Dorothy Ross's major new article

Or, why we should blame the 1950s for everything

The first part of a major two-part article by Dorothy Ross has appeared in the December 2021 (18.4) issue of Modern Intellectual History, although both parts are available as “FirstView” articles. (Here are the links to Part 1 and to Part 2. Let me know if you have any trouble accessing them.) The article’s title is “Whatever Happened to the Social in American Social Thought,” and as far as US intellectual history goes, it’s a blockbuster, which I’ll probably take two if not three posts to examine fully. In this first post, I want to lay out Ross’s argument and explain how it differs from prior attempts to answer the article’s eponymous question. I also want to enumerate some of the major issues I have with the article, but let me stress how deeply impressive Ross’s synthesis of a huge body of intellectual production is. “Social thought” is already a very capacious category, and Ross enlarges it without losing her grasp on its larger patterns and place within US culture.

“Whatever Happened…” covers some familiar ground for Ross; it builds on her monograph The Origins of American Social Science (1992) and her two landmark articles, 1977’s “Socialism and American Liberalism: Academic Social Thought in the 1880s” (sadly not available online) and 2011’s “American Modernities, Past and Present.” But in many ways this article is not just a summation of Ross’s forty-plus-year career, but of the scholarly themes and political preoccupations that have been at the heart of her generational cohort of US intellectual historians, the generation that came of age during the Carter or Reagan administrations. 

This generation—Kloppenberg, Hollinger, Blake, Horowitz, Lichtenstein, Brinkley, Katznelson, Westbrook, Gerstle, Kessler-Harris, Fitzpatrick—by and large took it as their project to do for the “Age of Reform” (as Richard Hofstadter called it) what the republican synthesis had done for the American Revolution and the early republic: give it a second political dimension, something more than liberal individualism.[1] But instead of republicanism, the alternative they recovered was social democracy, or, as some of them called it, progressivism or social liberalism. The project, in other words, was to show that mainstream liberalism both harbored and stood in tension with a secondary tradition—a continuous and evolving body of political thought and action that positioned itself as a fundamental alternative to liberal individualism. Their purpose was not hidden: even more than the founders of the republican synthesis, this generation of scholars was desperate to find and reconstruct a usable past.

Ross is still engaged in that task, but in this article she is more concerned with dissuading the reader from making a mistake and reaching for an unusable past. In plain historiographical terms, Ross’s first contention is simple: it is not the 1970s that is the “pivotal decade” during which social democrats definitively lost the will and imagination to combat liberal individualism, but rather the “long 1950s” that saw a “thinning” of the social, an intellectual change which virtually guaranteed the eventual triumph of the market über alles. Her argument is thus most pointedly a correction of Daniel Rodgers and, she argues, Howard Brick. Where Rodgers and Brick would look back to midcentury social theorists as potential resources for rebuilding a robust notion of “the social” in contrast to neoliberalism’s homo economicus, Ross insists that the materials for such a task cannot be found there, but must be sought further back, in the 1930s or earlier—in the Progressive Era.

The problem with what she calls the “long 1950s” (“from roughly 1947 to 1963”) is that social thinkers had already moved on from a truly “thick” or strong notion of the social; their imagination of society was one of “large but… loose collections of individuals.” If society still played a large role within postwar intellectual culture, it was no longer in the form of “a sense of mutual obligation of each to all” or the “moral community of the nation” (Rodgers’s terms) but as a “mass society” or the “lonely crowd.” By shifting to this vision of society as mere clusters of “weakened individuals” brought into mindless alignment by the aggregating forces of either totalitarianism or mass culture, midcentury intellectuals lost the will to defend a truly strong, social democratic society, and crumbled meekly before the neoliberal onslaught of the 1970s. The battle to keep the US from “fracturing” was lost not when it occurred—in the days of disco—but before—in the years when rock was young.

Ross’s article moves on from this rewinding of the tape from the Seventies to the “long 1950s” to examine the dominance of totalitarianism as “the chief factor in redirecting liberal energies,” a master concept which “shattered the liberal narrative of progress and put holistic and mutualistic conceptions of the social on the defensive.” Ross emphasizes throughout how overwhelmed intellectuals were as they grappled with the fear of the United States succumbing to totalitarianism, and argues that their response was a kind of panicked retreat to the safety of individualism: “In the context of those fears, totalitarianism was cast as America’s Other, individual freedom gained ideological power and moved to the center of liberal concern, while faith in the people and, along with it, faith in social democracy became more difficult to sustain” (part 2, page 2). [This sentence virtually repeats one from the article’s Part 1: “With totalitarianism cast as America’s Other, capitalist ideology was strengthened and liberals’ commitment to social democracy weakened” (part 1, page22).]

In these quotes, one can see the first issue I have with the article: its tendency to use not merely passive constructions to explain intellectual shifts, but to characterize those shifts principally in terms of strength and weakness, of robustness and inconstancy of will. This rhetorical mode has been extremely common within US intellectual history, as if our job as historians is principally to reward intellectuals in the past for holding fast to their commitments or chastise them for bowing under the weight of their conjuncture.

I think of this tendency—which is most prevalent among US historians who have tried to explain Why the New Deal Did Not Last Forever—as an “attenuation narrative,” because it describes not just a declension (a loss of power) but a weakening of resolve, a failure of nerve or hollowing of confidence. The attenuation narrative dwells not so much on the disposition of external factors—institutional structures, economic constraints, access to various resources—as on the will to power and even the moods of usually a relatively small category of actors, either intellectual or political elites.

The attenuation narrative is particularly seductive for intellectual historians who wish to marginalize material (especially economic) factors, or who at least want to defend the importance (and even the priority) of intellectual factors in explaining historical change. This is one of Ross’s explicit goals in this article, as she argues early in the first part that historians have been too focused on “the causal power of social–economic structures during the Fordist era and the ‘massive shifts in the global economy’ since the 1970s” (part 1, page 5), and it is for this reason that they have overlooked the earlier erosion of the social among anti-totalitarian liberals in the 1950s.

Along with metaphors of weakness and strength, there is another language which intellectual historians employ to gloss over the meagerness of any causal evidence in their attenuation narratives. Unable really to explain how ideas act, they use vague, somewhat bureaucratic actions to describe how ideas do their work. Here is an example from Ross: “While the intensity of forces waxed and waned with political events, the antithesis between totalitarianism and liberal democracy set the parameters and central issues for liberal social thought in the postwar era and continued to frame liberal thinking until the collapse of the Soviet Union at the end of the century” (Part 1, page 18). Such rhetoric is not merely an abstract way of describing verbal conflicts among individuals; it is a way to discuss intellectual conflict while omitting people entirely, as in this (rather gruesome) sentence: “By the end of the 1960s, the consequential political and intellectual moves to the left were producing a consequential countermove to the right that changed the play of political forces” (part 2, page 23). “Forces” and “(counter)moves” are all that the intellectual historian needs—no people required!

My objections to the “attenuation narrative,” as I have called it, and to the super-abstraction that I believe it leads to, have been so far mostly at the level of style or rhetoric. In a subsequent post, I hope to explain why I feel that these issues of language are intrinsically connected to more serious problems with the premises of Ross’s article. And, in fact, not just with Ross’s premises, but with those of the larger project I spoke of above, the collective attempt by Ross’s generational peers to reconstruct a usable past of social democracy in US history. 

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[1] I have listed only historians here whom Ross actually cites but this project also existed in political science departments, a crossover most powerfully exemplified by Katznelson but also including figures like Eldon Eisenach and Rogers Smith (whom Ross cites) and Stephen Skowronek and Theda Skocpol. It also should be noted that Ross also footnotes—but depends less substantively on—the generation of scholarship that came from the students of those cited above: historians like Glickman, McClay, Ciepley, Sklansky, Gilman, Jewett, and Schultz.