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The Hegelian Shadow
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10159 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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8 / 1986 |
3,573 Words |
| Author
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Wilfred M. McClay
Wilfred M. McClay is an assistant professor of history at
Tulane University in New Orleans. |
THE SEARCH FOR HISTORICAL MEANING
Hegel and the postwar American Right
Paul Edward Gottried
Dekalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986.
170 pp., $27.00 (cloth)
The fifteen years between V-J Day and the inauguration of John Fitzgerald Kennedy as president have come, in the surprising light of retrospect, to take on the appearance of a golden age of cultural vitality in American history. Ironically, the suggestion of such a judgment would have been greeted with shock, or more likely with a snigger, by the most respected American intellectuals of the time. To borrow the deathless words of Newton Minow of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC,) they beheld not vitality, but a vast wasteland when they contemplated the spectacle of America in the 1950s. They were disgusted by Americans' excessive and increasing conformism, by the plodding and uninspiring "modern Republicanism" of Dwight David Eisenhower, by the cancerous growth of huge sprawling suburban tracts like Levittown on Long Island, by the emergence of a vulgar and voracious "consumer culture," by the numbing emptiness of television programming, and, in general, by an American way of life that, in the words of John Kenneth Galbraith, opted for "private splendor" at the expense of public squalor. Needless to say, a society so mired down in the muck of material preoccupations, and so relentlessly and mindlessly egalitarian in its tastes and prejudices, could never sustain the sort of lofty and serious qualities of mind that made for genuine achievement in the realm of high
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