The Twilight of the American Enlightenment
Subtitle: the 1950s and the crisis of liberal belief
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2014
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 219
ISBN-13: 9780465030101
Description: "In the aftermath of World War II, the United States stood at a precipice. The forces of modernity unleashed by the war had led to astonishing advances in daily life, but technology and mass culture also threatened to erode the country's traditional moral character. As award-winning historian George M. Marsden explains in The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, postwar Americans looked to the country's secular, liberal elites for guidance in this precarious time, but these intellectuals proved unable to articulate a coherent common cause by which America could chart its course. Their failure lost them the faith of their constituents, paving the way for a Christian revival that offered America a firm new moral vision-one rooted in the Protestant values of the founders. A groundbreaking reappraisal of the country's spiritual reawakening, The Twilight of the American Enlightenment shows how America found new purpose at the dawn of the Cold War. "--

"In The Twilight of the American Enlightenment, Bancroft Prize-winning historian George Marsden examines the faltering attempts by the country's brightest minds to establish a new national identity and purpose for postwar America, and explains how their efforts--and eventual failure--helped to shape the society we live in today. As Marsden shows, the nation's challenges heavily influenced political debates and American art during the 1950s. Playwrights and novelists in particular reflected on the simultaneous conformity and alienation of modern man, with authors such as Dwight MacDonald and James Baldwin lamenting the new "mass man," whom mass media had robbed of all individualism. So too did sociologists Erich Fromm and David Riesman, whose idea of a "lonely crowd" seemed to sum up the inauthenticity of mainstream America. Political philosophers including Walter Lippmann, meanwhile, feared that the pragmatism of thinkers such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and Daniel Bell--who rejected wholesale ideologies in favor of a relativistic, selective politics--had left the nation directionless at a crucial moment in American history"--
Table of contents: title: Prologue: The national purpose; title: Mass media and the national character; title: Freedom in the lonely crowd; title: Enlightenment's end?: building without foundations; title: The problem of authority: the two masters; title: The latter days of the Protestant establishment; title: Sequel: consensus becomes a fighting word; title: Conclusion: Toward a more inclusive pluralism