Cold War Culture ─ Intellectuals, the Media and the Practice of History

Britain in the 1950s had a distinctive political and intellectual climate. It was the age of Keynesian, of welfare state consensus, of insipient consumerism, and, to its detractors, of complacency. While Harold Macmillan famously remarked that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’, the playwright John Osborne lamented that ‘there aren't any good, brave causes left.’ Philosophers, political scientists, economists and historians embraced the supposed ‘end of ideology’ and fetishized ‘value-free’ technique and analysis. This turn is best understood in the context of the cultural Cold War in which ‘ideology’ served as shorthand for Marxist, but it also drew on the rich resources and traditions of English empiricism and a Burkean skepticism about abstract theory in general. James Smyth here shows that, despite being allergic to McCarthy-style vulgarity, British intellectuals in the 1950s operated within powerful Cold War paradigms all the same.

James Smyth is Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He is a specialist in British and Irish history and his publications include The Making of the United Kingdom 1660-1800: State, Religion and Identity in Britain and Ireland and The Men of No Property: Irish Radicals and Popular Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century.