- and avidly embraced its culture was -- during that time.

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

How the French ruined everything.

[Bob Finch · Rating 5 out of 5]

A curiously unique and wide-ranging survey of American (that is, US) art and culture during the first half of the Cold War (post WWII to the the Vietnam War, roughly 1945-1969). Menand draws from a remarkable array of sources to describe how the politics and policies of that era influenced music, visual art, literature, movies, science, and education.

The author weaves a complex, interconnected web of influences across genres. While each chapter can stand alone as a deep dive into one or a few related cultural histories (e.g., see Gage’s review in Foreign Affairs Magazine), the cross linkages between genres is also made apparent.

I found the treatment across chapters a bit uneven, and I struggled at times with a few chapters about subjects I had limited interest in (e.g., Pop Art and Hollywood movies), although every chapter revealed to me new insights. I felt the first several chapters and the final chapter were the most interesting. My main complaint is that the book could have benefited from some kind of epilogue or concluding chapter, something to synthesize the reader’s journey (and at 800+ pages, a long one) and to provide some (additional) context about this period’s impact on the latter half of the Cold War and end of the 20th century. I guess the author felt the astute reader wouldn’t need that. Or maybe he was just exhausted!

[Truls Haugen Sletvold · Rating 5 out of 5]

En av de beste sakprosabøkene jeg har lest. Forfatteren undersøker utviklingen av kunst, filosofi, humaniora, musikk og pop-kultur i den tidlige kalde-krigen gjennom et fantastisk galleri av tenkere, kjendiser og musikere. Når prosaen i tillegg er gjennomsyret av vittigheter, tankevekkende spørsmål og refleksjoner er denne boka en «must read» for alle kulturinteresserte.

[Marks54 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Louis Menand has written a fine book, although by the time I finished it - and it is a long book - I was unclear regarding what this book is about.

Let’s start with the plot and its trajectory. I loved the author’s “The Metaphysical Club”, which was a four part intellectual biography, tied to a discussion group. You get four biographical stories, plus the interactions, all tied together with some well done context. In the context of other histories coming out around then, it was fascinating stuff.

What is the plot trajectory here? WW2 ends and many wonder whether our collaboration with the Soviet Union and Stalin will continue (Spoiler alert - it does not.). As the US adapts to the post-war world, cultural and intellectual activities break out again across a wide front in the US and Europe. …and then a bunch of stuff happens??? There follow eighteen long chapters about various aspects of “art and thought” developing from the late 1940s through the 1950s and into the 1960s. How can such a story line miss? How can it fail to engage?

I am younger than Professor Menand but I came of age during this period and on good days I even remember what it was like - or seemed to be like. The book has the sense of being a reflective exercise, in which the author looks back at this time from a distance (he suggests this in the intro) and then wonders “what the hell happened?”. Each of the chapters seems to take this as a starting point and then off a deeper dive into some more specialized area. The result is a series of engaging essays that are sprinkled with some memorable trivia. (My favorite - “borax” in new car styling in the boom years of the 1950s). Each of these areas seems to be its own world that evolves until it reflects a bit more clearly its contemporary relationships. (This is good up to a point - the art and music chapters still leave me more perplexed than I care to admit.)

But is this really a book or a good collection of essays/articles? I think it is more than a collection and am reminded of the apocryphal comment one hears from professors - Need to learn about something? Teach a course on it! The idea is that the preparation will help you make sense of it. For example, the chapter in “The Free World” on literary criticism seems to me to be one of the strongest in the book. In any event, I would love to see the exam for this course. The chapters are far from rehashes of what is generally known and appreciated on these topics.

The broad question for me is what the relationships of the three parts of the title to each other are. Is the “free world” defined in terms of the categories of “art and thought” that Professor Menand reviews or is the “free world” defined into terms of the “Communist World” or the “Third World”. Are these intellectual/cultural domains independent of geopolitics or do they derive from the broader geopolitical order? …and while we are at it, just what do we mean by the Cold War? When did it end? What were its major chronological points? Professor Menand has a definite perspective on this, but art and thought continued to progress after the events in the book and to some the Cold War lasted into the early 1990s. It turns out that Professor Menand does not resolve the relationship of art and thought to geopolitics but leaves some tension. That is reasonable and appropriate.

I realize that a book like this is of necessity a personal perspective on the period. That is OK with me. It is easy to look up details. It is much more difficult to think about what they mean. Professor Menand’s book makes a solid contribution and is well worth reading.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Summary: An intellectual and cultural history of the forces and figures whose creations contributed to the emergence of the United States as an intellectual and artistic leader in the years between 1945 and 1965.

The years between 1945 and 1965 were a time of transformation in the United States. The return of servicemen from the war fueled a boom in university education. An influx of intellectual and artistic refugees from Europe sparked a dynamic mix of ideas and artistic development. The boom in education and culture was accompanied by an economic and technological boom, fueling a widespread interest in music, art, books, museums and and the rapid growth of publishing and music and film industries. Something had happened in the country, where ideas mattered, and culture engaged, with an urgent and widespread interest.

The Free World is an account of the institutions, the people, and the cultural movements and moments of this period. The title is significant in two respects. One is an emphasis on the United States, fueled by Western Europe thinkers and artists, becoming a center of intellectual and artistic culture in a way it had never before. The second is the idea of freedom, that in a variety of ways was a theme running through the “slices” as Menand calls them of this history.

Menand’s approach to this sprawling intellectual and cultural history is to take slices, focusing on a particular aspect of that history and a particular network of key figures and their relationships. He begins with the advent of the Cold War, and the intellectual architect of America’s doctrine of Cold War, George Kennan, and the “Wise Men’ surrounding him, transitioning into a discussion of thinkers about power, anti-totalitarian George Orwell, and anti-communist James Burnham whose The Managerial Revolution foresaw the rise of the bureaucratic totalitarianism of mass culture.

Meanwhile, in occupied and post-war France, the existentialists (Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus) looked into the void, seeing nothing but absurdity, developing the philosophy of authenticity and radical personal choice and responsibility. Political and social theorists continued to wrestle with the connection between mass culture and totalitarianism. Hannah Arendt, influenced by Heidegger and the horrors of the Nazi camps wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism and sociologist David Riesman The Lonely Crowd on group conformity and how this would undermine personal autonomy, little realizing it also made room for alternative visions. Meanwhile, Claude Levi-Strauss, a pioneer in anthropology joined Roman Jakobson in developing Structuralism, a system for analyzing languages and cultural systems, eclipsing the concepts of freedom on which existentialism rested.

In the arts, a constellation of individuals led by Jackson Pollock and Clement Greenberg, along with other artists like Willem de Kooning, were trying to break out of the strictures of painting and art criticism (in the case of Greenberg). Menand chronicles the introduction of Pollock’s drip paintings and other similar works and the galleries and shows and the patronage of figures like Peggy Guggenheim that made this revolution possible. Meanwhile, the thinkers and writers were at work, a circle that included professor Lionel Trilling of The Liberal Imagination, poet Allen Ginsberg, and beat writer Jack Kerouac. Menand returns in a later “slice” to these figures and the further development of their work into the early post-modern deconstructive thought of Barthes and Derrida and the literature that followed.

Another arts movement, centered at Black Mountain College sought to implement a hands-on experimental approach, breaking with the strictures of theory in art, music, and dance under the influence of Josef Albers. Visual artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, composer John Cage, and dancer Merce Cunningham all were part of this circle. Menand does a masterful job describing the innovations of each of these figures. Meanwhile, rock ‘n’ roll was breaking onto the scene. Menand chronicles the unpremeditated recording of “That’s All Right, Mama” that launched the career of Elvis Presley and the intersecting growth of the record industry and disc jockeys who got them air time, often for pay, and the growth of television. He explains how all these factors created the environment for the surprising U.S. success of the Beatles. A later chapter on consumer sovereignty shows mass culture applied to advertising by McLuhan and the marketing of everything from pop art to cars with fins.

One of the most interesting chapters is the one on “Concepts of Liberty,” moving from the high philosophy of Isaiah Berlin in “Two Concepts of Liberty” exploring both negative and positive freedom (“freedom from” and “freedom to”) to the paperback revolution, and their covers and content and what constraints can be placed on this form of expression. This is followed by a discussion of the embrace of “freedom” as a key rallying cry in the Civil Rights movement.

In later chapters, Menand traces further developments in feminism and pop art and the central figures of Betty Friedan, Andy Warhol and Susan Sontag, the freedom literature of James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, and the shift of cinematic artistry from Europe to America, advocated by critic Pauline Kael, who wanted films both smart and entertaining and how Bonnie and Clyde was a watershed film in this regard.

The last chapter comes full circle with George Kennan testifying in the Senate against American expansion of the Vietnam War in 1965, which he and the other Wise Men thought contrary to not only American interests but unnecessary for “containment” of communism in a country trying to free itself from colonialism. But the real story of “This is the End” was that the diversion of intellectual and cultural energy from the intellectual and cultural awakening of the previous twenty years.

Menand does us an incredible service in chronicling this intellectual and cultural history in “just” 727 pages. It could have actually taken far more, and with commendable concision he summarizes complex ideas and multi-faceted movements and the contributions of a variety of key people. The one thing I miss is the religious element of the country’s intellectual culture. Reinhold Niebuhr is mentioned in one line on a single page but was a formidable influence on Kennan and many others. Howard Thurman played a key role in shaping Martin Luther King, Jr. Paul Tillich and Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel did major intellectual work during this year, addressing the themes of freedom in this work.

Menand concludes his preface musing, “As I got older, I started to wonder just what freedom is, or what it can realistically mean. I wrote this book to help myself, and maybe you, figure that out.” He does not draw conclusions as he ends the work. He challenged me to think. Arendt, Riesman, and Berlin all have concerns about how mass culture, under the guise of expressive individualism can lead to tyranny. Yet by and large, the freedom of thinkers and culture-makers in this work, is the freedom of throwing off of constraints. And when we are indeed shackled physically or by unjust practices like colonialism, racism, or sexual discrimination, removing constraints is necessary to human flourishing. But the religious outlook would also recognize some constraints enable us to flourish both individuals and societies to flourish–constraints upon evil or unchecked and undisciplined affections, that in extreme form can lead to tyranny. But Menand is spot on in identifying freedom as an important theme for our cultural life, and one worthy of consideration. His intellectual and cultural history certainly points toward the sources of our contemporary ideas of freedom. But it seems to me an urgent matter to discern whether these ideas are the best for both individual and societal flourishing.

[Illiterate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Menand is an engaging guide to lively topics. But his books lack intellectual heft, relying on biography and anecdote more than analysis and argument.

[Namal · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read about the development of American artistic and intellectual culture spanning roughly the first two decades of the Cold War, when art and ideas were “an important battleground in the struggle to achieve and maintain a free society [and] artistic and philosophical choices carried implications for the way one lived one’s life and for the kind of polity in which one wished to live it”.

Looking forward to buying and reading the paperback when it comes out next spring, to revisit a few topics.

Things I didn’t know or found especially interesting: translated American fiction and tough guy Hollywood archetypes providing the inspiration for Existentialism in postwar France; the relationship between Heidegger and Hannah Arendt; the obsession with totalitarianism as a bogeyman lurking behind postwar consumerism and mass culture; cultural anthropology, structuralism and the Family of Man exhibit in the context of postwar decolonization; the artists who produced and the critics who championed Abstract Expressionist art; the artists behind “the emancipation of dissonance”; the success story behind Elvis and later, the Beatles; Isaiah Berlin’s encounter with Anna Akhmatova dramatizing the stakes for individuals involved in geopolitical struggles; “The Two Concepts of Liberty” - Berlin’s writing inspired by his conviction that unhappiness is not cured (or happiness is not guaranteed) by rationality; the postwar proliferation of American goods and entertainment culture abroad inspiring Pop Art; Derrida, deconstruction, and Paul de Man; Susan Sontag calling for criticism of form over content dovetailing with anti-formalist aesthetics popularized by Rauschenberg and Johns, among others; the French New Wave in cinema inspiring the resurgence of American movies and Hollywood in the 70s; Pauline Kael’s defense of the midcult/middlebrow and putting entertainment value before aesthetic appreciation; the university as the springboard for cultural change - the federal grant university hiding behind the disinterested pursuit of knowledge vs FSM students supporting higher learning and pushing for the betterment of society; finally, Menand pulling the curtain back to reveal the CIA as a funding source for the NSA - “the fact that dissent was tolerated in the United States was a major Cold War selling point”.

[Dana Torrente · Rating 3 out of 5]

Okay on the fence about the three or four stars for this one. Loved the content. So very captivating about the transition of art and thought through the 40s-60s. I really loved each chapter as a stand alone but as an entire book it was a bit too expansive. I feel like some choice editing would have made this more digestible for the casual reader. You will not mind though if you’re looking for a incredibly dense examination of American thought at this time. I’m at a solid 3.5 or 4 if you are really looking for a research text.

[Brian Eshleman · Rating 4 out of 5]

He hit the right balance between specific examples and meta trends.

[Lukas Evan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Like the Cold War, it went on way too long.