Roman Clodia’s Reviews > American Intellectual History: A Very Short Introduction > Status Update

'Postmodernist thought raised difficult, urgent questions then, and it remains to be seen what the answers are or if they will ever come. Should the United States be American citizens’ primary allegiance or, in the era of globalization, should they aspire instead to be citizens of the world? If we cannot even get intergroup reciprocal loyalty in the United States, how can we possibly achieve it internationally?'

'Judith Butler... was one of the most powerful theorists... to question the assumptions and categorical thinking of fellow feminists. In her groundbreaking book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Butler interrogated the “foundationalist fictions” of the sex/gender divide, which viewed sex as something rooted in biology and gender as constructed by culture.'

'Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. sounded the alarm with his 1991 The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. He argued that academics had degenerated into ethnic activists and that advocates were proselytizing to students a way of thinking about America that “belittles unum and glorifies pluribus.”

'But because a vocal minority of academics began working with postmodern ideas and interpretive strategies, even turning their spokespeople into adjectives for this way of thinking (“Foucauldian,” “Derridean”), worried observers sounded the alarm that a “foreign invasion” was infecting the academy and, by extension, the tender minds of impressionable students'

'Less than a year later, two transformative texts would add to this lineup, breaking apart conventional ideas of the proper social “place” for women and people of color while helping to strengthen their respective liberation movements: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

'For Friedman... of the “Chicago school” of economics and its most vigorous critic of Keynesian (or state-interventionist) economics, the best thing a democratic government could do was to get out of its citizens’ way. Friedman’s wildly popular Capitalism and Freedom... maintained that governmental regulations were strangling freedom not just out of the market, but also out of American political life.'

'It was a decade [1960s] in which a number of visionary and inspiring political leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Robert Kennedy, rallied millions to their cause. But it was also the decade in which their lives—and much of the hope they inspired—were cut short by assassins’ bullets'

'Few decades in American history are as fabled as the 1960s. They were years of great hope as activists, lawyers, and governmental officials translated American liberal ideas into civil rights laws and Great Society social reforms. They were also years of dashed dreams as the full benefit of those liberal achievements was undercut by the Vietnam War, which drained resources from American cities to ramp up the war'

'The French existentialists were greeted with fascination, though also with some revulsion, by Americans who felt that the horrors of World War II had made a mockery of the Western intellectual tradition and thus sought to reset a notion of the self and the world more in line with their feelings of radical indeterminacy and experiences of aloneness in an anonymous, indifferent world.'

'The concern about conformity extended into other registers... David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1950) showed how the postwar American pressure for uniformity and togetherness was actually producing its opposite... American culture was producing atomized and alienated “other-directed” personalities who run on a “diffuse anxiety” and toggle between conformity and anomie.'