Name: The Free World
ISBN: 9780374158453

The Free World

"A history of the thinkers, writers, and artists who shaped intellectual culture in Cold War Europe and America"-- Menand analyzes the economic, demographic, and technological forces that drove social and cultural change in US during the twenty years following the end of the Second World War. Introducing us to the personalities at the center of this transformation-- artists and thinkers both in the US and abroad-- he shows how they exerted a powerful influence on postwar art and thought. It was an exciting period of creative innovation and intellectual debate, and it gave birth to the United States we know today. -- adapted from jacket

What Hacker News says

bckrSep 2021

Louis Menand's The Free World, a history of public thought in the cold war era, recently taught me about the relationship of the masses and totalitarianism.

The relationship appears to be : destroy classes & traditional relationships -> produce masses & the mob -> totalitarianism arises out of the masses' anxiety and the mob's despotic idiocy.

Something like how too many chickens in a big barn can't form hierarchies and so live in a perpetual panic, except along comes a Big Chicken who makes everyone feel better because they finally know their place again.

I hope something different and less awful happens. But the early results are worrying.

Can we just pull the plug on this experiment, please?

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schoenMay 2021

I first thought that the book itself was titled The Opportunists, but that's just the title of the book review; the book is called The Free World. Although it sounds like the book is fairly critical of many of its subjects, I doubt either Louis Menand or Mark Greif specifically meant to sum up Hannah Arendt's work as opportunism.

The closest to this that the review comes is

> One sentiment repeated with variations throughout the book is “The timing was good” (for the appearance of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, when Stalin seemed to have taken the place of Hitler).

In context I think the idea is that some people like Arendt may have engaged in sincere journalism and philosophy, which the culture and/or the CIA may then have deployed as part of the Cold War, not that Arendt (at least) was thinking "what could I write that would make me famous and influential right now?".

To modernize this a bit, Ta-nehisi Coates and Jordan Peterson were both developing and expressing their ideas for a long time (decades, I think) in relative obscurity. Then they suddenly became best-sellers in the 2010s, I imagine to a great extent because of cultural and political developments outside of themselves and their work. Both are presumably profiting quite a bit from their success, but I doubt either primarily thought tactically or consciously opportunistically about that.

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