Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust

The cosmography of Israel identifies a passageway beneath the Holy of Holies at Jerusalem’s First and Second Temples. It led to the Tehom, the fathomless deep of darkness, chaos, disorder.¹ The priestly stratum, the Cohanim, was charged to block this passageway. I have understood the purpose of this book to ask whether, today, when we have no Temple, no priestly caste, no fixed validity, and no revealed truth, an extended and fortified Enlightenment, rooted in its original values of toleration, reason, rule of law, free inquiry, and opposition to despotism, might successfully guard the passageway to the Tehom.

My intellectual history of the political studies enlightenment has approached this question obliquely by revisiting the charged moment when these scholars who sought to understand the sources of their insulted expectations and develop a fresh approach to the liberal state grappled with the shocking constellation of total war, totalitarianism, and holocaust. “Where are the limits of Enlightenment?,” the German novelist and satirist Christoph Martin Wieland had inquired in April 1789. “Where,” he replied, “with all the light possible, there is nothing more to see.” When the political studies enlightenment set to work, they understood they had to pierce their period’s darkness or humankind would be unable to escape the prospect of becoming “night birds…. who screech most shrilly when the sun pricks them in their eyes.”²

As I compose this coda, yet another stack of books is piled high on my desk. Indicative of how the Enlightenment and its legacies have come under assault in the humanities, the social sciences, and the wider culture, they announce, among other subjects, a ‘postmodernist critique of the project of enlightenment’; a ‘requiem for modern politics,’ the result of ‘the tragedy of enlightenment’; ‘contradictions of modernity’ in a study of ‘enlightenment and genocide’; ‘the politics of enlightenment in the aftermath of modernity’; even ‘remnants of the Enlightenment in National Socialism.’³ Their authors tend to see a singular ‘project’: rationalist, godless, scientific, cool, Eurocentric, regulatory, patriarchal, racist, imperial, and lawful.⁴ To be sure, the various analysts do not pick the same descriptors, but irrespective of whether they fault the Enlightenment for its disastrous attempts to dominate nature, its amoral pluralism and absence of virtue, or its biased unitary ontology which they believe makes room only for a narrow band of humanity, thought, and value, they tend to see a coherent, well-bounded, Enlightenment which they treat as the reflection, emblem, and cause of modernity’s ailments and upheavals.

Current critics can be grouped in two distinctive if internally diverse clusters. For the first, who might loosely be grouped as premodern, the Enlightenment is too thin, besotted by relativism, and incapable of searching and finding the good; a betrayal of traditional philosophy and theology. Aristotle, after all, thought moral conflict a badge of ignorance and Aquinas believed the moral virtues composed a beneficent unity. On this reading, the Enlightenment (as a capstone of Cartesian realism) substituted logic for content, method for virtue, and agnosticism for belief, producing a fateful loss of bearings and a reduction both to human thought and ambition. By contrast, for the second set, who loosely may be grouped as postmodern, the Enlightenment and its legacy is too thick, characterized by the hubris of imposing a master narrative which artificially values only particular and limited aspects of human capacities and sensations and is marked by stereotypes and prejudices that remain unexamined. In this accounting, its universalism is a pretense and its ideas are instruments of power and domination. Its tolerant glove masks the repressive fist of national-state concentrations of military, organizational, fiscal, and knowledge-based endowments as well as nimble fingers that regulate the micro-dynamics of daily life, including those in the zone of personal intimacy.

Polanyi, Arendt, Hofstadter, Truman, Lasswell, Dahl, and the other scholars of the political studies enlightenment would have sought to parry both sets of these imputations, I believe, in much the same manner that they resisted the assaults mounted by the critics of their time.⁵ They understood, just as the detractors of the 1940s did, that the Enlightenment’s version of modernity, despite its ambiguities and heterogeneity, did embrace pluralism, human reason and autonomy, science and technology as the mastery of nature, and the goal of social control.⁶ But they drew contrary lessons about the relationship of desolation and enlightenment. The Enlightenment’s search for control, they grasped, had been animated from the start by anxiety in situations where neither the thought of the ancients nor medieval religious doctrine any longer could speak effectively. In this context—which broadly remains our own, if in vastly expanded and distended fashion—the aspects of Enlightenment thought which some contemporary critics see as too thin and others as too thick are better appraised as appealing attributes. The absence of a search for a unitary good; the inclination to find room for diversity of thought tempered by common standards of discourse;⁷ and the emplacement of instruments of social control are indispensable checks on organized evil and authorizations essential to the toleration of difference. For without a standpoint conferring a sense of location appropriate to the variety of modern conditions, they understood, we lack the capacity not just for analysis but for judgment.

This view defining the proper perspective and orientation to knowledge of a free intelligentsia was embraced by leading figures in the political studies enlightenment of the 1940s and early 1950s. This multifaceted group, I have argued, originated a coherent design and conceived a program for the study of matters political more appealing than either of the stark choices we have been offered in the so-called culture wars.⁸ We have been confronted, on the one side, in a kind of throwback to the pre-Socratics, by the assertion that reason alone can discover truth based on an uncritical embrace of a particular (and partial) reading of Kant’s ambitions for the Enlightenment as a progressive, trans-local, disinterested, culturally disembedded civilizing project. This account, implanted on a self-congratulatory hegemony for modern reason, reasserts with confidence that just the right methods and procedures can, indeed will, yield truth. On the other side stands a disenchantment of truth, an excessive relativity of values risking nihilism, jettisoning the possibility of distinguishing systematic accounts of reality from mere interest or opinion, and often insisting on the unmediated linkage of sensation and knowledge. This sharp rebuff to the European Enlightenment, rejecting causality and rationality, effectively aestheticizes politics by treating its aspirations and standards merely as an ideological discourse entwined in a metanarrative of truth-seeking masking privilege and power.

In these ways, an inculpable worship of reason has confronted a sustained revulsion from rationalism in our universities and in the public realm. The political studies enlightenment fashioned a distinctive, cogent, and resonant alternative to these two positions. The body of work its members produced in the face of desolation, especially its more empirical, even behavioral, aspects, often has been understood by defenders and detractors alike as simply having reproduced a trustful and aseptic Enlightenment vision. This, it has been my burden to show, is not correct. They scorned the simple, the thin, and the disposition to believe too readily. They also thought humankind had nothing to put in the place of Enlightenment. Hence their act of rescue by coming to terms with radical evil and by using systematic knowledge to learn how to construct institutional and policy arrangements to confine its ugly endowments.

By reflecting on this effort to hold fast by revising and extending the Enlightenment’s legacies at a desperate time, perhaps we can come to think more clearly about our own conundrums as scholars and as citizens. As the Enlightenment question has been pressed by advocates of tradition, such as the political philosophers Alisdair MacIntyre and Allan Bloom, and by postmodern, postcolonial critics of its bounded hypocrisy, sustained by partial readings of Derrida and Foucault,⁹ those of us unhappy with these options might well still discover useful guideposts in the work of scholars who produced political knowledge some five and six decades ago in the midst of a moment stamped by the greatest shocks and stresses the Enlightenment tradition ever had faced both objectively and self-consciously on its own ground. At that wretched moment, the American political studies enlightenment advanced more than a series of normative or philosophical positions. Most important, they advanced the junction of history and social science as their preferred site for the discovery of answers, thus continuing and revivifying one of the most important offspring of Enlightenment. Not any social science selected from the cacophony of competing rational projects, to be sure, but an analytical, historically informed social science to serve as a guardian of decency¹⁰ in an era when humankind, hardened and embittered by experience, no longer could call on traditional mores, practices, institutions, and restraints, or familiar combinations of ideology and utopia, to perform this role.

Motivated by a sense of outrage, scandal, and surprise, the political studies enlightenment produced a political science marked by sorrow and charged by anxiety inside the field of tension defined by the general promise of enlightenment and the particularities of Europe’s age of barbarism. One only has to read John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration to understand how realistic dread—in his case anxiety about religious warfare—can motivate thinking combining sociological and political realism, institutional creativity, and normative purpose without lapsing into irrationalism or hysteria. Even before the Second World War and its murderous camps, Gilbert Murray submitted, “The world is dominated by fear—fear created by the Great War and perpetuated by its consequences and memories.”¹¹ By the new war’s end, social scientists and historians were left with a deep, persisting fear-inducing uncertainty. They did not cower. Instead, they confronted this new normative condition of humankind to produce a body of work in the spirit of what the late Judith Shklar, synthesizing her European and American experiences, resonantly called a liberalism of fear (which she opposed to a more aseptic, and, in her view, more naïve liberalism of rights), a melancholic dystopian liberalism without illusions and stripped of fantasy that stares hard at cruelty, coercion, and protean, unjust abuses of power; a liberalism seeking, above all, to defend humankind against public cruelty and oppression in full knowledge of the nonrational and irrational capacities people possess to do great harm. This kind of liberalism was grounded in a tragic, but not fatalistic, perspective, in a frank acknowledgment, as Arendt put it, of the “darkness of the human heart.”¹² This “liberalism,” Shklar wrote “is, in fact, extremely difficult and constraining, far too much so for those who cannot endure contradiction, diversity, and the risks of freedom.”¹³ As her fellow political theorist, John Dunn, has noted, though “driven by an awareness of the overwhelming grimness of much of human political life, its saturation with suffering and evil, the liberalism of fear is in no way an excuse for passivity, still less a counsel of despair.”¹⁴

Whether in Shklar’s hands or those of members of the earlier political studies enlightenment, it is, rather, a call to purposeful clarity, crisp understanding, and institutional defense equipped to advance the best values of the Enlightenment by “emancipating American liberalism from naïveté…. without obstructing potential moral progress” by steering a course between ingenuousness and cynicism, and by incorporating, as Lionel Trilling famously put it, “the emotions and the imagination … into its essence and existence—in the interests, that is, of its vision of a general enlargement and freedom and rational direction of human life.” A key task, especially in the United States where liberalism and its Enlightenment premises have been dominant for so long, is to “approach liberalism in a critical spirit,” leaning against its inclination to “ideas of a certain kind and a certain simplicity.”¹⁵

Before total war, totalitarianism, and the holocaust, liberalism’s premises and commitments had been so tacit inside American political studies they often were not noticed. In the aftermath of the pervasive and prominent disasters of the Second World War, however, liberal values and institutions, ideas and methods, orientations and practices, could not remain unexpressed or unobserved. At this moment, liberalism, recently reincarnated in a New Deal version with a social democratic tinge, became a fighting doctrine, literally so, with two clear foes, condensed, despite the differences between bolshevism and fascism, into totalitarianism as a single category. If still hegemonic in America, political liberalism—the doctrine first fashioned in early modern Europe before the Enlightenment to advance religious toleration, defend members of civil society against tyrannical regimes, and guide the construction of political orders respectful of human autonomy—was forced to confront its vulnerabilities and the exposed position of the Enlightenment tradition in which it now nestled, and to do so inside the deep cold of unprecedented desolation.

The mind concentrated. The political studies enlightenment confronted the wreckage not just of their times but the dashed hopes of reason and knowledge. There was no gainsaying the hideousness revealed to be located at the very center of western modernity or the requirement that such dark places be probed. They recognized that western scholarship’s vast achievements in banishing ignorance and darkness had fastened a high degree of hubris about the power of secularized light and reason to an unwarranted optimism about human nature. Nonetheless, these postwar scholars did not renounce this vision’s core commitment to reason’s powers but attached it to a darker and greater range of sensibility about the compass of human capacities as they shifted their orientation from unreflective sanguinity to reflective alarm. In so doing, they did not put aside the Enlightenment’s faith in reason or the liberal political project. They recast these legacies in more astute and knowing ways. Tethering desolation and enlightenment, each aspired, like Tocqueville, to become a “liberal of a new kind”¹⁶ to fortify prospects for a worthy politics.

Political science, history, and sociology are more accomplished today than the work of the forties generation in at least two respects. The subjects we now consider are more extensive. Neglected features of the human experience have been moved from a zone of ignorance to a zone of inquiry; think, for example, of the gains accomplished by women’s studies or area studies. Further, the tools and technologies we possess to probe our subjects and test our ideas have become much more capable. The ‘science’ in social science really has advanced quite a lot both in terms of how research designs are organized and in the range of methods available to parse tough questions and identify causal mechanisms. Despite these radical gains, there also have been radical losses. Today’s social, historical, and policy sciences have confirmed the undesired worries of Truman, Dahl, and others as they have come increasingly to detach subjects from methods, and purposes from instruments. Reading most issues of the American Political Science Review, the discipline’s flagship journal, offers an exercise in applied schizophrenia, the result of the stark disjuncture dividing description and analysis from judgment and normative purpose, thus also mirroring Strauss’s and Horkheimer and Adorno’s laments about the divided character of Enlightenment thought.

For all their considerable differences, the scholars to whom I have attended considered this bipolarity to be arbitrary. The continuing appeal of their work in part is a consequence of the connections they fastened between the realist, behavioral, and pragmatist tendencies that had been dominant in the interwar academy and their own deeper, heavier, more brooding, sometimes semi-philosophical reflections on dark times. Refusing to separate facticity and norms, they sought both to thicken political theory and to delineate specific institutional situations, past and present, and their social actors, processes, and choices, each in tandem with the other. The products of this conjoining, we have seen, made considerable, and insufficiently appreciated, contributions both to empirical social science, analytical history, and political theory, “beside which the current preoccupations of liberal thought may come to seem pretty trivial.”¹⁷

This program of research is best understood, I believe, as a deepening and fulfillment of the ambition Karl Mannheim sought to achieve in Ideology and Utopia, published in 1929 in a setting of weakening constitutional democracy and a cacophony of conflicting movements, parties, and world-views. Identifying a special role for scholars and intellectuals “who might play the part of watchmen in what otherwise would be a pitch-black night,” he had sought to reconcile the deep pluralism of incommensurable political perspectives with a functioning liberal political order under increasingly difficult, soon to be impossible, circumstances. In tethering a darker view of the Enlightenment’s patrimony to systematic history and social science, the political studies enlightenment undertook to achieve what Mannheim called “a new type of objectivity in the social sciences,” a set of standards “attainable not through the exclusion of evaluations but through the critical awareness and control of them.” This ‘new objectivity’ was to be situated not outside the clash of modernity’s ideologies, political estimations, and diverse ways of life, but inside its irreducible heterogeneity; a situation Mannheim believed that need not convey us into the morass of relativism.¹⁸

Composed inside late Weimar’s combination of creativity and putrescence, Ideology and Utopia was the first milestone twentieth-century book within the ambit of Enlightenment to call into question the Britannica version of unfolding disciplinary reason based on the assumption of a single, universal, standard of objectivity. Though a fierce partisan of reason and liberal values, Mannheim judged it necessary when faced with the legacies of total war and the prospects of totalitarianism to elucidate a sense of objectivity obtained “not through the exclusion of evaluations but through the critical awareness and control of them.” This project, he believed, had been made necessary by “the contemporary predicament of thought” in which “the continuous elaboration of concepts concerning things and situations has collapsed in the face of a multiplicity of fundamentally divergent definitions.” Even on the eve of the Depression and well before the Second World War, he noted the collapse of the singular, universal framework the Britannica had affirmed. Now, he argued, western intellectuals were confronted, like it or not, with “the irreconcilability of the conflicting conceptions of the world.”¹⁹

Having not erased, but having “shattered to a large extent” the hegemony of religion, the Enlightenment, Mannheim perceived, had opened the way to a fusion of politics as a struggle for power combined with competing political conceptions of the world. “First liberalism, then haltingly following its example conservatism, and finally socialism made of its political aims a philosophical credo, a world-view with well-established methods of thought and prescribed conclusions.” The result was an “amalgamation” of politics and scientific discourse and a new form of diversity, as “to the split in the religious world-view was added the fractionalization of political outlooks.”²⁰

These developments mandated political discussion as the very substance of liberal and democratic politics while amplifying it as a source of danger. In these conditions, politics is concerned with objects and materials of real consequence, but, concomitantly, politics also can “become a life-and-death struggle” gripped by “emotional undercurrents” that crystallize both in ideologies “so intensively interest-bound to a situation that they are simply no longer able to see certain facts which would undermine their sense of domination,” and utopias possessed by “certain oppressed groups so strongly interested in the destruction and transformation of a given condition of society that they unwittingly see only those elements in the situation which tend to negate it.” Within such a politics “in a world of upheaval,” conflict can go beyond defeating antagonistic views to attempts to “annihilate … the intellectual foundations upon which these beliefs and attitudes rest.”²¹

Social science had new responsibilities in this situation charged with an “uncertainty which had become an ever more unbearable grief in public life.”²² A thin behaviorism,²³ concentrating on the externally perceivable and “content to attribute importance to what is measurable merely because it happens to be measurable,” had to be replaced, he counseled, not by a flight to the higher reaches of political philosophy, but to a new and deeper set of systematic studies suspended between empiricism and ‘truth.’ The details of his sociology of knowledge, crafted in this spirit, are far less significant, I believe, than Mannheim’s “systematization of the doubt which is to be found in social life as a vague insecurity and uncertainty,” and his “relational as distinct from the merely relative” approach to knowledge that abjures the search for absolute values while holding on to “a quest for reality.” In this way, he counsels, “to see more clearly the confusion into which our social and intellectual life has fallen represents an enrichment rather than a loss.”²⁴ Throughout, as David Kettler, Volker Meja, and Nico Stehr insightfully note, “his rationalism always points to the method and achievements of the Enlightenment,” while leaving open “the boundaries of the Enlightenment,” especially as Mannheim sought to take “the irrational seriously while preserving reason.”²⁵

After a brief period in which he was able to advance this project from his academic chair in Frankfurt and his leadership, with Paul Tillich and Adolph Löwe of a ‘Liberalism Seminar,’ Mannheim’s world collapsed. “Deprived of his language and culture” his attempt in an English exile “to uphold his Enlightenment cultural-sociological program,” marked by a turn away from the sociology of knowledge to planning and, later, under the influence of T.S. Eliot and his circle, to religion in High Anglican form, “cannot be judged a success.”²⁶ But sustained by American patrons who inserted Ideology and Utopia into their New Deal milieu, Mannheim’s work helped define the country’s political studies enlightenment. The preface written by Louis Wirth, the noted University of Chicago sociologist and a pioneer figure in urban studies who, with Edward Shils, had translated Ideology to introduce Mannheim to American scholarship, underscored the relevance, even urgency, of this work for American scholars at a time when “What was once regarded as the esoteric concern of a few intellectuals in a single country has become the common plight of the modern man.” Weimar’s troubles had intensified and diffused. “It may seem like grim humor to speak of the beneficent influences arising out of an upheaval that has shaken the foundations of our social and intellectual order,” Wirth wryly observed, but “it must be asserted that the spectacle of change and confusion, which confronts social science, presents it at the same time with unprecedented opportunities for fruitful new development.” Now that the “partial victory … of enlightened minds” over unreason that had been achieved “for a brief interlude between the eras of medieval spiritualized darkness and the rise of modern secular dictatorships” had been “chastened,” an “intellectual world … [that] had at least a common frame of reference which offered a measure of certainty to the participants in that world and gave them a sense of mutual respect and trust” had transmuted into “the spectacle of a battlefield of warring parties and conflicting doctrines.” A unitary belief in Enlightenment, “irretrievably lost,” now faced “the threat to exterminate what rationality and objectivity has been won in human affairs.” He urged that Ideology and Utopia, a book that offered a guide to issues that “could only be raised in a society and in an epoch marked by profound social and intellectual upheaval” as a “product of this period of chaos and unsettlement,” be utilized as a charter document both for social inquiry and for the deployment of social knowledge under these new, deeply threatening, conditions of uncertainty.²⁷

Wirth’s understanding of the significance of Ideology and Utopia (though often obscured by Mannheim’s frequently murky and elusive formulations), I believe, defines quite precisely the motivation and character of the program the political studies enlightenment later developed. Faced with the collapse of the rational synthesis so visibly represented by the pre-First World War Britannica, the loss of a situation in which it seemed that ideals and reality could be homogeneous and reason faced no ineluctable barriers, the advancement of deeply conflicting ideological and material interests, the rise of nihilistic activism privileging deeds, the diminution of idealism to naïveté, and the vague, diffuse, unconfident qualities of enlightened political thought,²⁸ its affiliates sought to build a zone for situated inquiry in a space designated by the poles of philosophy and ethics, history and systematic social science, and epistemology, and by letting go of a sanitary neo-Kantian view of social science without giving up on claims to rationality.²⁹ Rejecting the stark distinction between politics and science that Max Weber had advanced,³⁰ transcending Karl Marx’s overly constrained world of class struggle, and going beyond classical liberalism’s penchant for methodological individualism, like Mannheim they demanded that the liberal political process be capable of giving expression to, while containing, the widest spectrum of ideological and utopian views. New empirical conditions made this quest especially difficult, thus defining a role for intellectuals who could stand at least partially outside the ordinary fray of political contest to lend transparency and critical reflection to the terms of collision within political life.³¹

In this, Mannheim was the most influential precursor to the effort by the political studies enlightenment to repair the weaknesses that had left the Enlightenment and the liberal tradition, to which he had been fiercely committed, so vulnerable.³² Working without guarantees, Mannheim had not only wrestled with how to map the sociological distribution of beliefs along lines of stratification and ideas, but also had tried to navigate within such a map to place ‘objectivity’ within realistic presuppositions.³³ This was a map of ‘in-betweens’: between Marxism and anti-Marxism, metaphysics and science, individualism and collectivism, consensus and conflict, theory and empiricism, rationality and irrationality, dialogue and discord. It also was situated in a space between traditional philosophy and its search for sure value and modern political theory cognizant of deep human differences.

Famously, Mannheim identified a special role for intellectuals, controversially asserting their standing outside the order of social stratification, thus offering them at least partial independence from conflicting positions in the public sphere. Challenging intellectuals to an awareness of their potential role in producing a framework within which divergent views could contend without eradicating reason, Mannheim cautioned against a foundationless relativism despite the irretrievable loss of the vision of a unitary Enlightenment. The understanding “that all historical knowledge is relational knowledge, and can only be formulated with reference to the position of the observer,”³⁴ does not, he declared firmly, insinuate a lapse into relativism, a term that only can have meaning when juxtaposed to just the static and absolute notion of truth he rejected.³⁵

Though Mannheim influenced some individual members of the political studies enlightenment, I underscore his themes and enjoinings in Ideology and Utopia less because he indirectly, and in some instances directly, shaped the work of Polanyi, Arendt, Truman, Hofstadter, Dahl, Lindblom, or Lasswell, but because this book quite precisely renders the conditions, program, challenges, difficulties, and potential pitfalls of the program they, too, advanced. If, under conditions of anxiety, disorganization, disappointment, institutional detachment, and uncertainty, as Mannheim then understood in 1929, intellectuals had both a special responsibility and an uncommon freedom, how much more true this was after 1945, especially in privileged American surroundings, where the First World War, but not the Second, had appeared as a mere pause on the pathway of enlightened, liberal optimism.³⁶ There, the political studies enlightenment powerfully elaborated Mannheim’s revisionist social studies on a large scale.

I have mentioned pitfalls, and there were more than a few. As a source of political knowledge, anxiety is two-edged. I have stressed its creative powers, but it carries more than a few dangers and distorting effects. These, alas, were especially apparent when members of the political studies enlightenment engaged with social movements, with the national security state in an age of Cold War, and with deep-seated structural inequalities, especially those based on race. In the United States, collision with these uncomfortable realities often produced a combination of evasion about unappealing features of America’s state, economy, and society and excessive alarm about mass political participation.

Of course, when Robert Dahl wrote in 1956 that “the full assimilation of Negroes into the normal system already has occurred in many northern states and now seems to be slowly to be taking place even in the South,”³⁷ putting a remarkably optimistic spin on the developments immediately following Brown v. Board of Education, he certainly was aware that Jim Crow and racism more generally were alive and well; and when Truman’s long treatise wholly ignored the role of the military in American life, he knew a great deal about NSC–68 and the issues C. Wright Mills soon was to make so central to his spirited analysis of the role of the armed forces in American life.³⁸ It was not, I think, mainly the ideological or the ethical proclivities of this generation that pushed such key subjects into a zone of silence, although this did play a part, but the very character of some features of the liberal political theory they sought to develop to secure a vibrant nontotalitarian politics.

Some aspects of these theoretical limitations were noted effectively some time ago in a large and impressive body of critical literature. By focusing on actual behavior and decisions, the political scientists of this generation underestimated the system’s skewed capacity to set agendas. Nor did they fully appreciate the biased qualities of actual participation along class lines.³⁹ But I think there is a deeper problem, whose roots can be found in Joseph Schumpeter’s influential effort, which most of the American wing of the political studies enlightenment emulated, to find alternatives to the period’s objectivist approaches, Marxist and otherwise, to stratification and hierarchy.⁴⁰

Schumpeter’s discussion of democracy proved particularly influential because it provided the postwar generation with unsentimental and hardheaded political foundations. At the height of the Second World War, he had agonized over the diminishing prospects of capitalism. Melancholic over what he thought was its inevitable dislocation by bureaucratic socialism, he had sought to salvage the prospect at least of a democratic socialism; but democracy of what kind? Not, he argued, the democracy of the classical doctrine grounded in the idea that the people decide on behalf of the realization of a common good. Government neither is premised on nor is a search for such a public interest. None exists. Rule by the people, moreover, is dangerous, because there is massive evidence against the rational capacity of the masses. “The typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. … He becomes a primitive again. His thinking becomes associative and affective.”⁴¹ Without the props of a common good or a rational public, Schumpeter proposed the role of the people be limited to the act of selecting a government every four or five years. Then they should get out of the way to let informed elites rule.

It was this highly elitist vision that Robert Dahl thought “excellent.”⁴² Its key elements, including a special role for elites, distrust of the mass, stress on procedures, and a rejection of simple notions of the public interest, trace unifying threads across many key texts about American politics in the postwar period. Truman and Dahl, however, were not pure Schumpeterians. They were committed not just to an elitist version of political liberalism, but to democracy including its participatory elements. “At minimum,” Dahl wrote, as I have noted, “it seems to me, democratic theory is concerned with processes by which ordinary citizens exert a high degree of control over leaders”; and Truman focused on the play and conflict of interests in-between elections and outside of the electoral process.⁴³

In spite of diverse points of entry and emphasis, not one member of the political studies enlightenment, to my knowledge, dissented from Schumpeter’s search for a realistic alternative to the classical utopian theory of democracy, entailing a rejection of ‘the people’ as a meaningful category, not only because, empirically, no such singular entity sharing common interests actually can exist under modern conditions, but because a populist orientation risks making the people available for anti-liberal forms of political mobilization. Dahl’s A Preface to Democratic Theory turned on just these points. He situated his preferred regime type of polyarchical democracy as a more desirable and hardheaded alternative to two other democratic models. The first he described as Madison’s system, an orientation so concerned with the dangers of political participation and so distrustful of the people that it tilted too far in the direction of preserving “the liberties of certain minorities whose advantages of status, power, and wealth, he thought, probably would not be tolerated indefinitely by a constitutionally untrammeled minority.” Madisonian democracy, he concluded, “goes about as far as it is possible to go while still remaining within the rubric of democracy.” The second view Dahl labeled populistic democracy. Stressing the sovereignty of the majority, this model, he argued, runs afoul of the fact that citizens do not care intensely and equally about different issues. Nor does this approach sufficiently take into account goals that might compete with political equality and popular sovereignty. These two purposes, he argued, “are not absolute goals; we must ask ourselves how much leisure, privacy, consensus, stability, income, security, progress, status, and probably many other goals we are prepared to forego for an additional increment of political equality.”⁴⁴

Dahl crafted an alternative by transcending the antinomy of the majority versus the minority. In seeking a balance between normative maximization and empirical description, he insisted that in a diverse and complex world of multiple interests and identities there are no majorities, only many minorities, even minorities within minorities. “Hence we cannot correctly describe the actual operations of democratic societies in terms of the contrasts between majorities and minorities. We can only distinguish groups of various types and sizes, all seeking in various ways to advance their goals, usually at the expense, at least in part, of others.”⁴⁵ This central feature of America’s regime is what makes it normatively attractive and different from illiberal competitors. It also is the mainspring of stability.

Dahl’s goal thus was not abstract equality or the sovereignty of the majority, but an attainable and desirable “political system in which all the active and legitimate groups in the population can make themselves heard at some crucial stage in the process of decision.” This, he hastened to add in his realist voice, does not mean “that every group has equal control over the outcome.” Dahl’s democracy is a system of endless bargaining in which “the making of governmental decisions is not a majestic march of great majorities united upon certain matters of basic policy. It is the steady appeasement of relatively small groups.”⁴⁶ Dahl designed his next book, Who Governs?, to be an empirical investigation of just this system at work. In his community study site of New Haven, he found that inequalities were dispersed; majorities and coalitions were situational; intensities varied from issue to issue and from group to group; and the system contained enough slack so that those who wished to have influence could prove influential even under conditions of inequality in wealth, social position, and knowledge.⁴⁷ Later, he came to realize this, at best, was a partial view.⁴⁸

Looking back in 1971, just three years after his response as provost to Columbia’s upheavals effectively had cost him the university’s presidency, first Truman elaborated on how he had closed his book with a paragraph concerning liberal democracy’s “guardians and their affiliations” under conditions “of dissensus on the rules”: “Neither the closing sentence of The Governmental Process,” he wrote,⁴⁹

Truman then appended a remarkable statement. “In the subtle politics of developing emergency,” he wrote, “the elites are, for all practical purposes, the people.”

When Truman had turned in the conclusion to The Governmental Process to his fear of an American version of a politics of decay and revolution, he had focused on the problem posed by deep differences in values and political orientations which obtain when specific groups “arrive at interpretations of the ‘rules of the game’ that are at great variance with those held by most of the civilian population.”⁵⁰ This unhappy circumstance is unlikely to arise, he observed, when citizens actually hold overlapping memberships in interest groups. After all, that is the purpose of this mechanism. He was forced to concede, however, that many Americans, especially at the bottom of the social hierarchies of class and race, do not possess such group memberships since, in fact, political participation is closely tied to social and economic inequality. As a result, many Americans, he conceded, are not integrated into the group system he so painstakingly had described. These unanchored, unincorporated citizens worried him a great deal. They are the most vulnerable, he hypothesized, to the appeals of antidemocratic ideologies and movements. Incredibly, Truman considered America’s racial order, after virtually 520 pages of near-total silence on the subject, exclusively through the prism of these fears. His prose was tortured:⁵¹

The problem with the emergent civil rights movement (this, in 1951!) was that it threatened the political stability of the system because it challenged the existing rules of the game. The value consensus required to keep the system on an even keel is “not threatened by the existence of a multiplicity of organized groups so long as the ‘rules of the game’ remain meaningful guides to action.” But, of course, when excluded groups challenge their exclusion there can be no ready agreement on the status of the rules. “In the loss of such meanings,” Truman cautioned with foreboding, “lie the seeds of the whirlwind.”⁵²

Two decades later, Truman did not back away from this passage. To the contrary, he celebrated it for having heralded “the complex and swiftly moving politics of the Northern ghettos: the scorn of the black militant for the apparent vagueness and even hypocrisy of the white liberal, the appeal of the Black Panthers, the discarding of black leaders without whose ability to work within the system the court decisions of the past two decades and the civil rights legislation of the 1960s would not have appeared, and the ugly shadow of the backlash.” Blacks had dismissed the rules of the game “as ‘whitey’s’ rules.”⁵³ The whirlwind had come. In the aftermath of these developments in black America, but also in the aftermath of the New Left and the student movement, Truman insisted that “were I rewriting the book today I would give [the theme of elite responsibility in the face of the collapse of common meanings] considerably more prominence.”⁵⁴

Truman thus implied in 1951 and again in 1971 that it would be far better for the excluded to remain apolitical than challenge the dirty secrets of the country’s liberal regime.⁵⁵ His fear of mass politics and political disorder contorted liberal democracy itself by treating disruption and protest under virtually all conditions, even those of the racially segregated South, as if they must stand outside the normal process of legitimate political participation. As a result, Truman found it difficult to distinguish movements he hated, such as the anti-communism of the radical right, from movements whose goals he admired, such as the struggle for civil rights, because he thought that collective action itself, as a form of politics, challenging the fairness of the rules of the game constituted a keen threat to political stability and the viability of liberal democracy.⁵⁶ Anxiety, it is all too clear, can conduce paralysis or worse.

If it is wrong to celebrate the political studies enlightenment while forgetting its lapses and silences about subjects like race,⁵⁷ so we should also remember that with respect to some of the same issues its frames of reference permitted, even facilitated, rather different responses. The period’s producers of political knowledge had choices to make. And they did choose. The year before Truman published his retrospective consideration on The Governmental Process refracted through the experiences of the civil rights and student movements of the 1960s, movements that transformed the United States vastly for the better, Richard Hoftstadter joined his New Left graduate student Michael Wallace to publish an incisive essay on ‘Violence in America,’ underscoring how “one is impressed that most American violence—and this also illuminates its relationship to state power—has been initiated with a ‘conservative’ bias. It has been unleashed against abolitionists, Catholics, radicals, workers, and labor organizers, Negroes, Orientals, and other ethnic or racial or ideological minorities. …A high proportion of our violent actions has thus come from the top dogs or the middle dogs.”⁵⁸

It is, of course, possible to include Arendt’s consideration of Africa, particularly her silences about African history and agency, in a reasonable reckoning with the shortcomings of the postwar reconstruction of the tradition of Enlightenment, drawing, as she does at times, on the placement of Africa and its people in the “dark background of mere givenness.”⁵⁹ But I am more impressed by the singular achievement for her time, albeit on terms now dated, that anticipated the new global history by incorporating colonialism and racism into the heart of European history. In so doing, “Imperialism,” the central section of The Origins of Totalitarianism, heralded the most forceful and persuasive aspects of today’s assault on simple, indefensible, Eurocentric versions of modernism. But rather than turn the dark side of Europe upside down as some postcolonial critics have been wont to do, as if it is remotely possible for anticolonial, antiracist projects to divorce themselves entirely from Europe in a global age, Arendt affirmed the assets of an enlightened and liberal Europe purged of exclusiveness, essentialism, and racism. At once analytical and literary, systematic and speculative, Origins still offers not only a model of how to look backwards without worshipping “the idol of origins,” but also how to look forward, even in the face of desolation, crossing boundaries usually not traversed.⁶⁰

Especially at moments when members of the political studies enlightenment found a critical voice in the manner of Arendt and Hofstadter, refusing to confuse fear for liberalism’s fate with excuses for Europe or America’s least attractive features, they defined a perspective that remains, today, an appealing, powerful, even indispensable guide. For this tradition reminds us that the darkest aspects of the human condition cannot be wished away, and that we must learn to fight, using all the normative and analytical tools at our command, for the kind of decent Enlightenment we should wish to have. At its best, too, the political studies enlightenment advised against too narrow a construction of democracy and against a self-complacent liberalism. More than a decade after the collapse of the last great totalitarian antagonist, and at a time of fresh desolation and often surprising threats to the best aspects of the West’s enlightened patrimony, this counsel is especially germane.

1. A concern with chaos recurs in this tradition. Accounting for the title of his study of Nazi Germany, Franz Neumann explained, “In the Jewish eschatology of Babylonian origin—Behemoth and Leviathan designate two monsters, Behemoth ruling the land (the desert), Leviathan the sea, the first male, the second female. The land animals venerate Behemoth, the sea animals Leviathan, as their masters. Both are monsters of the Chaos.” In this mythos, which recurs in Jewish writings, Behemoth and Leviathan either will be destroyed by God or by each other. By contrast, the Temple’s priests were human, and it fell to their responsibility to construct barriers to chaos. Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism (London: Victor Gollancz, 1942), p. 5.

2. Christoph Martin Wieland, “A Couple of Gold Nuggets, from the . . . Wastepaper, or Six Answers to Six Questions,” in James Schmidt, ed., What is Enlightenment? Eighteenth-Century Answers and Twentieth-Century Questions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 80. 82.

3. Sven-Eric Liedman, The Postmodernist Critique of the Project of Enlightenment (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994); William Ophuls, Requiem for Modern Politics. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997); James Kaye and Bo Stråth, Enlightenment and Genocide, Contradictions of Modernity (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2000); George Trey, Solidarity and Difference: The Politics of Enlightenment in the Aftermath of Modernity (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998); and Lawrence Birkin, Hitler as Philosophe: Remnants of the Enlightenment in National Socialism (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 1995).

4. “Indeed, sometimes it appears that the only commentators who pronounce on what ‘the Enlightenment’ stood for are those who are in the process of dismissing it.” In James Schmidt, “Liberalism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth Century Germany,” Critical Review 13 (Winter/Spring 1999): 46.

5. In dealing with the pre-modern strain, mounting a rejoinder to it, see Robert C. Bartlett, The Idea of Enlightenment: A Post-Mortem Study (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). Bartlett’s aim is “to shake the conviction that the idea of enlightenment is necessarily and obviously dead [and] to encourage a re-examination of the limits and possibilities of reason.” (ix) A thoughtful consideration of the post-modern strain, with an effort to fashion a fresh enlightenment for post-modern times is Keith Michael Baker and Peter Hans Reill, eds., What’s Left of Enlightenment? A Postmodern Question (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). For a subtle treatment of the Counter-Enlightenment, see Darrin M. McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

6. These commitments, of course, were charged with contradictory meanings and possibilities. “On the one hand,” Ernest Gellner noted, “by eroding and deriding all the old transcendental bases of certainty and hierarchy, [the Enlightenment] undermined the authority of the self-appointed agents of the Higher Order, and the residual legatee of sovereignty was man himself and his mundane interests. In this sense, the Enlightenment was on the side of liberty and equality. On the other hand, the rationality it commended required the authority or experts and the implementation of their plans,” thus introducing a “technicist-authoritarian element.” Ernest Gellner, “The Struggle to Catch Up,” Times Literary Supplement, December 9, 1994, p. 14.

7. Of course, there were Enlightenment figures who did seek after a unitary good and who rejected diversity in the name of reason. This point is made forcefully by Isaiah Berlin, in The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (New York: Knopf, 1991); and by Jacob Talmon in The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker and Warburg, 1952)

8. Though most frequently a series of battles in the humanities, these extend, of course, to history and the social sciences, and to broader cultural trends.

9. Alisdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 1984); Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987); Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); John McCarthy, ed., Modern Enlightenment and the Rule of Reason (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1998); Hugo A. Meynell, Postmodernism and the New Enlightenment (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1999); Piet Strydom, Discourse and Knowledge: The Making of Enlightenment Sociology (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000); Karlis Racevskis, Postmodernism and the Search for Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993); and Padmini Mongia, ed., Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997). For a thoughtful review of books concerned with the darker side of the earlier Renaissance, the Enlightenment’s precursor, see Anthony Grafton, “The West vs. The Rest,” New York Review of Books, April 10, 1997.

10. This choice is worth considering. Most reflections on this century’s intense brutality have taken literary form, combining tropes of realism, irony, and fantasy. It is arguable that reality becomes more actual, as it were, when transmuted by literary form capable of conveying detail. The members of the political studies enlightenment were convinced, however, at minimum that such representations had to be accompanied not only by sober, detailed historical accounts but also by systematic social inquiry capable of a more powerful understanding at the levels of ideas and institutions of how the descent to barbarism had happened and how its consequences might be grappled with to make a more decent future.

11. Gilbert Murray, Liberality and Civilization: Lectures Given at the Invitation of the Hibbert Trustees in the Universities of Bristol, Glasgow, and Birmingham in October and November 1937 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1938), p. 89. The broad orientation to recent and current events by the political studies enlightenment was much like that announced by Karl Popper in the second edition to The Open Society and its Enemies: “Although much of what is contained in this book took shape at an earlier date, the final decision to write it was made in March 1938, on the day I received the news of the invasion of Austria. The writing extended into 1943; and the fact that most of the book was written during the grave years when the outcome of the war was uncertain may help to explain why some of its criticism strikes me to-day as more emotional and harsher in tone than I could wish. But it was not the time to mince words—or at least, this was what I then felt. Neither war nor any other contemporary event was explicitly mentioned in the book; but it was an attempt to understand those events and their background, and some of the issues which were likely to arise after the war was won.” Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1952).

12. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), pp. 92–93.

13. Judith N. Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Nancy Rosenblum, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). The term ‘liberalism of fear’ in the sense of political theory geared to defend against public cruelty in the situation posed by modernity’s pluralism in which there always are minorities first was introduced in Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 5. For a fine, appreciative volume considering Shklar’s distinctive liberal theory, see Bernard Yack, ed., Liberalism Without Illusions: Essays on Liberal Theory and the Political Vision of Judith N. Shklar (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

14. John Dunn, “Hope over Fear: Judith Shklar as Political Educator,” in Yack, ed., Liberalism, p. 53. Shklar wrote appreciatively about Arendt more than once. See her essays, “Hannah Arendt’s Triumph,” The New Republic, December 27, 1975, pp. 8–10; “Rethinking the Past,” Social Research 44 (1977): 80–90; and “Hannah Arendt as Pariah,” Partisan Review, 50 (1983): 64–77.

15. Benjamin DeMott, “Rediscovering Complexity,” The Atlantic Monthly, September 1988, pp. 68, 69. Lionel Trilling, “Preface,” The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), pp. xi, xii. I thank Robert Merton, who, along with his Columbia colleagues Richard Hoftstadter and Lionel Trilling is one of its three subjects, for directing me to DeMott’s article whose principal purpose was to rescue the combination of liberality and intricacy in the sober thought and measured tones of the postwar generation from the simplified and mythical remembrance of their neoconservative students and successors. Of the studies I know about scholars and intellectuals in this postwar period, DeMott’s brief piece comes closest to apprehending the themes I am addressing in this volume. Yet, to my preference, his compass is somewhat narrow, restricted to American liberalism and not the larger fate of the Enlightenment within which it is embedded; to native-born scholars exclusively; to national concerns with race and class but not the greater context of total war, totalitarianism, and holocaust in the era of crisis dating from the First World War.

16. This is Tocqueville’s self-description in a letter of July 24, 1836. Gustave de Beaumont, Memoirs, Letters, and Remains of Alexis de Tocqueville (Boston: Tickenor and Fields, 1862, volume 1), p. 382; cited in Margie Lloyd, “In Tocqueville’s Shadow: Hannah Arendt’s Liberal Republicanism,” The Review of Politics 57 (Winter 1995): 37.

17. David Miller, “The Nagging Glory; Hannah Arendt and the Greek Polis,” Times Literary Supplement, July 9, 1993, p. 7. Critical overviews, not entirely in harmony with my own views, include James Farr, John S. Dryzek, and Stephen T. Leonard, eds., Political Science in History: Research Programs and Political Traditions (New York; Cambridge University Press, 1995); Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (New York; Cambridge University Press, 1988); and Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet, eds., A History of Sociological Analysis (New York; Basic Books, 1987).

18. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London; Routledge, 1936 [1929]), pp. 143, 5, 44.

19. Mannheim, Ideology, p. 7. Mannheim’s thematic and personal links to the émigré members of the American political studies enlightenment were close, if complicated. No European scholar in this period could avoid engagement with this controversial figure who had achieved high visibility and standing at an early point in his career. A young Hannah Arendt reviewed the text shortly after it appeared. More broadly, all the members of the political studies enlightenment were deeply familiar with Mannheim’s work. Received visibly if unevenly by the American academy after the publication of the English edition in 1936, Mannheim’s scholarship on ideas and ideology was a major influence on Richard Hofstadter in the period between The American Political Tradition and The Age of Reform, just as his later work on planning oriented Robert Dahl to the subject. Irrespective of such direct influence, the program undertaken by the political studies Enlightenment in the United States can be grasped through the prism of Mannheim’s work in the late 1920s. Like the scholars I treat in this text, Mannheim, as he put it, sought “to learn as a sociologist by close observation the secret (even if it is infernal) of these new times,” and “to carry liberal values forward.” His biographers comment, “His problem remains irresistible to reflective people at the end of the twentieth century. Mannheim’s project was to link thinking to emancipation despite strong evidence against the connection.” David Kettler and Volker Meja, Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism: The Secret of These New Times (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1995), p. 1. For an extended discussion of Mannheim’s reception in the United States, see David Kettler and Volker Meja, “‘That typically German kind of sociology which verges toward philosophy’: The Dispute about Ideology and Utopia in the United States,” Sociological Theory 12 (November 1994). Hannah Arendt’s “Philosophie und Soziologie” appeared in Die Gesellschaft 7, no. 2 (1930). Robert Dahl’s review of Mannheim, Freedom, Power, and Democratic Planning appeared in the American Sociological Review, 15 (December 1950).

20. Mannheim, Ideology, p. 33.

21. Mannheim, Ideology, pp. 34, 36, 57.

22. Mannheim, Ideology, p. 45.

23. Mannheim wrote a critique of American behavioral social science in an extensive consideration of the state of the art review found in Stuart A. Rice, ed., Methods in Social Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931). Mannheim’s book review appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, 38 (September 1932).

24. Mannheim, Ideology, pp. 45, 70, 87, 94.

25. David Kettler, Volker Meja, and Nico Stehr, “Rationalizing the Irrational: Karl Mannheim and the Besetting Sin of German Intellectuals,” American Journal of Sociology, 95 (May 1990), pp. 1452, 1453.

26. Claudia Honegger, “The Disappearance of the Sociology of Knowledge and Kultursoziologie after 1933,” in David Kettler, ed., “Contested Legacies,” a preparatory document for a conference on “The German-Speaking Intellectual and Cultural Emigration to the United States and United Kingdom, 1933–1945,” Bard College, August 13–15, 2002. For a powerful discussion of how “Mannheim’s promising theoretical beginnings were disrupted by the brute facts of his generation’s biography,” see Kettler, Meja, and Stehr, “Rationalizing the Irrational.” They acutely take note of how he “veered abruptly from the inside to the outside of the talk about the crisis of rationality,” observing how throughout the 1920s Mannheim’s theme was “the need to find ways of thinking capable of meeting fundamental objections to liberal rationalism without abandoning the needs of ‘modern man’ in favor of some disruptive celebration of the irrational, or, indeed, abandoning the ideal of genuine knowledge for guiding human conduct.” But when in “English exile after 1933, Mannheim turned to a militant rationalist counterattack, disavowing much he himself once admired and done. . . . Mannheim abandoned his highest hopes for the sociology of knowledge when confronted by fascism. . . . The emancipation from Weimar culture turned into a barren exile.” (pp. 1451, 1452, 1459, 1467) There is a parallel discussion in John Herman Randall’s review of Mannheim’s Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1940), where he observes that “his more recent English experience has altered the whole temper of this thought, and brought him close to the Anglo-American philosophy of social control and intelligent reconstruction of society.” Journal of the History of Ideas, 2 (June 1941), p. 373. Reviewing the same book, C. Wright Mills observed how Mannheim had turned back to “the comprehensive themes of the Enlightenment” rather than the more differentiated, contested, and wry reflections he had offered earlier. The Mills review is in the American Sociological Review, 6 (December 1940).

27. Louis Wirth, “Preface,” in Mannheim, Ideology, pp. xii, xiv, xv, xxvi, xxvii.

28. These traits are noted in Leonard Krieger, “The Intellectuals and European Society,” Political Science Quarterly, 67 (June 1952).

29. This search is nicely framed and summarized in Richard Ashcraft, “Political Theory and Political Action in Karl Mannheim’s Thought: Reflections upon Ideology and Utopia and its Critics,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23 (January 1981), and in Dick Perls, “Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge: Toward a New Agenda,” Sociological Theory, 14 (March 1996).

30. In his famous lectures at the University of Munich in 1918 on “Politics as a Vocation” and “Science as a Vocation,” translated and published in Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946). Also see, Ahmad Sadri, Max Weber’s Sociology of Intellectuals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

31. Given the ‘in-between’ character and placement of Mannheim’s ideas in Ideology and Utopia, his work was subjected to various sharp critiques: ranging from Marxists, including those of the Frankfurt School, who found fault in his abandonment of their preferred versions of class analysis to critics of what looked like his abandonment of a search for truth based on firm philosophical foundations. The former line of emphasis was expressed in a 1929 review by Herbert Marcuse, “Zur Wahrheitsproblematik der sociologischen Methode,” reprinted in Volker Meja and Nico Stehr, eds., Der Streit um die Wissenssoziologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982). The latter can be found in the two reviews published in the American Sociological Review: by Alexander von Schelting, 4 (August 1936) and by Hans Speier 43 (July 1937).

32. “In my understanding,” Mannheim wrote in an unpublished manuscript near the publication of Ideology and Utopia, I have discerned that liberalism is obsolete, but my attitudes are still at a liberal level.” Cited in Ashcraft, “Mannheim,” p. 48.

33. For a discussion along such lines, see Willard A. Mullins, “Truth and Ideology: Reflections on Mannheim’s Paradox,” History and Theory, 18 (May 1979).

34. Mannheim, Ideology, p. 71.

35. I have been guided in my understanding of Mannheim on these points by Harvey Goldman, “From Sociological Theory to Sociology of Knowledge and Back: Karl Mannheim and the Sociology of Intellectual Knowledge Production,” Sociological Theory, 12 (November 1994).

36. By the conclusion of the period I am examining, American political knowledge had bifurcated between those who continued to see reason for anxiety and alarm and those who did not. Writing in 1956, Wishy contrasted the work of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Peter Viereck, David Riesman, John Kenneth Galbraith, and others whose “more open optimism is proclaimed . . . about the new promise of American life with others, including C. Wright Mills, Lewis Mumford, and Hannah Arendt who “are more stirred by the possibilities of the collapse and destruction of liberal-bourgeois democracy.” Wishy, “Revolt,” p. 243.

37. Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), vol. 1, pp. 138–139.

38. Mills, The Power Elite.

39. The relevant literature is massive. For pioneering work along these lines see E. E. Schattschneider, The Semi-Sovereign People (New York: Holt, 1960); Peter Bachrach and Morton S. Baratz, “The Two Faces of Power,” American Political Science Review, 57 (December 1962); Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York: Knopf, 1966); and Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism (New York: Norton, 1969).

40. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper, 1942). Schumpeter devoted the first section of his book to a critical, but not wholly unsympathetic, account of Marx’s writings, announcing, in effect, that he wished his book to be understood as an attempt to develop a surrogate at the same level of analysis.

41. Schumpeter, Capitalism, p. 262.

42. With the caveat that he disagreed with the notion, as an empirical matter, that elections and party activity are of little consequence in determining public policy. Dahl, Pre-face, p. 131.

43. Dahl, Preface, p. 3.

44. For Dahl, populistic democracy is flawed for more than this set of ethical reasons. Unlike Madisonianism, it violates the requisite that liberal democratic theory be empirical as well as normative. As a set of aspirations which cannot be operationalized, “it tells us nothing about the real world” or about political behavior. It also is naive. It fails to define membership in the political system (who will be admitted and under what terms) or to recognize that “every society develops a ruling class.” Even more important, it is insensitive to the fact that political preferences develop over time within the political process or that majorities are not fixed entities. Dahl, Preface, pp. 31, 32, 51, 54.

45. Dahl, Preface, p. 131.

46. Dahl, Preface, pp. 137, 145, 146.

47. Robert A. Dahl, Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961). Most treatments of this book have debated its empirical and pluralist portrait of New Haven without sufficient attention to its tight linkage with the political theory of A Preface to Democratic Theory, nor to its realization of the larger anxious project of his generation of political scientists.

48. See Robert A. Dahl, Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy: Autonomy vs. Control (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

49. Truman, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” The Governmental Process (New York: Knopf), p. xliv.

50. Truman, Governmental Process, p. 521.

51. Truman, Governmental Process, p. 523.

52. Truman, Governmental Process, p. 524.

53. Truman, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” pp. xliii, xliv.

54. Truman, “Introduction to the Second Edition,” pp. xliii, xliv.

55. I hasten, from personal interactions when he was Dean of Columbia College, where I was a student and he was my teacher, to add that I can attest that Truman held strong pro-civil rights views in the 1960s. He took positive note of the participation of students in civil rights protests in an address to alumni on ‘Dean’s Day,’ February 5, 1966. David B. Truman, “The Causes and Nature of Student Unrest,” in David B. Truman and Fritz Stern, “The Background of Student Unrest,” pamphlet distributed by the Association of Alumni of Columbia College, 1966, pp. 26–27.

56. As David Greenstone demonstrated in his incisive, though not unsympathetic, reexamination of Dahl’s New Haven cases, this orientation hardly was unique to Truman. J. David Greenstone, “Group Theories,” in Fred Greenstein and Nelson Polsby, Handbook of Political Science (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1965).

57. I also have in mind Hannah Arendt’s remarkably jarring disagreement with federal enforcement of the Brown v. Board program of racial desegregation in her “Reflections on Little Rock,” Dissent 6 (Winter 1959) that found “discrimination” to be “as indispensable a social right as equality is a political right.”. Like Truman, Arendt supported civil rights, making this clear in ‘preliminary remarks’ to her article, stating, “I should make it clear that as a Jew I take my sympathy for the cause of the Negroes as for all oppressed and under-privileged peoples for granted and should appreciate it if the reader did likewise.”

58. Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, “Reflections on Violence in the United States,” in Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, eds., American Violence: A Documentary History (New York: Knopf, 1970), p. 11.

59. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1951), p. 301. A sharply critical assessment of Arendt’s work along these lines is Anne Norton, “Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in the Writings of Hannah Arendt, in Bonnie Honig, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).

60. I am struck by how some of the most thoughtful postcolonial voices are now reconsidering an engagement with the Enlightenment on terms that understand that the provenance of an idea does not necessarily dictate its worth. See, for rich examples, Nicholas B. Dirks, “Postcolonialism and its Discontents: History, Anthropology, and Postcolonial Critique,” in Joan Scott and Debra Keates, eds., Schools of Thought: Twenty-Five Years of Interpretive Social Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).