Preface (c. 1980)

History has imposed upon the avant-garde the duty not only of disinterestedly cultivating art and ideas but of educating and leading an aimless body of Philistine taste and opinion.

—Richard Chase, “The Fate of the Avant-Garde” (1957)

In 1967, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded me a fellowship to do a history of post-World War II American thought. The letter announcing the award came as a surprise, and I have elsewhere disclosed how this award changed my life, mostly by certifying my growing, but still tentative, sense of myself as a fulltime professional writer. I was twenty-six when it arrived, only a few steps out of graduate school; and I later learned that the only fellow younger than I that year was a physicist born two weeks before me. I got to work, needless to say, producing not only the profiles that became Master Minds (1969) but writing the text for Metamorphosis in the Arts (which was not published until 1980).

In the fall of 1968 I began work on the remainder of the project, a comprehensive two-volume history of recent American thought; and in the ensuing weeks I made outlines and even drafted chapters. As I saw it then, the theme of my book was that only in the post-WWII period did American thinking in many fields achieve first-rank importance and major international influence; only in the post-war period did American cultural life become fully mature. My strategy in writing this book was not to prove this thesis, which I took to be virtually self-evident to those who knew (and cared), but to identify what this major thinking was. I projected that the first part would deal with current forms of “old thought,” which are traditional disciplines, and the remainder would focus on “new thought,” which is to say both science and intellectual domains that were new to the mid-twentieth century. Thus, in the first book would be these chapters, approximately in this order: Historiography, Theology, Social Philosophy, Sociology, Architecture, Government, Anthropology, Economics, Jurisprudence, Education, Philosophy, Psychology, Esthetics, Literary Criticism, Arts Criticism, Theater, Fiction, and Poetry. The second volume would have been devoted to Scientific Philosophy, Computers, Communication, Mathematics, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Cosmology, Linguistics, Management, Military Strategy, and Community Planning.

I initially thought of the historical period as 1945 to 1965, but later came to extend it to 1968, which I still think did indeed mark the end of the boom in American intellectual life. (Richard Nixon came to power in 1968, it should not be forgotten; and among other calamities, the stock market collapsed, a general recession ensued, while universities began a “cut-back” that continued through the 1970s into the 1980s.)

I had been trained as an intellectual historian, first at Brown University and then at Columbia, with a year out at the University of London; and it was then thought, not only by my teachers but by myself, that I had developed certain talents for synthesizing large amounts of intellectual material and for explaining difficult concepts. These aptitudes would inform the strategy of this book.

Once the scheme of the book was in mind, I did a lot of researching (and book-buying), outlining what I would discuss in each section, making folders in which I filed notes for each chapter, and compiling bibliographies of major texts. Toward winter I began to draft chapters, completing one every two weeks, roughly, until May, which is the season when that part of my metabolism that writes prose customarily winds down. I spent the summer of 1970 taking more notes and rewriting these chapters already completed and began the following October to work on the book again. However, as I recollected in “The End” Appendix (1979), an incident of “white-collar mugging” prompted me to put aside the intellectual history and instead spent most of my days drafting The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America, which I hoped would be finished soon enough to allow me to get back to the intellectual history. Such was not to be. That book did not find a publisher for two years, and in the interim I lost a good deal of confidence and energy. By the time The End was done, I applied again for fellowship aid to continue “The Maturity of American Thought,” not only because I needed the money to buy uninterrupted time but because, to be frank, the historian in me needed support to get me back to work again. That did not happen (the National Endowment for the Humanities typically disgracing itself by rewarding mediocre academics over independent scholars of whatever quality), and so I wrote other books instead.

In 1976 I happened to look again at “The Maturity of American Thought” and realized that, since the book was never finished, it would be appropriate to offer the completed chapters to magazines. That on “Esthetics” appeared in Sun and Moon , those on “Government” and “Social Philosophy” in Western Humanities Review , that on “Literary Criticism” in Boston University Journal , and that in “Architecture” in The Bennington Revie w . The first was reprinted as the introduction to Esthetics Contemporar y (1978; revised ed., 1989). [That on poetry appeared as an introduction to the anthology Possibilities of Poetry (1970) and was later reprinted in The Old Poetries and the New (1980), which is still in print; so it is not included here.] From time to time readers ask me for copies of these essays, or those who have read one essay ask for others accompanying it. Since no other intellectual history of the post-WWII America has yet appeared, it seemed advisable to publish all the completed chapters as an “unfinished history.” Neither the text nor the accompanying bibliography has been updated.

II

History, conceived as a form of understanding, has a proper concern with every other field and form of knowledge and understanding.

—W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (1968)

The Maturity of American Thought announces its theme in its title, which holds that only since World War II has North American intellectual activity truly achieved that diversified excellence that we associate with a pre-eminent culture. By “thought,” it should be established at the beginning, I mean cultural produce that reveals intellectual functioning at the highest, most adventurous, and most consequential levels; and the measure of “excellence” is first-rate and universally influential work. It follows, therefore, that there is nothing here about industrial design or display, both of which intellectually derive from painting and architecture; nothing about journalism which, in spite of occasional claims to the contrary, remains a sub-genre of literature; nothing at all about transient pseudo-culture, no matter how well-publicized. If Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s book on the two decades after World War I, The Long Week-End (1941), “is intended as a reliable record of what took place, of a forgettable sort,” this study deals in precisely opposite material—only that worth remembering, even if among only a few specialists.

A further implication of this theme is that American thinking can be considered apart from European (but that intellectual Canadians, particularly if they communicate in English, are culturally American); for even though certain developments described ahead were achieved through international collaboration, while the new communications media hasten international dissemination of most important ideas, most American thought descends largely from distinctly native examples and traditions. Also, it is clear that the familiar European intellectual categories, such as “rationalism,” “tragedy,” “realism,” and “dialectical,” are irrelevant in characterizations of intellectual endeavor in the New World. At a time when the historiography of American politics has become more stringently critical, if not deprecating, this essay on intellectual achievement is all but celebratory, nonetheless acknowledging an older truth (exemplified by Weimar Germany) that intellectual splendor neither brings nor accompanies social success.

My thesis could be documented by itemizing in detail the influence of American thinking about the world’s practitioners in so many fields; but that verification process is, in my judgment, too obvious to merit scholarly elaboration. Instead, The Maturity of American Thought concentrates upon identifying and characterizing the thought itself, the book thus becoming a record of the most laudable and consequential thinking in a variety of intellectual areas, in short providing the evidence upon which culturally comparative critical judgments would elsewhere be made. One incidental assumption, perhaps unusual in American intellectual history, is my regarding Anglophone Canadians as essentially American in their culture and audience.

As the recent period has witnessed great changes, in no field were the dominant ideas of 1945 held with equal tenacity and pervasiveness in 1968. Since the dominance of universities makes the “discipline” the primary context and communications channels in America today, most of the following chapters describe developments in “the state of the [discrete] art,” my assumption being that later intellectual historians will identify overlapping interdisciplinary themes that preoccupy and perhaps unify the thought of the period. The book’s main point is, thus, assumed and elaborated, rather than argued or constantly reiterated; for the text itself acknowledges the practical wisdom of Johann Huizinga’s contention that, “The less systematic a discipline [such as intellectual history] is, the less use it has for the thesis.”

Another crucial critical assumption here is that fresh intellectual work largely grows out of prior achievements and concerns in acknowledged intellectual domains, for thinkers respond to new problems and questions posed not only by recent social developments relevant to continuing disciplinary concerns but to intellectual change in other domains. Though the structures and details of intellectual contributions are often influenced by factors outside the field, the major idea itself, especially if persuasive, usually stems from intrinsic traditions. To put it more succinctly, new thought builds upon old thought in response to new ideas and realities of the current time.

Most of the following chapters exist rather independently of the others, each telling its own intellectual story; yet lacing the book together are common concerns, a dominating critical intelligence perhaps, and then the overall theme of intellectual maturity. Beyond that, the book is divided into two major parts, the first to deal with recent extensions of pre-1945 intellectual endeavors—literature, social philosophy, historiography, economics, theology, etc.—and the second to emphasize the emergence of “new thought,” which is to say intellectual domains that did not exist before—information theory, thermonuclear strategy, molecular biology, computer science, etc. Therefore, while the chapter headings in the first volume have familiar names, those in the second book [that was never written] will favor new coinages; for discussions of unprecedented ideas would best eschew the old language.

Acknowledging what I take to be the great tradition of intellectual history, The Maturity of American Thought is an interpretative record in which decisions of inclusion and exclusion generally reflect my critical weighing of competing claims. Since the historian’s familiarity with a particular field is inevitably less thorough than that of a professional in that discipline, the specialist may find my discussion of his own terrain more capricious and/or limited than the remainder of the text. Nonetheless, it should be understood that an intellectual historian’s judgments inevitably reflect not superior information or intimate understanding but, first, a disinterested distance that enables him to discern the broadest trends and the most significant contributions, as well as, and more important, a developed experience at precisely such selective discriminations. For that reason, most “omissions,” especially the more conspicuous ones, should be considered intentional. A more serious risk confronting the intellectual historian is superficial comprehension, or explanation, of ideas and procedures, particularly if the conceptual structure and/or intellectual material are strictly indigenous to a certain field; but in a study of such encompassing scope, minor misunderstandings might be more profitable than the costs of neglect. Intellectual history deals with easily verifiable evidence—the texts themselves; and though I decided to avoid footnotes, all sources are credited in bibliographical appendices to each chapter.

The outline of this book first came to me as an undergraduate, a decade ago. When I proposed the project to my advisor in graduate school, he piously dismissed the project as “the work of a lifetime” (his perhaps, but not mine) and insisted that I devote myself instead to something more modest. However, on the side, I have been working on this study ever since; so that numerous previously published essays and reviews, written with this project ultimately in mind, are incorporated here, usually in heavily revised form. It could also be said that this book documents the intellectual atmosphere into which I matured—its dominant ideas were my unexamined beliefs until I came to question them and later learned to recognize my own location in recent cultural history; and by 1970, I would like to think, the historian can gain sufficient perspective upon 1945-68 to make judgments he expects will be definitive. The most conspicuous omission from the following survey is the nonliterary arts, which were covered in Metamorphosis in the Arts; and some of the individual contributions emphasized here were also discussed at greater length, with more personal background, in Master Minds (Macmillan, 1969), which is, however, a book primarily about the personalities and careers of preeminent people.

* * *

Barzun, Jacques. “Cultural History as a Synthesis,” in Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History. New York: Meridian, 1956.

Cargill, Oscar. Intellectual America. New York: Macmillan, 1959.

Commager, Henry Steele. The American Mind. New Haven: Yale University, 1950.

Gabriel, Ralph Henry. The Course of American Democratic Thought. New York: Ronald, 1940.

Gay, Peter. The Enlightenment: The Rise of Paganism. New York: Knopf, 1966.

Gallie, W. B. Philosophy and Historical Understanding. Second ed. New York: Schocken, 1968.

Graves, Robert, and Alan Hodge. The Long Weekend. London: Faber & Faber, 1940.

Hazard, Paul. The European Mind (1680-1715). London: Hollis & Carter, 1953.

———. European Thought in the Eighteenth Century. London: Hollis & Carter, 1954.

Hughes, H. Stuart. Consciousness and Society. New York: Knopf, 1958.

Lerner, Max. America as a Civilization. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957.

Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance. New York: Oxford University, 1941.

May, Henry F. The End of American Innocence. New York: Knopf, 1959.

Miller, Perry. The New England Mind. Two volumes. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1939, 1953.

Parrington, V. L. Main Currents in American Thought. Three volumes. New York: Harcourt, 1927-30.

Shattuck, Roger. The Banquet Years. New York: Harper’s, 1958.

Wish, Harvey. Society and Thought in Modern America. New York: Longmans, 1952.

These bibliographies acknowledge titles that are cited in the text and/or inform the thinking. If a title mentioned in a later chapter was credited in an earlier chapter, it will not be mentioned again.