The liberal social thought of the long 1950s is best seen as an attempt to combat the threat that the United States, as a modern mass society, could succumb to totalitarianism. Widely discussed texts like Escape from Freedom, The Vital Center, The Lonely Crowd, and The Origins of Totalitarianism announced the threat. Academic and theoretical studies worked to provide social supports for now weakened individuals or to find behavioral evidence that Americans still functioned as liberal democrats, but they did so by subordinating individual autonomy and mutual social responsibility to social systems, the market, and elites. Although social liberalism revived during the 1960s, the Great Society fused social liberalism to the Cold War state; the movements for civil rights and social inclusion, fueled by the desire for authenticity, veered into individualistic, identitarian channels; and radical calls for participatory democracy magnified both desires for authenticity and fears of American totalitarianism. Until the end of the century the totalitarian frame of liberal social thought continued to encourage visions of the future as a monolithic totality, to steer liberal social thinkers into individualistic channels, to hobble mutualistic conceptions of the social, and to weaken the ability of social liberals to respond to the conservative backlash that grew through the century and beyond.

The efforts of liberal thinkers to incorporate mutualistic social principles into Americans’ understanding of liberalism extended through the century, but the strongest and most holistic conceptions of the social sphere took hold during the New Deal era and World War II. Contrary to recent accounts that locate the weakening of that social liberal project in the 1970s and attribute it to underlying economic changes, this article builds on two generations of historiography to argue that the decline began during the long 1950s when totalitarianism changed the political context of social thought. The theory of mass society that developed to explain the rise of totalitarianism replaced the citizens of liberal democratic theory with the anxious, rootless masses of modern society and forecast the collapse of liberal democracy into totalitarianism. Americans cast totalitarianism as the antithesis of America, its Other in the narrative of American identity, a threat both without and within. In that context, mutualistic conceptions of the social sphere were put on the defensive and individual liberty was valorized. Liberal intellectuals, trusting in American capitalism and in the weak social state, focused on the threat of McCarthyite anti-intellectualism and mass irrationality. Their commitment to social democracy weakened and their chief concern shifted to the no-longer-autonomous individuals of modern society.

The history of the social sciences in the United States—like many other fields of intellectual history—confirms John Dewey's observation: “Intellectual progress usually occurs through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives they assume—an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and a change of urgent interest. We do not solve them: we get over them.” As Dewey suggests, two fine new books mark intellectual progress in the field through a change of generational interest. As he also implies, new perspectives leave important issues behind.1

While popular nationalism flourished in the United States from the time of the Revolution onward, reflective treatments of what it meant to be, specifically, a “nation” were rarely produced until the Civil War era. Historians have generally treated northern Civil War theorists of the nation as importers of European ideas of organic nationhood to serve conservative and statist purposes. The most notable mid-century theorists—Francis Lieber, Elisha Mulford, Orestes Brownson, John William Draper, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Sumner—were a more diverse set, however. They brought to the subject different theoretical and political assumptions and produced different models of the American nation, and they accommodated their borrowed conceptions to native materials. If their initial aim was to strengthen the authority and unity of the wartime nation, they soon struggled with the multiracial nation that was emerging from the war. The unity they posited in the nation contended with invidious racial, ethnic, and religious distinctions. In the end, Lieber, Brownson, Mulford, and Draper found diversity difficult or impossible to reconcile with their visions of national unity. Only Sumner and Douglass managed to construct models of the nation that were both heterogeneous and united: their postwar views serve as counterpoint to the tortured efforts of the other writers. In the language of current theory, these writers divided over whether the United States was a civic or an ethnic nation, although not all their exclusions and inequalities emanated from an ethnic model of the nation, nor all their inclusions and liberties from a civic one.